King_Gus_Man

Just over a year, wow. I've made a few attempts at space planes since I started reading this, they were all dismal failures. I think to start getting the hang of them in going to copy a few of your designs to get a basic idea, I may even start a new career and play through this way. Once I get through my current career though. I think one or two planetary landings out side of Kerbin will get me the rest of the tech tree. It's there a good guide out there that explains the difference in piloting a space plane? I can fight the design out, but the flying seems really different.

I'm amazed at how successful this adventure has been. I'll definatly be keeping tabs on this one, and maybe trying some space plane craft of my own. Just out of curiosity, how long have you been playing?

Awesome, I guess I'll be starting up a thread over there. Thanks to everyone for all the tips and advice, I'm sure I'll be docking in no time now.

Rescue mission to Mun finally went fairly well, lander had 880 dv left, but I landed a nice piece away from where Jebadiah was stranded. Annnnddd, he was killed during the Eva to the rescue lander. RIP Jebadiah Kerbal. Not sure if 880 is enough for the return and I just botched it, or if I need more, but all that got me was back into a Mun orbit. The only science I have left to get in the Kerbin system is recovering a ship that landed on the Mun. Going interplanetary seems a bit out of my reach given current technology unless I get this docking down. I'm going to mark this as answered, I'm pretty confident that I can get this docking with the new ideas I got hear. Which leaves me with one question, is there a sub forum that is more of an ongoing mission log? Some place I can post about the mission as a whole and ask questions as they come up, rather than making a new thread here every time I get lost.

I would tend to agree, my job has had me doing 24 hour shifts every other day so I haven't had much time to play lately. It makes me mad that my Minimus landing and return went so easily, but after 5 attempts I still have a man stranded on the Mun. Just a side note, this is in Career mode so I don't have access to all the parts just yet. I have the basics to begin constructing a refuelling station, I just lack the ability to do so right now. With an orbital refuelling station I can redesign my lander to have enough fuel to make the return from the Mun, or just push the station to a Mun orbit then I just have to get the lander into a mun orbit, refuel, then drive back. Either way, I'm not leaving Jebadiah behind.

This seems to be the thing that makes the most sense after reading through every thing that has been posted. I really feel like that is a method I can follow.

Wow, was not expecting this much response that quick. I have not had time to try any of these things, but there seems to be some new ideas here that I didn't understand the last few times I've tried docking. I'll try this stuff out the next time I'm playing. I think docking will help me out with my new problem, Jebadiah is stranded in the Mun without enough fuel to even break orbit. If I can establish a refuelling station in Kerbin orbit, i should have the fuel needed to make the rescue mission. I'm not against mods, i use Kerbal Engineer Redux for all the extra info and I have MechJeb but have no idea how to use most of it. I'm not interested in using any kind of auto pilot, but I'm not against tools that will give me the information I need to make this happen.

That's me, I just cannot make it happen. I've read every post on the forum that I could reasonably find about it. I've read the wiki pages I could find. I watched the Scot Manley tutorial on docking. I still just cannot do it. Here's my problem, 2 orbits, both are nearly perfect circles. (Less than 1000 m between Ap and Ep). I wait for the ship in the lower orbit to be right behind the one in the higher orbit, burn pro-grade which pushes ap out and gets me an encounter, (usually between 1km and 4km, but I've gotten as close as .1km). Now that I have an encounter I have to kill relative velocity, so I burn retrograde, relative velocity is under 5m/s, but now the other ship is as close as it will get on its own, and if I burn at the other ship to keep it that close my relative velocity goes way up. If I keep relative velocity down to a manageable level, the other ship runs away and I have to wait for another encounter. Am I missing some key trick? I've tried doing everything with RCS (as one tutorial suggested) I've tried getting to about 100m before I start using RCS (as another suggested), I've tried not using RCS at all (just to see if I could do it, I can't). I hate to lose, but this docking thing is making me think about giving KSP up.