Docking.

[Starchaser]

Writing this quickly because I was just trying to get some quick playtime before work and I have to leave within 9 minutes.

My docking mission around minmus finally made it's rendezvous, and after 1 set of attempts pulling my hair out, I thought I learned enough to make a second set of attempts. I quickloaded my quicksave made as I was initially approaching my target, gave it a few nudges forward and back, then some right and up, and I got to this point

I rotated all the way around the craft. It looks like this from all angles. 

What am I doing wrong that it won't dock? Do you need to arm the clamp-o-tron or something? I looked in the right click menu and I couldn't see anything

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

The regular clamp o tron can be a little tougher to line up and connect than the Sr version. The magnets usually aren't strong enough to straighten you out unless one of the ships is very small. Everything looks fine though. I've been in the same position many times. You just need to flatten out a bit. It'll be easiest with RCS, but you should be able to with just reaction wheels as well. You just need one ship to push the other at the point where they're touching (the toughest part at this point is often figuring out which button to push to move you in the right direction) until they flatten out and are able to connect. Just quicksave (in case things go wrong), and mess around with it a little bit. They should dock up just fine.

[Superfluous J]

Turn off SAS and dock using the navball, not the screen. Try - with SAS off - to get the target in the center of the navball. Works every time for me*.

*At least, most of the time it does!

[Urses]

3 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Turn off SAS and dock using the navball, not the screen. Try - with SAS off - to get the target in the center of the navball. Works every time for me*.

*At least, most of the time it does!

Disabling SAS allows the magnets to line up the ships. For Normal and Junior ports SAS is mostly to powerful and prevents the magnetic forces to work propperly. Good point!

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

1 hour ago, 5thHorseman said:

Turn off SAS and dock using the navball, not the screen. Try - with SAS off - to get the target in the center of the navball. Works every time for me*.

*At least, most of the time it does!

 

1 hour ago, Urses said:

Disabling SAS allows the magnets to line up the ships. For Normal and Junior ports SAS is mostly to powerful and prevents the magnetic forces to work propperly. Good point!

Agreed. I don't like to take my hands off the wheel but, in the position he's in, that'll probably do the trick.

[Zhetaan]

@Starchaser:

Be sure to leave RCS on when you shut off SAS so you can make adjustments to your position if necessary.  Also, since you're in docking mode, I don't know whether you get precision attitude controls as part of it (I don't use docking mode, so accept this with many grains of salt), but when you're in normal flight mode, you can get precision attitude control by pressing the Caps Lock key.  You can tell whether you're in precision mode by the colour of the pointers for pitch, yaw, and roll:  they are orange in normal mode and turn blue in precision mode.  This is useful for two reasons:  first, it turns down RCS thrusters to about 10% of their normal output, so you are less likely to overthrust and overcorrect, and second (and this is not widely advertised), it turns on a feature that controls rotational drift due to unbalanced RCS.  In other words, if you notice that translating your ship also makes it pitch or yaw, precision controls will help with that by varying the output of the imbalanced thrusters so you get translation without rotation.

Also, since you're using a 2-D view to align two docking ports in a space that has five degrees of freedom (three of translation and two of rotation), you'll always find yourself doing some fancy camera work to get the ports aligned the way you want them.  You may wish to consider a docking camera or alignment mod.

I use Docking Port Alignment Indicator, but it has a GUI, and since some people do not like to clutter their screens with GUI, there's also Navball Docking Alignment Indicator.

Edited November 2, 2017 by Zhetaan

[Starchaser]

Thanks for the advise, and tips. I should have thought of the SAS myself. I'll do that as soon as I get home

[themonk]

I have found one of the easiest ways to line up docking ports is by using the "Normal" and "Anti-normal" pointers on the Navigational indicator.  When you get close to the ship you are docking to... Switch to the target ship, highlight the targeted docking port, assign it "Control From Here" and have it point in the Normal direction.  Make sure you have SAS on.  Then switch back to the docking ship, and have it point Anti-Normal.   This way you are only having to fiddle with the Translation controls as you move closer.  When playing in career game, you usually will have the Normal, Anti-normal control available to you, either by Kerbal or Probe, by the time you need to start docking.

 

I flailed around for a long time till I noticed this was one thing I didnt have to juggle around with while docking!

Thumbs Up, space cadet!

themonk

[Starchaser]

The craft docked as soon as I turned off SAS. Yay for completion