Eye ball Rendez-vous in LKO

[PictoKong]

Yesterday i tried to do rendez vous for the first time and, as an added challenge, i tried doing it without mods or any kind of maths. I went 650m from the goal, but i was able to transfer the 2 capitains with the eva pack...

What i did:

1. Align both planes

2. Try and align both periapsis (they were circular orbits tho)

3. At the periapsis, burn a little to get a slightly bigger orbit (my target was behind)

4. Wait around 100 orbits (very slight increase indeed...)

5. EVA the kerbals!

The problem i have is that, when the 2 ships met up 500m apart, i wasn't able to close the gap. So my question is this: how can you get them closer once you are within render distance?

[LaydeeDem]

Yesterday i tried to do rendez vous for the first time and, as an added challenge, i tried doing it without mods or any kind of maths. I went 650m from the goal, but i was able to transfer the 2 capitains with the eva pack...

What i did:

1. Align both planes

2. Try and align both periapsis (they were circular orbits tho)

3. At the periapsis, burn a little to get a slightly bigger orbit (my target was behind)

4. Wait around 100 orbits (very slight increase indeed...)

5. EVA the kerbals!

The problem i have is that, when the 2 ships met up 500m apart, i wasn't able to close the gap. So my question is this: how can you get them closer once you are within render distance?

RCS, using the translation keys. (I,J,K,L,H,N).

[PictoKong]

The problem i had is that the other shipe was in a swing motion (going foward, then backwards, then foward...)

[togfox]

You need to make sure both ships are on the same plane with AP/PE roughly the same. If you went to map mode youd see there were large differences and flying "direct" wont fix that. You say everything was aligned but small differences have a big effect.

The kgss publish kosmo's article on rendeveous with no mods. Take a look in my sig.

[Kosmo-not]

But my tutorial uses maths, but the person using the table doesn't have to calculate anything... so idk if it would count for his no math thing.

[togfox]

Ya, you did the maths for him, but i wasnt going to mention that.

[PictoKong]

Yeah. I am aware of the KGSS... very helpful indeed.

But what i am looking for ia a way to do it "by skills" and not with tables or calculus. I understand it is a lot harder, but that's why i consider it a challenge

[Serratus]

Simple, when You're under 2km distance, You can carefully eye-ball it with RCS and patience... Works for me anyway. Once Your at ~20m, You just need to work for a while (orbit, or two) to match semi-perfectly with the other craft speed and trajectory.

[Jeebs24]

Yes, RCS is your best friend in rendezvous.

I always have an Advanced SAS attached, have the ship pointed to the prograde indicator in the gimbal ball (is that what it's called?) and also have the horizon aligned correctly. With the ship aligned properly I can better judge where my target is in relation to me and the orbit, the I use the RCS to match my orbit with the target ship. So far I've been able to do it like this with a lot of success and rendezvous are becoming easier and easier with each mission. The latest challenge was performing an rendezvous in an elliptical orbit where the apoapsis was 2,000km and the periapis was 74km.

[thorfinn]

If you make a small, light craft, and start in a good orbit wrt your target, RCS is all that you need.

This was an old design (0.14X4, go figure ) but in 0.16 things haven't changed much. The active craft was the smaller one, the other just sat there waiting.

I also went kinda eyeballing it; all these months of KSP have given us some instinctive feeling for orbital mechanics, but you'll probably end up a couple klicks apart or more at the end of you orbital maneuvers. The closer the distance, though, and the lesser apparent are the weird effects of "non-Euclidean" motion... in the final moments, you can just thrust towards your target and correct along the way.

[Shortsonfire79]

If you make a small, light craft, and start in a good orbit wrt your target, RCS is all that you need.

Nice job! But you can also use only RCS with big, heavy craft as well.

[PictoKong]

Thanks for all your tips, i will try later with smaller craft (i had 2 3 man orbiters... pretty heavy stuff if you ask me)

[Markus Reese]

One of the interesting parts about rendevous is that altitude plays a big part. If you just try to fly and use speed to catch up, you will extend your orbit altitude an fly past it. Try to slow down and you will come below. My preference for a capture is first off, patience. Second, if you are behind, you actually can catch up by dropping altitude and slowing down slightly your rendevous will start to pass overhead and then give yourself some altitude gain. When you get on the same plane and getting close, then can slow yourself down, or if ahead, speed yourself up to match the orbital velocity and angle.

[PictoKong]

Yeah! Managed to rendez-vous after some more tries. I took only 1 man capsules and went to the moon (so plane change is less of an energy sink, and also for the lolz...)

Here, some screenshots, everything was done without maths. I just took 1h30 to get to that point...

[spoiler=]

[spoiler=]

[spoiler=]

Thanks guys! I hope that i'll get good enough that when dockig will be implemented i will be able to RV faster