Mission failed...

[Elon Tusk]

I was doing science on dres, using Apollo style. It was ez ofc, but... I didn't expect that you can't dock 2 ships, if 1 of them isn't controllable. 

PLEASE help how to comeback to home. I have 1200∆ m/s and it's enough back to home, but speed in the atmosphere is so high, near 5K... 

[Vanamonde]

You should be able to dock an active ship to an inactive one, though the piloting may be more difficult. There are two things you can do to simplify it.  You can leave the inactive ship parked so that its docking ring is perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. That maybe he hard to visualize, but what it means is that from the perspective of the approaching ship, the inactive ship's docking ring will be rotating in a stationary position, making it easier to hit. But that won't help if you've already got the ships positioned. So the other trick is to from time to time go in and out of time warp. This is a cheat because it breaks the physics simulation, but it makes docking easier because it cancels any unwanted rotations of the target ship. My advice would be to save the game, try to dock, and keep loading the save until it works. 

Good luck.

[Spaceman.Spiff]

10 hours ago, Elon Tusk said:

I was doing science on dres, using Apollo style. It was ez ofc, but... I didn't expect that you can't dock 2 ships, if 1 of them isn't controllable. 

PLEASE help how to comeback to home. I have 1200∆ m/s and it's enough back to home, but speed in the atmosphere is so high, near 5K... 

If you have multiple kerbs in the lander you could EVA one and have them take control of the other vessel

[Elon Tusk]

1 hour ago, Spaceman.Spiff said:

If you have multiple kerbs in the lander you could EVA one and have them take control of the other vessel

I can't, there are only big science module, I thought it is controllable...

[Klapaucius]

It can be done, though it is fiddly.  If the uncontrolled ship has no rotation, then basically it is just standard docking. If the other ship is moving, that gets harder.  If it is not too big, you could EVA a Kerbal and try to arrest the motion by pushing on it.  Also, make sure you set your docking port to the maximum docking force. This gives you a bit of assistance if you are not completely precise on your approach.  

Finally, make sure you click on the actual docking port of the uncontrolled ship and make sure you have your navball set to target.

[Zhetaan]

On 9/2/2021 at 3:21 AM, Elon Tusk said:

I was doing science on dres, using Apollo style. It was ez ofc, but... I didn't expect that you can't dock 2 ships, if 1 of them isn't controllable. 

PLEASE help how to comeback to home. I have 1200∆ m/s and it's enough back to home, but speed in the atmosphere is so high, near 5K... 

Assuming that your uncontrolled vessel is only drifting, but not spinning wildly, then you can dock with it provided that you can be both precise and fast.

In the future, you should know that it helps to leave your target docking port in a normal orientation.  You can see whether it is by using 'Control from Here' and watching the navball.  As a vessel orbits, it remains in its orientation--it doesn't rotate to keep the same side facing the primary.  Thus a vessel in orbit will appear to rotate as it revolves about the primary, but the normal direction is the axis of this rotation, so anything aligned that way won't rotate away from your approaching vessel.

Obviously, adding control (even in the form of a cheap probe core) would help, but you should also know that docking to uncontrolled targets is exactly the intended use of the Advanced Grabbing Unit (the claw).