Why does the navball spontaneously change from orbit to target?

[jnbspace]

Why does the navball spontaneously change from orbit to target? and how do I stop it doing that?

I'm trying to rendezvous two craft so I set the navball to orbit and fire prograde and retrograde to align orbits and bring my orbit dow to the same periapsis and apoapsis as the target. 90% of the time this is fine but every so often I find my craft heading somewhere random and then discover that the navball has spontaneously (or I did something inadvertently but I don't know what) changed from orbit to target. So now my prograde direction has no relevance to my orbit. If this happened when I was close to target I could understand that it might be a feature but this happens when I am still 100km away from the target!

Either
  - what is KSP doing and how do I stop it?
or (and more likely)
  - what am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance

[king of nowhere]

59 minutes ago, jnbspace said:

Why does the navball spontaneously change from orbit to target? and how do I stop it doing that?

I'm trying to rendezvous two craft so I set the navball to orbit and fire prograde and retrograde to align orbits and bring my orbit dow to the same periapsis and apoapsis as the target. 90% of the time this is fine but every so often I find my craft heading somewhere random and then discover that the navball has spontaneously (or I did something inadvertently but I don't know what) changed from orbit to target. So now my prograde direction has no relevance to my orbit. If this happened when I was close to target I could understand that it might be a feature but this happens when I am still 100km away from the target!

Either
  - what is KSP doing and how do I stop it?
or (and more likely)
  - what am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance

very simple, when you get close enough to your target (not sure what is the exact distance) the game authomatically switches from orbit to target. just in the same way that when you pass a certain altitude it authomatically switches from surface to orbit.

i'm not sure if you can disable it from the options, but you can just click on the speed gauge over the navball to change the speed between surface, orbit and target.

[fulgur]

Usually, one rendez-vous'es by the following steps:

• Match planes with targets
• Fiddle the manoeuvre until you have an intercept [a pair of orange or purple arrowheads] within about 5km (you can usually get as close as 0.5km, but even 10km is workable).
• When you are approaching the target, reduce your velocity relative to the target  to 0.
• Move in to dock.

Setting your navball to the "target" display and pointing retrograde will allow you to reduce your velocity to zero relative to the target. If you are within a few km of the target you should now be floating motionless. You can then just point yourself at the target and move towards it.

see also this thing & the illustrated guide to rendezvous linked with it.

Edited April 15, 2023 by fulgur