Getting out and pushing: How?

[Skorpychan]

I screwed up. I have three kerbals in a lander, stuck in an elliptical kerbin orbit after a failed return from the Mun. No power, no fuel, but they have a capsule and their jetpacks.

How do I go about pointing the thing retrograde and using their packs to push it? It only needs a little more delta-V to get into aerobraking altitude when applied properly. However, trying to swing it around to use up the last of the fuel found that it's hard to push a flat-bottomed craft. Especially if there's a strut in the center.

I don't want to leave them out there until I can rendezvous, either, because it also has no docking ports.

[Scarecrow88]

You don't need to dock a rescue craft, just get it close enough so that you can EVA your stranded guys over. A hitchiker can has enough capacity to rescue all 3 in one go.

[Johnno]

This seems like a bit of a trick question. You turn the craft either by using its reaction wheels, if you have power, or by pushing it with a kerbal to rotate it. You go on an EVA, activate the rocket pack, manouver the kerbal to the opposite side of where you want to turn and move the kerbal against the craft.

For directions you'd need to understand the navball or navigate by checking mapmode of what direction you're heading and using the sun/kerbin to get a heading.

But there's not even a need to point the craft any specific way, pushing the craft with a kerbal would be like using RCS. You can point the nose of the ship prograde and push retrograde by going in front of the nose and pushing... which kills any difficulty of direction you had...

All in all I don't quite understand what the difficulty is. You get out, you push, quite literally. Everything beyond that is simple navigation/directions which I'd think you knew just from flying.

[Skorpychan]

I can't get them to sit properly against the craft to push it, that's the difficulty. Also, the thing rotates whenever I try and board to see the navball.

There's no power at all; I forgot to add solar panels to the design, and flattened the batteries on the way up.

[Specialist290]

In that case, building a rescue craft is probably the best of your available options. Like Scarecrow 88 mentioned, you don't have to actually dock it so long as you can just get it in close enough to the stranded capsule.