Docking Issues

[kaphraxus]

So I'm going about my first docking procedures. Two pretty small ships with the 2.5m ASAS on them but despite that, they both won't stay on heading for longer than 10 seconds or so. Of course, me being the docking novice, it takes for ever to line one ship up only for the other to have drifted off heading. Each ship is composed of a skipper, x300-32 tank, ASAS, and mk1-2 command pod. Am I doing something wrong with my ASAS or is it just doomed?

[Kasuha]

Assuming you have them in Kerbin equatorial orbit, the only heading they will keep is North or South. Otherwise they keep pointing (more or less) the same direction in space, which however changes as you're circling the planet. For example what is "up" on one side of the planet is "down" on the other side.

There are more things to that, but for docking purposes it's just better to orient the docking port North or South, i.e. the place where the brown line intersects the brown/blue edge, or the oposite side.

[Mr.Rocket]

Did you remember RCS fuel and ports? Those are pretty much assencial to dock, more than ASAS. From there you can use ijkl for up down left right, and h n for forward backward movements. The RCS will keep the ship headed in the same direction as long as both it and ASAS is activated. Also, if they're close to eachother, thier headings shouldn't be changing. Make sure you set the navball to target mode. Hope this helps?

[kaphraxus]

RCS check. What I'm getting is navball drift. That's just caused by my orbit?

[Smidge204]

Depends on how much drift we're talking about. Unless you're orbiting something low and fast (Like Minmus at 6.5km) it shouldn't drift THAT quickly.

In fact it really shouldn't matter at all what the blue/brown part of the navball says. Once you've made your rendezvous, set your velocity readout to "Target", set the docking port on the other craft as the target, and typically set your own docking port as "Control from here" (not always necessary) you should need only the pink and yellow markers to dock.

=Smidge=

[NoPanShabuShabu]

Some other things you should check: Have you run out of electricity? Do you have SAS on?