Landing And Docking

[rockbloodystar]

Is it possible to land on a docking port?

Follow up: Is it possible to get Mech Jeb to do it?

[Jagger]

Well, you can use MechJeb's Translatron to help you do it. Translatron helps you fly steadily, hover above the ground, and kill your horizontal speed. That plus some skills, and lots of reaction wheels (else MechJeb will screw it up) and you can do it. I have done it in my Mun base some months ago.

[Dust]

It's possible, but aiming to land within a 1 meter target is pretty difficult, as opposed to, y'know, landing anywhere on the side of a giant rock. If you think about it, it's pretty much exactly like trying to dock to the top of an accelerating craft - the lower the gravity of the body the lower the acceleration and vector you're constantly having to match. I've done it once: on Minmus to rescue a capsule that'd run out of fuel, but it took a few restores to get a successful operation.

[Skorpychan]

Yes, if you're very careful, and the craft you're landing on is very very well designed to deal with sudden additions of weight.

Practice has let me land things on the Mun virtually pinpoint. With enough spare fuel, I could probably stack them atop each other.

However, they would then most likely fall over due to imbalance.

It'd be easy as pie on Minimus, where gravity is so low you barely need any fuel to move around.

[Vanamonde]

This guy does it. (The whole thing is amazing, but your question will be answered starting at round minute 26.)

[Kerba Fett]

If you were to try it on a low gravity world like Minmus where your hover time is pretty long it should be possible and perhaps even easy with MechJeb. Consider this, The translatron can control your vertical speed pretty accuratly. You can use Mechjeb to hold your ship parallel to a docking port axis. You can translate with RCS while in staging mode using IJKLHN.

It should be possible to mount a docking port on the bottom of your lander and use radial mounted engines. Then have the translatron hold a hover just above the height needed to dock, use Smartass to hold you Par - to the docking port on top of the base. (in the target menu) Then use the JJLHN keys with RCS on to move over the port on the station. Once you're above the port you set the translatron to descend at about -.2 (in case you didn't know, you can input a new number into the translatron and it won't take effect till you click execute. This makes for a quick way to change hover/descent rates.)

You might even be able to just use the RCS to push down onto the docking port against the translatron.