Orbital docking, closing the gap

[Sirrobert]

Aaa, that's a bug (obviously)

Danny2462 did the same thing in one of his videos,

.

That's all I know about it though. Did you try to exist KSP and load it again? Do you have a quicksave?

[Algomeysa]

yeah, I've been quicksaving. Actually, I just found the named quicksaves (Alt-F5 named quicksave, alt-f9 named restore).

I think I figured out my problem though: when you dock with a refueling tanker you become one big ship, and I had previous to that chosen "control from here" on the tanker's grabber port. When I separated, even though my Kerbal was in the ship, not the unmanned tanker, and the thrusters worked, it seemed to keep control of the navball on the other ship, the unmanned tanker. Or something like that. When I chose CONTROL FROM HERE on the Kerbal's capsule, I regained control.

[Algomeysa]

Thanks again for the help, all. As a result of...eventually...digesting all this, I got a lot better at orbital navigation, docking, and modifying .craft files.

And I got my unmanned probe within 2 kilometers of the Kerbal Sun (Kerbol), but above the point at 1.3 kilometers where it vaporizes.

I did notice ---- at that close to the Kerbal Sun orbits decay a bit each orbit, until the vaporization point. I wondered at what solar distance you had to be where your orbit wouldn't decay. Seemingly 3,270 kilometers is the sweet spot; below that, ship orbits decay a bit each time until you hit the Sun vaporizing point, above that, orbits remain unchanged by the approach to the Sun.