How in the World do you Dock?

[PK_Starstorm]

Seriously, I'm stuck in a rut I dug here. I've been playing since 0.19 - and yet under no circumstances can I dock! I can get into about 500m proximity of whatever I'm docking to, then from there on I'm like "duuuh, wut button do I puhress?" and just fail epicly.

Am I missing something? I mean, I suck. But I don't suck THAT much.

Edited October 19, 2014 by tetryds

[tetryds]

*Topic moved to Gameplay Questions and Tutorials.

No, I don't think you suck, docking is not very easy to learn.

Try to point one ship to the north and other to the south, then set the heavier one as target and on the smaller one you drift around with I/J/K/L (sides) H/N (front and back), with RCS enabled.

With time you will learn that using those keys move around your prograde marker when you set "Target" velocity on the navball.

Then just bring the target prograde to where you are looking at, and use H and N to approach carefully.

You can also search some docking tutorials on youtube, not all of them are easy to follow but after watching a few you can get the hang of it on your own.

Hope this helps

Edited October 19, 2014 by tetryds

[Master Tao]

Very carefully. It's hard.

Sounds like you have rendezvous down. The next step is to

.

For your first few (hundred) times, try docking two small crafts, especially two Mk. 1 Lander Cans with docking ports on top, and pack tons of Monopropellant. Lights facing the same direction as the docking port, help, too. Once you're close and the relative velocity is nearly 0, switch to Chase camera with V. Use RCS with IJKLHN to get closer – IJKL should be aligned with your view, and H will go into your screen and N out of it.

[r_rolo1]

Yeah, don't diss yourself on having issues with docking. NASA also fumbled the first docking they tried and all of us have the pleasure to share the planet with the man that literally wrote the book on docking ( I assume that you are familiar with the name Buzz Aldrin His graduation thesis was titled "Line-of-sight guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous" )

On the issue in hand, tetryds points are valid. point your target docking port normal/anti-normal to your orbit ( north/south if the orbit is equatorial ), align your ship in the north south direction as well and then use docking mode to push what directions you need, using the target mode of the navball to guide yourself ( a good direction is one where the prograde marker of the target mode is near the front direction ). If you have doubts of where the directions are ( besides front -back, that are easy enough ), the up direction is the one of the dorsal side ( the one that is facing you when you pick it from the menu ) of the controlling part and you would do good to mark it with something to know where it is ( a massless battery , for a example ) ... from there is easy to know the down and the left/right directions.

[Master Tao]

Very carefully. It's hard.

Yeah, don't diss yourself on having issues with docking. NASA also fumbled the first docking they tried and all of us have the pleasure to share the planet with the man that literally wrote the book on docking ( I assume that you are familiar with the name Buzz Aldrin His graduation thesis was titled "Line-of-sight guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous" )

Quoting myself because you may be interested in the link.

Let's see... My first rendezvous, I think I came within 5 km. At that point, Jeb hopped out and EVAed the rest of the gap.

[Starwhip]

Signature link. I hope it helps!

[r_rolo1]

Quoting myself because you may be interested in the link.

I had not seen your post when I posted mine ( shame on my low word/minute type speed ) . Anyway, thanks for the link ... it looks like a good Sunday evening read

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

practice with Kerbals in jetpacks. those controls are just like "docking controls"

personally, I can't switch back and forth from docking controls to "staging controls" so I just leave it at staging and have learnt to use the retro btottons (hn, ik, & jl )

[Tahib]

Trial and error. A lot. Ok to get started: get yourself Mechjeb (modules in science tree, or this too) and follow the Rendezvous Planner Steps.

There's a docking Autopilot for last few meters too. From time to time i try it myself, but i'm bad at docking as hell.

[tetryds]

Trial and error. A lot. Ok to get started: get yourself Mechjeb (modules in science tree, or this too) and follow the Rendezvous Planner Steps.

There's a docking Autopilot for last few meters too. From time to time i try it myself, but i'm bad at docking as hell.

I would not recommend sticking mechjeb at first difficulties to anyone.

Several people learn with it, but as you said trial and error works better.

There is also the navball trick, which I don't seem to find anywhere, I may make a tutorial about it.

[Kulebron]

First, try docking of 2 similar ships, not a ship+heavy station.

0. SAS on, RCS on. RCS should be placed around the center of mass to not destabilize the ship.

1. Click on navball velocity indicator, switch to "Target" (relative velocity)

2. Aim at the green marker (rel.velocity retrograde) and burn to nullify the velocity

3. Aim at target marker (purple round) and burn slightly to get closer.

4. At 100 m distance slow down to 0.5-1 m/s with main engines (will need to turn around) or with RCS.

5. Turn both ships towards each other (switch to another one, then back), exactly at the round purple marker.

6. Final approach: keep the yellow velocity marker center close to the pink marker center with translation controls.

7. If the purple marker moves off your aim, don't turn the ship, just move the velocity marker beyond it, so that you'll be on the axis again.

8. Closely to docking turn SAS off and may be, when ships will touch, push a bit forward with RCS.

That's it.

MechJeb spends too much fuel while docking, because it's a control freak: it keeps keeping the ship close to the docking axis, which makes no good, just oscillating sign-changing (mutually cancelling) burns. BUT it has a valuable indicator: closest approach distance. At 100 meters distance you want to keep it within 3m, at 30 meters it should be less than 2m, and at closer than 20 meters you should aim better than 1 m. <400 mm is a good aiming.

Also SmartASS is useful: point both ships TGT+, then to "kill rotation", and just do the manual docking procedure above. You can keep "TGT+" aim, but both ships must be controlled from docking port (right click to open a menu) and target must be a docking port too, otherwise one ship may aim at docking port, and another one aim at mechJeb part some degrees off, and it will always turn from you.

Edited October 19, 2014 by Kulebron

[Geneborg]

Many have already stated what to do, but 2 simple questions:

1. do you know about secondary RCS controls (IJKL+HN)?

2. do you know you have to correctly position RCS thrusters or your ship will constantly try to change attitude while firing RCS?

[worir4]

You mean how out of the world do you dock?

Use RCS and watch the target vector and don't come in too fast. I usually use time warp while i'm closing in up until >200m.

If you want to practice docking and don't want to have to launch and rendezvous every time try use Hyperedit . It has a useful feature that allows you to teleport within hundreds of meters of your target.

[Vanamonde]

I haven't updated this craft for a while, but it should still work. It's a docking trainer ship that launches two orbiters already docked to each other. You can then separate them and practice bringing them back together.

[Kowgan]

The youtuber DrJonez has some

s, simplifying docking a lot. I learnt the procedures through him; recommended.

[mdkendall]

The key things for the final phase of docking for me were (i) select the Chase camera view (push V to cycle through the views) which keeps the view on the screen aligned with the directions on the navball; (ii) install Navyfish's docking port alignment indicator.

For the first phase, when you get within a few km burn to keep your velocity vector pointing at the target, and reduce your relative velocity. Once I get close I like to gradually reduce my speed to keep the rendezvous about a minute and a half away; i.e. if the target is 500m away I aim to be moving towards it at 5m/s (dividing by 100 is easy).

During this phase look at the navball mainly, and just look at the view for confirmation. When thrusting, your prograde marker will tend to move towards the direction you are pointing (and conversely your retrograde marker will move away from the direction you are pointing). You can use this to "push" or "pull" your prograde marker on to the target marker so that you are moving towards the target.

Some time during the approach, when your relative speed gets low, you will probably switch from using engine thrust to RCS. If you just use 'H' and 'N' at this point to thrust forwards and backwards, still controlling direction by pointing the ship, you won't have to worry about which directional keys to use for the lateral RCS thrusters.

Once you arrive about 100m away you should be moving only about 1m/s and can just come to a stop with 'N'. At this point select the chase camera view, enable the docking port alignment indicator, ensure the correct docking port on the target is chosen as the target, select the correct docking port on your ship and select "control from here", then do the final approach using the docking port alignment indicator. I suggest getting the alignment correct first (WASDQE to rotate, using either RCS or reaction wheels if they are strong enough) then move over to the port (IJKLHN to translate using RCS) and dock!

[Higgs]

All these suggestions are good. Time for a plus 1 suggestion: MechJeb. Dead serious. It will teach you how to dock with YOUR rockets. Cant stress this enough, it will teach you with YOUR rockets. No video or tutorial you watch/read will or can do this. MechJeb can and DOES. Enjoy

[CDK]

You can't dock? You just gotta be careful. I can do it just because I'm use to it.

[Zylark]

All these suggestions are good. Time for a plus 1 suggestion: MechJeb. Dead serious. It will teach you how to dock with YOUR rockets. Cant stress this enough, it will teach you with YOUR rockets. No video or tutorial you watch/read will or can do this. MechJeb can and DOES. Enjoy

Though I am quite the MechJeb (ab)user myself, I woudn't recommend learning through MJ. Before using MJ, one should get the basic skills to do stuff manually. Two reasons for this. First, it is very rewarding and second, at the start of a career MJ will only give you info - not pilot the ship for you. So either way you need to be able to do stuff manually.

Although MJ is great and all - a must have in my book - I feel ones use of the autopilot features should be limited to the routine tasks that get very tedious very fast. Like say getting a rocket to orbit. The thrill of it soon wear off after doing it manually a few times. As for docking, MJ isn't that good at it with big ships. Small nimble ones is fine, but come again with something big and ungainly and MJ will eat through your Monoprop faster than a gaggle of cats through a can of Tuna. So knowing how to do it manually is required.

As for actually doing the docking approach manually, I can't recommend the Docking Port Alignment Indicator mod highly enough.

[Alshain]

I'm with tetryds, it's much harder to rid yourself of a crutch than it is to learn it right the first time.

EDIT: aaand there was a whole other page I missed.

[Higgs]

Though I am quite the MechJeb (ab)user myself, I woudn't recommend learning through MJ. Before using MJ, one should get the basic skills to do stuff manually. Two reasons for this. First, it is very rewarding and second, at the start of a career MJ will only give you info - not pilot the ship for you. So either way you need to be able to do stuff manually.

Although MJ is great and all - a must have in my book - I feel ones use of the autopilot features should be limited to the routine tasks that get very tedious very fast. Like say getting a rocket to orbit. The thrill of it soon wear off after doing it manually a few times. As for docking, MJ isn't that good at it with big ships. Small nimble ones is fine, but come again with something big and ungainly and MJ will eat through your Monoprop faster than a gaggle of cats through a can of Tuna. So knowing how to do it manually is required.

As for actually doing the docking approach manually, I can't recommend the Docking Port Alignment Indicator mod highly enough.

i will, till the day i draw my last breath, suggest mechjeb do your first rendezvous and docking. Why? as I have stated before: it can teach you how to do it with what YOU built. Why is this important? because it shows how YOUR stuff flies. I could make a tutorial video on how to do it, but, that would show how its done with what I built. and how does that help YOU with YOUR ship? it honestly doesnt.

I read every single written tutorial on the subject of Rendezvous and docking, I watched every single video i could get my hands on, and i STILL couldnt pull off a safe and efficient rendezvous and docking. the ONE i did pull off w/out first using mechjeb was successful in that I DOCKED, but, i was OUT of ALL fuels on one vessel. No, MechJeb is the tool to learn with.

[Capt. Hunt]

Set the docking port you're aiming at as target, and control from your ship's port. This way the prograde marker is going to represent where your port is pointing and the target marker will be the other port, use the translation keys to line up the two markers and thrust forward, if the two ports are pointing at each other you should dock if you can thread the needle.

[tsotha]

IMO the key to docking starts in the VAB. Most people new to docking don't understand what's important from the ship standpoint, so they've already made things difficult before they even get off the pad. Make sure:

1. Your ship is small. Practice with something under ten tons. It's tempting to try to jump right to orange tanks. Don't.

2. Both the docking ship and the target have active SAS. It's really difficult to dock with something that's rotating. You can do it, but that's really part of the advanced class.

3. You have 4 RCS thruster blocks arrayed symmetrically around your ship's CoM. The idea is you want to point your ship in the right direction and then translate to where you need to be without changing your ship's heading. If you don't have enough thruster blocks or you didn't put them in the right place your ship's heading will change as you try to translate, which makes everything much harder than it needs to be. Make sure your CoM doesn't change as your fuel stores are depleted, or failing that make sure the thruster blocks are positioned around the CoM the ship will have when you're ready to dock (hope the rest of the flight went as you planned).

4. Your ship is "tight". When you translate the nav ball shouldn't sway back and forth as you rotate or translate. This means lots of struts and a preference for short, squat ships over long skinny ones. Avoid attaching parts with docking ports as that creates a flexible joint that will cause your stack to bend. If it's necessary use girders and struts to keep the joint from flexing.

You should be able to take your ship to the pad, turn off the gravity, and translate back and forth without your heading changing at all. Ideally you can do this both with 100% fuel and also when your tanks are bone dry. If your course sways back and forth before settling out, figure out what's flexing and shore it up. If your heading changes either you put the thruster blocks in the wrong place or your CoM is moving as you use up your fuel. The latter case may require substantial rethinking of your design

Once you have lots of experience you can dock with (slowly) rotating objects and dock ships that sway back and forth as you try to move them. But you'll never get there if you can't get the basics down.

[CDK]

Ok, docking is kinda hard.

[herbal space program]

Step-by-step: If you've mastered the orbital rendezvous part, the rest is really pretty straightforward. You should first boost either towards or away from your target (i.e. towards the pink circle to close distance faster, towards the pink tripod to close slower) until you are closing at around maybe 3-4m/s. You also want to roughly line up your prograde/retrograde vectors, i.e. the yellow open and crossed circles respectively, with the target and anti-target vectors (The pink circle and tripod thingie). The thing to remember here is that the prograde vector will move towards wherever you're pointing when you boost and the retrograde vector will move away. The maximum movement is when you're pointing at a 90 degree angle to each vector, so what you want to do is point as far away from the prograde vector as you can while still seeing everything on the navball, in a position that puts the target vector directly between the two. You can also approximate this procedure using the maneuver node, by dragging things around until the orbits match perfectly and then executing the burn. Once you're 500m away and closing at that speed, right click on your docking port and select "control from here" if you have not already done so. Then line up your ship on the pink circle and switch to the other ship (just hit right or left bracket when within 2km) . Do "control from here" on the docking port for that ship, then set your first ship as target and again line up on the pink circle. Now you should have you two docking ports pointed right at one another and be around 300m apart. Go back to the first ship and turn on the RCS. Your yellow prograde vector marker should be very nearly aligned with the pink circle. If it is not, use the IJKL RCS translate keys to move it so that it is. You will have to keep making this adjustment repeatedly as you close the distance. Once you get within 200m or so, use the forward-back translation keys to cut your relative velocity to 2m/s or less. Remember you can always time-warp if it's going too slowly. Keep pushing the yellow circle on top of the pink circle with the RCS translate keys as you close the distance. Once you get to less than 50m separation, slow down to 0.5m/with the forward/back RCS keys and then switch back to ship number 2. Make sure that ship is still pointed directly at ship number one and switch back again. At 20m or so, slow down to 0.1-0.2m/s and just let the two ships glide together. As long as everything stays lined up, you should dock successfully. If you make contact at an odd angle, wait for the bounce and translate forward just a tad to stop your recoil. You should than come to rest with the two docking ports in contact. If you then disengage your SAS, your ship should gradually swing around to the right angle and dock. Practice practice practice. Also, I have found that using a Nintendo controller for this is VERY helpful. Good luck!

Edited October 21, 2014 by herbal space program