Today the world of Kerbin witnessed a momentousness occasion. Two Kerbal Space Program command pods launched from the surface of the planet docked together in an roughly circular orbit of 99300m above the surface. There was much fanfare and cheering from watching Kerbals in the Space Center but none were more relieved than the six Kerbonauts in the vessels.
The Kerbals weren’t very good pilots however, offering no help when it came to manoeuvring the two pods together. In fact, the looks of distress and alarm on their faces made me glad they weren’t helping.
The two pods danced around each other, rotating silently and smoothly in the vacuum of space but firmly refusing to line up.
Eventually they did line up and slowly inched toward each other before clamping magnetically together.
Despite his earlier fear I couldn’t stop Rodlong Kerman going on an EVA and with his suit he flew around and inspected the newly joined craft. His attempts to join his Kerbonaut comrades in the other pod didn’t go so well as the pod was already full. Still, he even posed for a photo!
Electricity in the pods was rapidly depleting until I shut it off. I hope the six Kerbals in the combined craft are ok. I’ll have to send some solar panels up next time and use one of the extra docking clamps. Maybe this calls for a rescue operation?
I’m still a noob at this game but doing this I figured out how to cancel my forwards and backwards movement correctly (it’s just like flying the rocket engines, boost towards retrograde rather than away from the target as you might not be heading towards the target!)
These 2 tips from r/kerbalspaceprogram were invaluable:
- Use [ and ] to switch ships
- Disable SAS when you’re docking as your pods will just roll around the docking clamp
Scott Manley has an excellent tutorial on docking which helped a lot too.
Frustrating Fun times.
I forgot to say, I also used Mechjeb to get into orbit but I can do it manually. Right now the thought of getting the right height and docking is enough to turn me to drink so I needed the extra help 🙂
Funny I found you by your mention of Hardcore history and now that I see you play KSP too makes me smile.
My best docking was a moon mission with a module remaining in orbit and a lander. After landing on the Mun, ran out of fuel 200m from the orbiting module and EVA thrust my crew the rest the way.