How to dock

An advaced docking technique for noobs to try and pros to practice.
This guide will teach you how to dock quickly and reliable.

Emphisis on Design

One of the most important things when docking is seeing to it that your rcs thrusters can strafe without turning your craft. The best way to do this is open the center of mass indicator and make sure your thrusters are roughly symetrical around it then actually take it into space turn off sas and try to strafe if it causes little to no rotation you are good.
Having a reaction wheel to better control rotation and a large supply of monopropellent is also a very good idea.
A surplus of delta v is practically a must for such things.

Don't forget to actually set your intended destination as your target fairly early in the orbit it will be important latter.

The way I learned

Ksp basicly has 2 ways of doing a rendevus in order to actually make docking phesable in the slightest.
The first way is timing and luck, you need your docking target (Usually a space station) to be a certain distance from your launching point before you take off, in the case of kerbin it is reccomended at something like 5-10 degrees until it flies over the ksc.

The way that works best

At one point I was watching a video about how starlink satilites are placed in there target orbits, this rendevus method is basicly just that applied to ksp.

Unlike the other method this does not rely on getting into the same orbit on the first try but waiting in orbit until you can get a good try.

-Start off by launching into an orbit of about half that of your docking target (Twice will probobly work just as well but I have not tried it and it does require more fuel)
-Next, use prograde on your manuver tool in order to get your theoretical orbit to intersect with the orbit of the station. You will be moving the point of manuver around until you get an intersept just like with a mun mission (You will need to use the seccondary mouse button to skip to next orbit a few times if the ideal intersept is behind you)
-Once you have a manuver (reccomended range 10km or less but as high as 30 has been known to work) we can work on the next step.

The approach

Now that you have a randevus with your docking target you will need to start slowing down.
If you cut it particularly close to your target you will want to slow down fairly early as you will be coming in at a higher speed. Either way make sure you are burning retrograde relative to target.
If you are burning prograde you are doing it wrong and may simpily hit the moon. If you are burning relative to orbit you will hit kerbin. If you mess up particularly bad you could theoretically hit both.

Once you are slowed down you want to be sidling along at around 5-10m/s relative to your target. This helps to miss it should you not slow down fast enough. You will also be several Km away from your target, fortunitley this can be solved by burning directly at your target and slowing down again when you get closer, if you are to far away to see your target this does not matter because in the sas menu you have a target indicator direction. Just be sure to slow down with retrograde instead of anti-target.

Now that you are a bit closer you will want to repeat the last step a few times until you are about 1km away from your station. Once you slow all the way down to as close to 0m/s as you can manage and then turn off your engines entirely. (I usually have the 1 action group assigned to this specific task (Along with 9 for solar panels and 0 for ladders (it makes things easier))) This is also a good time to retract any solar panels and radiators you might have in order to avoid collision with the station.

FinalFinalApproach_final.exe

You will now have to do one of the most seat of the pants by the instincts thing in ksp actually connect 2 docking ports. You should make sure to familiarize yourself with using IKJLHN for translating because this is how you get it done, keep your speed low enough you can counter it quickly and don't be afraid to come around and try again. You have a large reserve of monopropellant for this very reason so I hope you were not drinking to much on the way up however fruity and energy drink it might make. The target indicator will come in handy a little bit for alignment but do not use that as fixed rotation as this can make docking harder, particularly in the last 5 meters or so.

Other Guides

-Previus Guide
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2721999030
-Next Guide

[Unheil]

Meanwhile I've set up a docking tutorial by myself, which fits perfectly after your guide. See https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2914099863

[CosmicAggressor]

Hmmmm. Looks like I forgot to subscribe to my own thread here. I may take the advice of @unheil into consideration and do a part 3 of this at some point.
For future on these as well ascii art will be removed when noticed as it has become a plauge across steam. 1 can be nice but threads with 100 or more comments most of which are ascii art responding to ascii art are just a waste of data.

[Unheil]

(2/2) As an additional tip: When approaching the target, look at the rendez-vous markers, they tell you the speed difference at closest approach. From that you can estimate when to burn retrograde to the target. Plan a dummy maneuver node somewhere on the path with that delta-v in any direction, it should give you a good burn-time estimate. Delete the node afterwards, as it's not thought as an actual maneuver (e.g. it would steer you to orbit-retrograde, not target-retrograde). Anyways, thanks for investing your time into community work. Always appreciated!

[Unheil]

The title is misleading and should read "How to plan Rendez-Vous maneuvers", as you do not actually explain how to do the docking part. Also, I recommend to go waaay closer than 10km and do a course correction, mid-way to target or later, to get into the range of 100m and below. Reason is, depending on your vessel's thrust and orbit, re-approaching from 10kms on a CURVED PATH at high velocities by thrusing towards the target indicator can become a chase for every km, boosting and boosting again and again wasting a lot of fuel. You save much time and fuel by setting a most precise course as early as possible. (1/2)

[FrosttyZs ッ]

pika