4 ms·

Thanks for sharing. Took me around 4 minutes and docked successfully on my first try. What a great interface too. Without training and without even looking at t

Thanks for sharing. Took me around 4 minutes and docked successfully on my first try. What a great interface too. Without training and without even looking at the instructions, I managed to dock it. This may be a dumb question but I noticed something a bit odd. I had no trouble getting the orientation right and stabilizing those numbers. They didn't drift after getting to zero. But there was always a little drift on Y and a bit more on Z. A very small drift, but I was thinking I should have been able to completely stabilize it. That a single click right thrust would cancel out the previous single click of the left thrust. But that wasn't the case. Is that a fault of the simulator? Or how a spaceship would handle in reality? That the translation movements can never be completely canceled out and have to be monitored?

villuv 5y ago
I believe it might be because of the orbit isn’t perfectly circular and and same inclination as the station. Check some docking videos where they show relative trajectories between docking ships and station and you notice that it forms “loops” if no thrust is applied. Orbital mechanics can be unintuitive, if you apply thrust towards your orbital motion you raise your orbit on the opposite side of the earth and so on.
Doxin 5y ago
If you're accelerating towards an orbital object you are by definition not in the same orbit as the target object. If you were you would be moving at the exact same speed. This effect makes getting yourself close enough for docking all sorts of tricky if you don't know what you're doing. Once you get close enough (like in the linked simulator) you can mostly ignore the problem since the effects are small given the relative speeds involved. I can heartily recommend messing around with orbital maneuvers in KSP to get a feel for the problem. It's not exactly intuitive.

villuv 5y ago

I believe it might be because of the orbit isn’t perfectly circular and and same inclination as the station. Check some docking videos where they show relative trajectories between docking ships and station and you notice that it forms “loops” if no thrust is applied. Orbital mechanics can be unintuitive, if you apply thrust towards your orbital motion you raise your orbit on the opposite side of the earth and so on.

Doxin 5y ago

If you're accelerating towards an orbital object you are by definition not in the same orbit as the target object. If you were you would be moving at the exact same speed. This effect makes getting yourself close enough for docking all sorts of tricky if you don't know what you're doing. Once you get close enough (like in the linked simulator) you can mostly ignore the problem since the effects are small given the relative speeds involved. I can heartily recommend messing around with orbital maneuvers in KSP to get a feel for the problem. It's not exactly intuitive.