Here's the shortest, sweetest "a-ha" I've yet learned in KSP. So you're piloting ship A and you want to rendezvous with ship B in a stable orbit. Let's assume

Here's the shortest, sweetest "a-ha" I've yet learned in KSP. So you're piloting ship A and you want to rendezvous with ship B in a stable orbit. Let's assume that A and B are on identical, basically circular orbits, and A is behind B, so your distances from each other aren't really changing much. The maneuver you're looking for is.... Point retrograde (i.e. "away from the direction that will take you to where B is now") and burn. In the short run, you increase your distance from B (of course), but you also dropped your orbital altitude and therefore the area of the arc swept between your ship and your center of orbit over time... and by Kepler's second law, you are now orbiting faster (more full revolutions per unit of time). So you'll swing under B and eventually come up "in front" of it; time your burns right, and you come up epsilon distance in front of B; rendezvous successful. It's totally counter-intuitive to accelerate away from something to approach it, except you're basically on a sphere. :-p