KSP: Apollo-style HOW TO DOCK Walkthrough!

alright guys welcome back to another Kerbal space program video and this week I had plans for something a bit more ambitious than what we're doing here which a surface value is yet another Mun mission but I'm doing my own little twist in it because a lot of you are asking me how to get better at docking and how they suck at things like lunar orbit rendezvous that sort of things I said you know what let's do like a little tutorial but slightly different to most tutorials so just the beginning of this video I'm just building the craft you can download the craft in the video description what I'm doing is essentially an Apollo style mission that you can play along to so I've kind of made it a little bit more simple while having a single stage for the moon lander so not having a separate stage for the ascent and a different stage for the descent it's all just one vessel that does the whole landing at the whole taking off just to simplify things so it's not really a true Saturn 5 recreation but I'm not really going for that I just went for a 7 5sk looking rocket just because I guess it looks cooler and that was it that's pretty much goes for most of my ship designs honestly I compromise a lot for the sake of vanity is it vanity with ships whatever anyway there's the payload pretty much all built I have the launch escape tower I did consider using a SpaceX style and I guess Boeing's doing the same thing as well escape system where it's no longer a launch tower it's just like well in KSP Glee's to be a series of separate runs along the side of the capsule I did do that I did try that but I thought you know we basil as somewhat be reminiscent to the Saturn 5 aesthetic and have the tower but I think I'll trolley probably try and phase out the tower for my crafts going forward now that most space programs I'm moving away from launch scape towers and instead instead incorporate some sort of separate ROM escape system built straight into the capsule anyway here we are taking off from the launch pad and there it is there so the actual what I meant by play along of this series I did I mentioned this and then didn't touch elaborates oh I admit it may be somewhat confusing oh they didn't explain it I said she won't doing is a polished our missions to me when I was trying to learn how to do them I really struggled with it when I was a wee lad learning how to play this game what I would often do is look at sky I think was like some random scott manley video he wente Lou for the first time after it was first added to the game he did like an Apollo style rendezvous and I would always just skip to the part where he went from the surface to the mothership again in orbit and just watched it and tried to figure out what he was doing and I thought this would be a good opportunity to do that but I will also be providing a quick save not only for when my ship is landed you'll see me create the quick save and then I'll just carry on doing the mission so you can get your game open at the same time and then you can watch what I do and then try and do it again on your screen if that makes sense and I made another save file as well for another part of mission I can't know what it was now I'll probably go back and ship maybe I'll remember and go if I can change this bit of audio so I clarified a bit better but I probably will forget anyway like I said the hardest part of me for me for these Apollo missions was the actual docking so I didn't talk too much about the actual ascent into lko because I think if you're going to be planning on trying and Apollo star mission for yourself or any kind of mission that involves rendezvous I would definitely recommend at least having a grasp of getting into lko and you know you should have at least gone to the moon you should have gone to the moon at least once using a normal star mission direct descent profile by that there's no rendezvous just the whole ship lands on the man the whole ship comes back which in KSP actually makes a lot more sense than the Apollo style but it's got a lot lesser style points so that's the best theory real reason to do Apollo style in this mission at least for the mum obviously things like even tylo other more massive bodies like Momo especially makes a lot more sense to do Apollo style but getting a bit sidetracked here not much - getting to the moon really just create a maneuver node just drag it out to the apoapsis is at Mun altitude and just spin it around as you move the manoeuvre node around your orbit until you getting to a point where you're getting at Mun encounter you are aiming ideally for an equatorial Mun orbit it's not essential by any means and for example all of my blunderbuss missions pretty much are non equatorial orbit and have to do rendezvous into orbit again but I think for the purposes of practicing and getting better at the game you should be aiming for equatorial at first just so you can follow the 90 degree vector on the nav board I have to worry too much about the the map screen or indeed you know following more weirdo novel trajectories so you see I put myself on a collision course with a man just when we ditch that lower stage it will crush harmlessly into the surface and not leave any debris in space and then we can do a quick reconfiguration if you really want to if you find your land there actually goes out of alignment with your command pod accidentally you could always be careful and just put a Kerbal inside the lander ahead of time just so you can change its orientation in case that happens to you but I'm not gonna do anything like what I normally do I it seems to have been coined the Matt Lauer method now on the Kerbal space program separated even though I it's definitely not an original idea but what I normally do is have both vessels be controllable either it through it being like having a Kerbal on board or having a probe core on board and set both of them to target each other so that they'll automatically stay aligned I'm not doing that trick just in case any of you are playing on career mode or don't have leveled up kerbals or just I don't know forgot to put a probe core or you know means of recharging electricity on the ship your docking to yeah anyway that's Esaias that's why I'm not doing that so here we are approaching the Mun and I'm just gonna lower the periapsis just to a more reasonable height so I may I aim for about 50 kilometers just because that seemed like a nice round number you want to be at least above 10 kilometers on the man just see oh definitely definitely clear old terrain features I usually when I'm playing aim for sort of between 10 and 50 kilometers but you know mileage in my videos very sounding on how lazy I happens to be at the time of recording so again not much more not much to this at this point most of this videos focus is going to be on the latter part but we're actually getting from the surface back up to the command pot in orbit but there we are all ready to embark upon the Mun surface here in lo Mun orbit so the first we're going to do is transfer two of our kerbals into the lander itself one of them is gonna be a pilot and the other is gonna be an engineer I don't know what profession they were because we don't actually have Jeb a bill and Bob at value obviously I know who what they all do I have no I've just got generic randomly generated curveballs because jebediah bill Bob and Val are all on lathe in my life on lathe Series which you know was saved for those that follow my Instagram on Twitter may be aware and I guess I think I posted on disk or as well may be aware that my SSD sadly passed away after many hours of intense surgery couldn't be saved but luckily I didn't realize at the time that KSP actually used this cloud steam cloud save I assumed it was one of those games that doesn't use it I don't know why because it does and a lot of the Flies said it uses the steam clouds I'm like oh great so I'm actually at my savings back not to full capacity there are like a few ships missing like I haven't got any of the Animus Base Hotel and Casino craft in this file but I guess it's the beauty of me putting craft buzz in the video descriptions is that I could actually recover them myself from the resources I gave to you guys so it all comes full circle and here we are landing again I'd every talked that much about the landing but I did say at the beginning oh okay at least in the beginning ish I mentioned that you should probably be able to at least land on the moon and return from the month before you embark on something more ambitious like an Apollo style rendezvous before we get into the whole rendezvous getting into orbit and obviously the meter potatoes peas and carrots of this of this video we should use a few a VA activities I forgot to do any science because I put the science inside the little doors on that mark - lambda' cam that they recently added ice would have been nice to tuck them all away but by doing that I forgot that they existed when I actually did the mission so we don't have to do any science aside from doing an Eevee a report crew report and getting a service sample but the main thing is you know planting the flag and we did that well here's our kerbals getting ready for their Instagram opportunity there they are magnificent and yeah with that we can isn't that just the most wonderful thing you ever seen it's two kinds of two kinds of attitudes in this world anyway let's get the back home to the lambda so I put the ladder here not actually needed because mums gravity is low enough that jetpacks work or yeah the e VA Pat works it's not really a jetpack is it but you know he looks a little bit more realistic impressive science fiction if there actually is a ladder that they can climb up and then we can get ready to create the quicksave after I've and at this point so lastly I recorded this yesterday I'm now recording today so I'm trying to record exactly when I did things up doing a little bit of science and we're just panning the camera around I guess to show things off and here we are creating the save so here is a quick save here ready to leave mum I've saved it and that will be part of the file in the description so I'm actually gonna now just quickly load that quick save just so this is what it will look like for you guys when you load it anytime now there we are say we are on the steps of the month this is what it should look like a few guys so our lander is here there's our fuel levels and where's the ship there it is the old Jul 5 there a very subtle parody of Saturn 5 I guess cuz Jul 5 is an analog of Saturn in this game anyway I'm waiting for it to be a little bit ahead of ourselves before we launch just because we're gonna be taking a very flat approach because obviously mom has no atmosphere so it has no atmospheric drag so we can start flying flat very very soon and obviously having very low surface gravity doesn't take much thrust to weight ratio to get off sweet again we can start flying black quite quickly because we're flying flat like this and because our command pods altitude is relatively high up we're actually going to be effectively undertaking it so we want to be launching a little bit ahead or as in we should be letting it pass over us before ascending just so that when we actually get our counter nodes they'll be fairly close there won't be perfect but you can see there they're pretty close in fact the targets gonna be a little bit behind us when we get to that point so when you want to win when it comes to rendezvous in with a target that's behind you you effectively want to slow down and have a slower orbit you need to be orbiting a slightly higher so by raising our elapses slightly higher than the apoapsis of our command pods you can see our separation comes way way down so we can just play around with retrograde and pro-grade to get that as close as possible you may also be able to tell at this point that that dotted line doesn't quite align with our target line which means our tilt is slightly off so once we've got as close as we can with retrograde and pro-grade we're going to use a normal and anti normal you can use radial in and radial out as well if you still are getting quite close enough but usually you can do it with pro-grade retrograde and normal and anti normal and as you can see just watching our separation very carefully there it's creeping down and there we have it 0 km/h Jose struggling to get as far as I just did you could always reload this one just have a go that's actually getting a little bit close to the target ship so this is I've just loaded it in case you couldn't tell so this is what we like when you load up this quick save if you choose to do so so I'm gonna just time off our way up to our maneuver node which is a very very short berm and give me a two second burn you probably won't we don't want it to be a two second burn though you want to do it at our slightly you know less than full throttle just you have a little bit more control I didn't find if you just do full throttle with maneuver nodes you tend to either just under shoot or over shoots so be careful so there we are so just before we actually finish doing that many of those where I then do is close the manoeuvre no maker and then just eyeball it myself because many of those are only so accurate really you want to just do the last bit using eyeballing so as you can see we couldn't catch really get the zero kilometer separation and we got but no point one kilometers that'd be pretty good you know kirbo the Cobell map screen isn't that accurate when it comes to a separation of ships own 0.1 kilometers is perfectly fine as is almost like a 1 kilometer you can just eyeball it once you get that close oh so I personally Whitney's all by the way I've got seasonal allergies pretty badly and I don't think my medication is quite fixed the problem just yet so once you get close to your target you want to make sure that your nav balls relative velocity is set to target so you see on my novel where it says target if yours doesn't say that if it says orbit or surface just click it and it would like click the word and it will just cycle through so once you got close to the target you want to burn retrograde because I'll be retrograde relative to the target once you kill the hole your velocity we've got it close enough to zero point towards the target then again the close once you get closed again burn off with your speed and get closer and closer that way so at this point I'm just going to be eyeballing it I'm not going to use any mana propellant to do the docking just kind of really show you how to talk with mana propellant in case things go quite bad and you run out but it's but it would be easier using one run for you guys but I'm just showing you how to do it without so I'm basically just seeing a man get myself nice and lined up by spinning the ship round getting it on right cause very very slow moves and then killing off my speed using retrograde and then gradually coasting into a good position and then once you know I'm gonna happy out of a good place I'll then point the ships together double-clicking that docking port so it's set as our target and letting myself drift towards it keep your speed low sometimes you may need to just point towards the target to get on the nav ball but it's pretty simple but there we are all rendezvous hopefully you made it - now that we're here we can do a little less sorry and touchy and then think about getting I was back on board to go home or and if like the hooker voice Bay's burger crashes don't know why that happened too quickly reload the game luckily I did a quick save at that point so I was able to get back to where I was so to know exactly what I did to antagonize the game like that but there we go here we are back in loma an orbit after that brief intermission luckily alcove was raw still alive and didn't spontaneously combust because that happens when the game breaks apparently so like I say we can get our codes back on board so I actually took with the data from that pot just in case you want to get some science from this mission I personally don't need to because I've got the whole tech tree unlocked but if you're doing this for science then by all means take the science from the pod look at that lovely little shot of the craft this is actually a stock craft I know the fuel tank of the command pod looks a bit weird it's actually just the big service Bay this mentor you know look like the Apollo service bay and well the fuel tanks clipped into that I mean I guess you would have seen that in the time lapse of the beginning but it is a stock part it comes with a making history expansion pack anyway I'm voting retrograde here just to lower our periapsis to be kind of put ourselves on a collision course just so we can attach the lambda and leave it so it doesn't get stuck in space it'll crush harmlessly into the moon or surface and now that we've done that we can think about returning home so I'm not gonna aim for like a particularly realistic Apollo landings we're landing in the ocean that sort of thing although I think I actually did land in the ocean so let's go with actually I did eight into that in the ocean we're going to just create at escape node essentially so our escape kind of path goes backwards along the mums orbit so that were actually gonna be entering curb into atmosphere directly from the mum burn on to do another on the way back and year I added way too much fuel to this that's because I forgot that the actual Apollo the bit that goes from curve into the man is done with a lower stage not using the command pod stage and then by that point I couldn't be bothered to remove fuel tanks from this bit so it's another Matt Lauer special where we put way too much fuel into the command pod stage but there we are I didn't actually use all the ablator because AB later in this game is very very powerful so it's I've rarely I don't think I've ever really had any circumstances where I've needed all the ablative heat shield so I usually shave off a lot of it just because it makes the shield lighter and therefore you have more Delta V I say that after I just told you that I had way too much still to be in this craft anyway I hope you enjoyed this video and it was helpful for you I know I've done a docking tutorial similar to this where I used minimus as the example because mimesis a lot easier but that was kind of leaving you more to your own devices whereas this is more like a walkthrough layer you can use the saves follow along so you can see exactly because I think it's difficult if your landing is exactly like the one in the video it can be hard maybe to mirror it so thought maybe it's a cool of me a good idea to create something that people you know can mirror so I hope it was helpful I could do more videos like this where i share the quicksaves but you know feedback appreciated in the comments next week I don't know what's happening I'm very busy hopefully I'll have time to make a KSP video I will definitely have time to make a Planet Coast video because they take a lot less time to make but hopefully KSP will come back next week as well good bye

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 125,482

Keywords: ksp, kerbal space program, kerbal, space, program, jebediah, kerman, matt, lowne, matt lowne, nerd, british, funny, epic, commentary, abridged, amazing, gameplay

Id: toulv4suzNw

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2019