2.7 Rendezvous and Docking

Explanation

The space station is now within visual range. Since our orbit and orbital planes are identical, our closing speed is very low. And, the station is close enough for us to carefully maneuver our ship closer for docking. This is the spaceflight equivalent to parallel parking, and in real life it has to be done with extreme care. If a bump occurs, even if nothing breaks, the rotation and orbit of the space station will be disturbed, which will be a massive headache to fix. 

Flight Results

We can use the Docking MFD to lock into a docking port and then project its information onto the HUD for guidance: 

Note that the HUD is projecting the distance and relative velocity visually, so it's easy to maneuver the ship on approach. The maneuvers are done manually, slowly, with the RCS thrusters. To keep the ship on track requires lots of switching back and forth between the ROT and LIN (rotational and linear) modes of the RCS thrusters.

Finally, we reach our destination:

Post Flight

Now that we have docked, we can add up the total fuel we spent on each burn and compare to our initial flight plan. After each burn in the flight, I took a note of the fuel level. Here I print out the summary:

Note that docking was excluded from the budget but took about 1000 kg of fuel. 

Visually, the results look like this: