So after my successful recreation of Project B.E.A.S.T. 4's MunShot and return to Kerbin, I thought I would try my hand at the rendezvous they attempted in the most recent video. I recreated their target ship on a similar orbit and then recreated their rescue vessel and attempted to save the stranded Kerbal! Some advice:

• Throttle back on ascent! If you're burning up going UP you're wasting fuel fighting air resistance!
• When starting out, always turn east (90 degrees) after clearing most of the atmosphere.
• Put some power generation on the thing! Just a few solar panels will do. The internal battery doesn't last forever!
• When trying to match inclinations, use the purple maneuver handles over the markers 'AN' or 'DN' (ascending node and descending node) after choosing a target.
• Hover over the rendezvous markers to see what your separation will be!
• You can click above the navball to see your speed relative to your target.
• Open drogue chutes at 2,500M above surface. Drogue chutes alone will not save your craft!
• Open full chutes at 500M above surface.

Success!

Imgur album: http://imgur.com/a/o268m

Previous B.E.A.S.T. 4 mission recreation: http://www.giantbomb.com/kerbal-space-program/3030-36494/forums/my-attempt-at-piloting-giant-bombs-project-beast-0-1789620/#4

Good idea trying out the Beast missions.

Launching east is generally a good idea if you want a quick, easy and efficient orbit but dont care what type of orbit it is. If you wanna do a rendezvous you should try to launch in the direction of the orbit you are trying to match. Launching just before the target will pass over your head is also a good idea. If you do those two things you will only have some small adjustments to do once in space.

None of that is needed however. I love how all the Vinny orbits are almost opposite to each other, he goes where the wind takes him! ;)

Edit: Also, make your orbit big before you match planes to save some fuel.

Edit2: Your mission is a failure however. The Vinny ark was intended to bring home all three stranded kerbonauts in one go. ;)

@rethla: For sure turning to the exact inclination is ideal, however I wanted to do something that a beginner can easily grasp. Learning to change inclinations is an important step, as is catching up to a target! I had more commentary to that effect in the imgur album.

I wouldn't call it a failure - I was just doing their revised mission after they realized their initial ambitions were perhaps a bit too big! :)

I would just build a giant space station and then construct the ships on that and send them out from there with fuel to spare.

@oursin_360: Constructing ships on-orbit is incredibly complicated. A good idea, though, is to have a space station where your rescue ships can fuel up. That requires building a station, launching it, stocking with fuel, and mastering the art of docking - which is even more complicated than a rendezvous.

Building a spacestation is in fact a long chain of rendezvous (btw: what is rendezvous in plural?) so its a hilarious idea to make a spacestation to make it easier to successfully complete your first rendezvous :)

This is awesome. Really glad KSP continues to bring everyone along (now in 1.x edition) and didn't fizzle out while still in Early Access/beta. Loving the GBEast videos and community content like this.

Just an extra note for anyone who is only just starting out, playing at home reading through threads like this (and just wants to orbit, rather than match an existing orbit to hook up with something already in space).

Think of orbit as (for Kerbin low orbit, out of atmosphere so stable but not much more - the higher the stable orbit the slower you go) falling sideways at 2200 metres per second. When moving in a straight line parallel with the ground below you (which is curved to either side because sphere) you are clearly going to be moving away from the ground. But that stickler gravity means that you're also falling towards the ground. So going 2.2 km/s sideways is that happy balance where gravity pulls you down to exactly balance what would otherwise you going flying off into space due to the curvature of the planet. Result: stable orbit. But fundamentally you only really care about getting 70-90km above Kerbin to get out of the air resistance that will cause you to come crashing down. The final plan for vertical velocity is 0 m/s, it's all going to be about horizontal velocity. The important part is you need to be going sideways really quickly.

As Kerbin is a spinning globe then you are not starting off from zero horizontal velocity. As you launch, staying entirely "stationary" above the launch site means you're actually already going at 175 metres a second sideways in the direction of East. Because Kerbin rotates. So, as we need to get to 2.2 km/s horizontally, we're already 8% of the way there if we increase our velocity East. We only need a delta-V (change in velocity) of ~2 km/s to get to where we want to go for an orbit.

Heading West means you need a delta-V of ~2.4 km/s to set up an orbit going the other way, because the first 175 m/s of delta-V is simply undoing the rotation you had when sat on the ground from the spinning globe you started on. So you need more thrust (and so more fuel) to get into orbit when launching Westerly. Hopefully someone reading this has just gone, "Oh, that suddenly makes perfect sense!"

@rethla: It's plural already. The singular is "rends-toi".

The "rendez" part is the second person plural of the verb "rendre" ("to meet"), and the "vous" part is the second person plural pronoun (i.e. plural "you"). To explain that bit, in English "you" is both plural and singular (i.e. "You are my friend" and "You are all my friends" both use the same pronoun), but French has two different pronouns for singular and plural.

Fun fact: you know how old-timey texts use the word "thou" instead of "you"? That's used to be the second person singular pronoun in English, but it's not used much anymore. That is, it used to be the case that you said "Thou art my friend" and "Ye are my friends", using different pronouns for singular and plural second person. Not any more though.

For the specific case of "rendezvous" in English, the plural is generally spelled the same as the singular, but with the difference that you pronounce the final "z". So singular is pronounced "rahn-DAY-vou" and the plural is "rahn-DAY-vouz". Or something like that.

Sorry, linguistics interlude over. Keep talking about rockets and stuff.

Building a space station is a long chain of rendezvous? Says who? Just send it up in one launch! :)

@orzbluefog: Thats what i always do. Whaaaaat if i could also add this thing to the spaceship, will it still launch? etc.. etc... I always end up with a humongous creation and since i play career i will usually have to spend just as much time descaling it as i did building it.

If you are gonna use it for anything at all apart from stranding yet another Kerbal in space you are gonna have to do some rendezvous however ;)

Yeah, when my station arrived on-orbit it was 2/3rd empty of fuel. First order of business was to fuel her up! Now she's full of gas and ready to facilitate deep-space adventures!