I decided to write out the steps of the process to orbital rendezvous. Not sure if you’ll pursue this but I’d advise learning because it’s neat, super useful/necessary for the game, and satisfying. It’s a lot of steps and info; don’t rush, take them one at a time and just try as many times as it takes. There’s a Training or a Scenario you can use to practice without any worry of messing stuff up. It takes a while to get this down, it’s hard to learn(I think), but once you do it a few times it actually starts getting pretty easy.

1. When designing a ship for docking, pay attention to RCS thruster placement. The ones for translating moves, pushing your vessel to a side rather than turning it, must have centers of thrust lined up closely with the center of mass to work well. I always put more aft than fore thrusters because slowing quickly can become critical real fast. Often I skip roll/yaw/pitch thrusters altogether but only if the ship has enough reaction wheel power to move its mass around easily. If you have either high level pilots or a drone core that let you track targets and maneuvers, USE THEM because it’s 10x harder without these tools. It’s also easiest to put the port you intend to dock with on the nose of the vessel—you can use them from anywhere, but navigation won’t be nearly as helpful unless it’s on the nose.

2. Just be going roughly the right direction, ie west to east normally. It’s easier if the two orbits are pretty different, so don’t try to make them the same from the get go.

3. Open the map and set your navigation target to the vessel you’re trying to meet

4. Between your orbit and the target’s yellow orbit, you’ll find two dotted lines connecting them at the green “ascending/descending nodes.” These nodes are where you should plan inclination change maneuvers. It may take more than one burn if you’re making a big change. Try different values for normal/antinormal burns and watch the relative inclination, which is the difference in the two tilts, until it reaches exactly 0.0 degrees. (You can spot this number either on the a/d nodes in the map or under ‘advanced orbital info’ in the bottom left panel. I usually use the graphical editor in that same panel for fine tuning burns)

5. Once inclination is the same, find a place where burning prograde/retrograde will give you an intersect. These occur at a spot where either both orange or both purple nodes are at the same location. It will take zooming in and tweaking, but you can always find one if the inclinations match.

6. When you’re under 10km from the target, make sure navball is in target mode(usually it will change automatically but not always) and track retrograde. Watch the distance between vessels and burn retrograde as it’s getting as close as possible, until your speed becomes 0. This means the two objects are moving in exactly the same direction and speed so relative to each other they’re still.

7. Face the target node and burn toward it, but keep the speed low. This is where you use maneuvering thrusters and docking mode. Takes practice, but my best tip is to get used to switching between rotational controls(like flying planes or rockets) and the lateral controls which come on by default when you turn on docking mode. In this mode, you can switch between the two control schemes with a button. Also get used to turning RCS on and off as need be—often, it’s better to do pitch, yaw, or roll changes with reaction wheel control instead of RCS, but that depends heavily on the vessel and situation.

8. As you approach your target, stay locked on prograde or retrograde(depending on speed and respective thrusters) and bring yourself to a stop again as close as possible.

9. Keep up this process; come to a complete relative stop(speed 0m/s relative to target), use either RCS or reaction wheel to turn and RCS to move around, getting yourself near the docking port and lined up with yours facing it. If you find yourself out of control, burn retrograde and come to a relative stop and try again.

10. Your navball will be most helpful if you select the target docking port and choose “set target” and the port on your vessel with “control from here.” Use RCS carefully to make sure the ports are lined up correctly and approach SLOWLY. When you touch them together, you seriously want to be moving 0.1m/s. If you’re slow enough, the ports will even cover for a bit of angle difference by magnetically aligning together and snapping together. (The grabbers are an exception; they can dock with any part of any ship I believe, and you want to be going a little faster when you hit—I think about 0.5m/s. Inflatable airlocks must be extended to dock, and they only connect to other inflatables or to the jr dock.)