Season 5 is a modded single-player game in Science mode, and one goal of the season is that no kerbal dies. This video opens on Year 2, Day 83 with BSSHub1 in orbit, Lodlorf Kerman aboard, and the station's science module BSSScience1 a few kilometers away. The job is to get two ships joined. The hub's planned burns refuse to work for most of half an hour, so a second craft, DockingWho5, goes up with Ludwell Kerman to reach it instead. The video ends with DockingWho5 about 36 meters from the hub's docking port, still not docked.
Two ships, and one has no thruster fuel
The Tracking Station lists BSSHub1, only three hours into its flight, and BSSScience1, 22 days up. BSSScience1 comes up first, and its resource panel shows the problem: monopropellant at 0 out of 1,530. "He's out of monopropellant, so we can turn off RCS because this guy can't really do anything." It is left to hang where it is, and the flying falls to BSSHub1, with Lodlorf Kerman's portrait in the corner.
Basket has a web page of docking instructions to work from this time. "I've already read it, so I learned a couple things." The two craft have drifted farther apart than wanted, and BSSHub1 has no way down: "I can't land with this guy." The commentary calls it "a life or death situation."
Burns that won't behave
The plan is simple: add a maneuver node, point the hub at it, burn, and bring the two orbits together. It doesn't go that way. The burns fire, but the countdown on the node doesn't drop, and the node keeps jumping somewhere else. "This thing doesn't go down at all." The next try is at full throttle, the one after that from staging mode, and a target still being set comes up as a possible cause. None of it helps. "Am I missing something? Has the game fundamentally changed? Am I in a dream?"
After about 27 minutes of this the hub is parked. "Let's launch a different ship and we'll try to dock something together."
DockingWho5 and Ludwell Kerman
Back at the Space Center it is Year 2, Day 84, with 469.5 science banked. The VAB's load list holds BSSHub1, BSSScience1 and five DockingWho craft, and DockingWho5 is the pick, "the ship that we actually docked two of these together." Ludwell Kerman takes the seat in its Mk1-3 Command Pod. "So Ludwell, you're gonna rescue whoever it is that's in the hub."
The launch goes cleanly, and once DockingWho5 is in orbit its first maneuver node works on the first try. "Maneuvers even work and everything? It's amazing."
Closing the gap
With BSSHub1 set as the target, a few burns fix the tilt between the two orbits and bring the closest approach down to "0.9 kilometers apart." Then the web page gets read out step by step: match orbits, point retrograde near the encounter, burn off the speed between the ships, point at the target, nudge closer, and repeat.
The trick that matters most turns out to be switching between the two craft. "The main thing is being able to switch between the ships," so that each one can be told to face the other. A docking display opens on the left, showing the distance and closing speed to the Clamp-O-Tron Docking Port, and the numbers shrink from kilometers to tens of meters, mostly without RCS, to save fuel.
Bumps at the last few meters
Up close it gets fiddly. On the first real pass the two ships come together too fast. "Oh, you just bump each other." RCS goes on, docking mode comes up, the H and N keys get tried for moving forward and slowing down ("Both are speeding up"), and the view flips back and forth between the ships, each told to point at the target. The closest the screen shows is 11.7 meters, DockingWho5 lined up on the hub's docking port. Then it slips again. "They still bumped off each other. I think having them on the side makes this a lot more difficult."
Where it ends
There is time for one more drift toward each other. The ships end up "pretty stable now," about 36 meters apart and closing at 0.2 meters per second, and the game is paused to save. The video stops there, with Ludwell Kerman in DockingWho5, Lodlorf Kerman still aboard BSSHub1, BSSScience1 still out of monopropellant, and nothing docked yet.