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Docking ports intermittently stop working.


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Just letting others know what possible solution could be if you are using Real Solar System mod (RSS). 

Fix: Save game and reload the save.

Possible cause: I believe it has to do with Real Solar System mod. RSS exposes one of the limitation of KSP game engine: it cannot calculate location of things precisely enough at the scales of RSS (I speculate that was one of big reasons why we got a solar system that is 10 times smaller than real one in the stock game.) Good examples are the runways that have bumps between sections (I use Kourou and that one has one huge bump between 3rd and 4th sections.) This problem exasperates by 3 factors:

1. Time since the vessel(s) have been loaded.
2. Size of the vessel. Specifically it seems the farther the part is from either root part or center of mass will have their bounding boxes dislocate faster as time passes. I am not sure about this one, but docking ports closer to center of the vessel did not give me any problems but ports at far points did.
3. Also not sure about this one, but it seems that the bigger the port the more likely the issue will occur, so Docking Port Sr. is more likely to glitch than regular port.

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I'm unclear on exactly what you're saying happens. Do you mean that the ports are unable to dock to one another? Or undock? Or does something else happen such as the ports moving around?

And does this happen in the SOI of any planet? (when it comes to coordinates, it really shouldn't matter if it's scaled up or not... unless you're talking about heliocentric space where the distances are really far apart in RSS at the more distant orbits. So I could see coordinate accuracy being an issue for the more distant planets)

 

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1 minute ago, Starwaster said:

I'm unclear on exactly what you're saying happens. Do you mean that the ports are unable to dock to one another? Or undock? Or does something else happen such as the ports moving around?

And does this happen in the SOI of any planet? (when it comes to coordinates, it really shouldn't matter if it's scaled up or not... unless you're talking about heliocentric space where the distances are really far apart in RSS at the more distant orbits. So I could see coordinate accuracy being an issue for the more distant planets)

 

This happens on attempt to dock in orbit of Earth at altitude of 800 km.

My statements are based on info I gathered when I was researching the issue I mentioned about the runway being uneven, which could be worked around by constantly reloading a save and eventually get a relatively smooth runway (sometimes I get a runway at  Kourou that has a minimal bump but this happens extremely rarely.) This was long time ago so I cannot reference.

Still, even if the coordinates are not heliocentric, but whatever body I'm orbiting (Earth in this case), double precision values are only good enough up to centimeter precision (I think half a centimiter to be exact, I did a GPS sim using Java for my final project for Numerical Analysis at university and double precision values were only good up to that point ). So if they system does constant recalculation of position  errors can pile up and eventually things will go out of place. 

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