Attaching Shielded Clamp-o-tron to an unshielded one?

[davidpsummers]

I need to attach a Shielded Clamp-o-tron to an unshielded one.  (I need to land, drop something, close it, and take off again, from Eve.)  But the VAB won't seem to let me.

Any work-arounds?

[steuben]

In the VAB no. At least not using stock parts.But

But if you are willing to hack up a part there are a few solutions here.

 

[Fierce Wolf]

Without some hacking into part config, you can't.

[Linkageless]

The only half decent solution I came up with, without hacking the shielded clamp-o-tron, was to surface mount an octostrut to the parent part, to which you 'dock' the normal clamp-o-tron.  Then offset that octo to be in the centre of the opened up shielded clamp-o-tron.

With correct positioning it looks like they are docked (they aren't) and when you 'decouple node' they will likely re-dock immediately, at which time you can undock normally.

You're left with an octostrut in the middle of the shielded clamp-o-tron which is a bit ugly and the surface mount is possibly a drag problem.