Damien_The_Unbeliever

I was trying to build my space station earlier and one area I kept going wrong was trying to connect up some final docking pylons that I carried into orbit separately - there are some close in docking ports that (for safety) I disable some solar panels before using - so I was carrying some pylons up that would allow docking to occur further away from the station core. I was carrying three pylons up and (with some fiddling) I'd managed to fit them to a stack tri-adaptor - but with them all offset by different heights above it. So the plan was that I'd dock the furthest out first, fire off some decouplers, then dock the next highest, etc. The problem I had was during docking. Normally, when docking I select "control from here" from the port I'd like to use, and then select the port on the target vessel as my target, and so long as I got the navball indicators lined up (my velocity, centre of target), they'd at least hit. But what I was experiencing here was that the ports would slide past each other. I had to do the alignment by eyeball and it took a lot more effort (and didn't seem to match up with what the navball told me). So - is there some trick to performing off-axis docking I need to learn? Was my previous intuition that setting "control from here" and targeting a port on the other vessel, and keeping my velocity vector and the target aligned should at least cause a collision between those two parts incorrect? Is it in some way related to the COM not being aligned with the part? (No mods at the time, I've just installed FP) --- Similar situation recreated using a deliberately exaggerated vessel:

Yeah, I think that at least the root-part changing thing will allow me to take a sub-assembly and re-orient it to "expose" an alternative node for attachment. Say the sub-assembly currently exposes node n1 but I want it to expose node n2 instead: Start a vessel using some arbitrary part (r1) Attach the sub-assembly to r1 via node n1. Attach some other arbitrary part (r2) to node n2. Use the new feature - make r2 the root instead of r1. Delete r1. Detach the sub-assembly from r2 and put it back into the sub-assemblies area. But now I have to create variations of the sub-assembly for each node I might want to use for attachment. This is based on my understanding of the "re-root" feature.

I can't see this directly mentioned in the already suggested list. Would it be possible when saving a sub-assembly to be able to select more than one attachment node as an "external node" so that it shows up when adding the sub-assembly back in? I'd also like to be able to save an entire ship as a sub-assembly (here the line between sub-assemblies and saved ships blurs a bit, I guess). And finally I'd like to be able to identify a sub-assembly as valid as the first part when building a new ship. Basically, I want to be able to build a lander, play about with it a bit, then save it away whilst I build a suitable launcher for it. Once the launcher is built, I then want to pull the lander back in and mount it to the launcher appropriately. But I can't seem to make that workflow work how I want given the current tools.