SabertoothMosquito

@Deadweasel : Ok then. Hm this issue is important enough to make a sticky post warning everyone about multiple docking ports. @Kasuha : Struts are indeed an exception to the rule. I really have no idea how it's done. Only a memeber of dev team working on game physics would be able to fully and correctly answer this question.

Hmmmm... struts. This reminds me of quantum struts used to reinforce docking ports. Though i do avoid using non-stock parts or flight/docking/descent assistive plugins, for as long as i can (still stuck at Kerbin SOI, my free time is limited and i enjoy my slow pace of prepping for "next step"). If i ever get around to doing it, i may even try tweakable parameters to see what can be altered. I still did not go through the docs, i assume plugin will list all available properties of a part, this may include docking timeouts, triggers and forces for ports.

Hi ! I am new to the forums, but i was playing KSP for a while, thus i too stumbled upon the same problem. I got dual-port docking mastered, problem is that i want to make a (admitedly large) refuelling depot from 9 big orange tanks in 3x3 formation, each tank having 2 levels of 4-symmetry normal size ports. Unaware of this problem, i tried to attach a newly delivered tank by docking 4 ports at once in a L formation Below was my second docking configuration with 3-on-3, you can see 4 tug "drones" (and 1 large unmanned tug, currently unused). Unfortunately, instead of doing 4-port docking, this configuration meant 6-port docking instead Only two lower ports docked, rest of 4 ports were left undocked and were quite misaligned. I have theory about this : with whatever ports are close by, game engine will begin timed magnetic attraction (state = Acquire in savegame sfs file) and whatever ports are in their satisfactory positions, they will dock together and lock position. All other ports will soon time-out, left unconnected and misaligned. I wonder that until this issue is resolved by dev team, if there is a way to work around this by using a plugin that could have write-access to ports in-game. Reading in-game info about ports is possible, look at Docking Port Alignment Indicator . The plugin would access ports info and alter either the time-out value that game engine manages (best option) or try to alter port states between "Ready", "Acquire" and "Docked" for each docking iteration until all ports show are in docked state. This second idea is that ports will connect, some will fail, plugin then detects this failure, then tries again to undock them all with zero ejection force and retries. After each iteration, ports will align closer and closer until finally all ports are aligned and are in "Docked" state. Problem with this second approach is how to determine if all needed ports are indeed connected, because what if player creates a geometry that has one intentionally port slightly out of alignement ? The plugin might try indefinitely to connect all ports OR it could give up, failing on some predetermined timeout. BUT this could be bypassed if player would multi-select all ports (usual alt+rmb) and then clicks on plugin's GUI widget to begin multi-port docking procedure (umm maybe best idea yet ???).