Detachable fuel/power lines.

[THX1138]

In reference to this thread, I would also like hoses that could be connected between vessels, maybe by engineers. Maybe they'd use small docking ports or maybe all docking ports. Sometimes docking alignment while landed is impractical, especially given that there are no in-game tools to ensure that ports are aligned from one build to the next.

[That thread might be one and a half years old but the need for these hoses spans much longer than that into the past as well as the future. Boy do I dislike people going on about old threads.]

Edited April 21, 2015 by sal_vager

[klgraham1013]

This thread reminded me that the stock way to refuel a landed ship will be the claw. I hope KAS updates quickly for 1.0.

[Brotoro]

Do we know that Squad is NOT giving us a sane method of surface refueling to go with the new resource mining?

I've been a long-time advocate of getting some kind of refueling hose into stock KSP, because I do a lot of surface refueling. But I don't think I'd ask for a draggy, dangly, snaky hose animation for when kerbals are connecting hoses. I think it would be sufficient (and not overly processor intensive) to implement a system where a kerbal on EVA touches point A on one ship and then touches point B on the other ship, and then a hose line is calculated between the two points (dropping down to the surface, snaking along with a bit of a wiggle, and connecting up to the other ship). The hose would be a static item once dropped into place.

Barring that, a straight-line ray hose would be OK, even though it looks silly.

And barring any of that, I'd like the ability to right-click on tanks to refuel them with any ships that are closer than some maximum-allowed distance apart (and we can just imagine the hose connecting the ships, just like we imagine all of the lines that connect all our tanks and RCS tanks and Xenon tanks and docking ports on our current ships).

Edited April 21, 2015 by Brotoro

[sal_vager]

Well, we have KAS, I guess detachable fuel lines was never on Squads drawing board but thankfully KSP has a strong modding community that'll keep scratching those itches well into 1.1 and beyond

Oh and I split this off, best practice is to start a new thread, linking back to the old one, it prevents necroposting and necromoaning that way.

[tntristan12]

Some sort of functionality like this would be great! I can't help but think back to the time (see my blog) when an entire mission was ended on the surface of the Mun because the fuel lines in my ascent stage had glitches into not being connected anymore... Oh what I would have given to be able to just detach and reattach those fuel lines a la KAS.

[nholzric]

Could this be the surprise feature? Something that could be coded in a short amount of time (reusing/modifying existing fuel line code). It's something people have been wanting for a while. And it has become more important with the introducing of resource mining.