Droids MOD

[Qigon]

Given that I like to play with TAC LS I tend to do most of my missions with probes. I'm getting started on ISRU (karbonite) so what I really miss for initial base building is some way of attaching vessels on the surface for resource transfer.

I love the possibilities opened by KAS and IR, but still didn't find a way to do that in an elegant way without EVA. My vision is a couple of vessels connected by kas pipes, maybe connected in a star, without having a kerbal ever running around. Think of a Mars mission for probes, before any human comes around asking for oxygen, food and a return trip. And electricity, that one is tough on TAC when on night side.

I'm discarding the claw because I tend to see it as an ugly unrealistic variation of docking ports, which tend to be cumbersome. You'd need wheels, alignment, and what not to make them work properly.

So far I couldn't find a way to do that with a robotic arm with IR. The best idea I could think of is having pairs of droids,pre connected with kas pipes on the VAB. They would start with maybe a pylon, have a docking port on the top, over an hydraulic cylinder that would raise and lower to allow them to be connected to another docking port on the bottom of vessels. They would run around in wheels and Daisy chain themselves through lateral docking ports.

And I just saw a monowheel on the forum that I'd love to have a try.

Maybe a space version could use rcs to fly around.

My main concerns building that is the part count. since my laptop can't handle 200+ parts that will severely limit my ability to have fun with it. A quick spec showed that a droid pair would take about 20 parts alone.

A side question, is there a way of keeping that functionality with a low part count? I failed to find an updated version of the welder tool. Would it be difficult to make a single part droid MOD with solar panels, wheels, etc? I'm a seasoned programmer but I really don't want to get into Mono right now.