Haven't played in a couple years : is hard-docking possible yet?

[SomeGuy123]

By hard docking, I mean "connect 2 spacecraft in orbit using a connection that acts exactly the same as if they started from the VAB as a single piece."

I always had trouble in my KSP campaigns, where i would get to the point where I had a large spacecraft, too big to launch as a single piece, and/or I wanted to be able to send a smaller spacecraft to land on stuff, collect kethane (or the new fuel resource I guess), and return to refuel the mother-ship.  

With limited parts and a desire not to cheat with quantum struts, I found that no docking connection was solid enough that there wouldn't be terrible feedback wobble that would make interplanetary burns unfeasible.  So I'd quit the game.  I am aware that extremely clever spacecraft designs that carefully manage center of mass and tightly couple things worked in the vanilla game at the time, but I wasn't interested in such designs as in real life you don't need them and often they required parts I hadn't unlocked yet.

Has this finally been fixed?  Or are there mods that finally offer true, Kraken-proof, hard connections?

Edited December 10, 2015 by SomeGuy123

[Terwin]

I was under the impression that 3 docking ports in parallel made a pretty secure connection.

is that inadequate?

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Well you can certainly use multiple docking ports to make a stronger connection? But, yeah...two large pieces connected by a single port will have significant wobble in my experience.

[Windspren]

KAS and KIS are your friends in this situation.

Have fun crashing lithobraking at high velocities!

[RocketSquid]

Near future construction adds the Grip-O-Tron, which is a 2.5 m docking port that has enormous strength and is very rigid. Also, You could use KAS struts, or use KIS to build it in orbit.

[fourfa]

Kerbal Attachment System offers this as a mod, but I agree - the ships that can't be solidly connected by three large ports in parallel are unplayable large anyway.

(oops, ninja'ed)

Edited December 10, 2015 by fourfa

[sardia]

KIS AND KAS mod is what you seek. I've built and rebuilt mother ships and landers over and over again. The mods let you attach pieces just like in the vab building. 

[Xavven]

A lot has changed in 2 years! One of the updates increased joint strength quite a bit, so I recommend you give it a try now and see how it goes. I did a Jool 5 run in version .90 which required a lot of orbital assembly of landers and transfer ships to a giant mothership, and I had it working just fine without having to use more than 1 docking port per vessel.

[Hobbes Novakoff]

I was under the impression that a 2.5 meter docking port exists, does it not? (If you're building a mothership with 3.75m parts, then you probably don't have any expectation that anything will work normally.)

[SomeGuy123]

9 minutes ago, Terwin said:

I was under the impression that 3 docking ports in parallel made a pretty secure connection.

is that inadequate?

Yes.  I tried this.  Maybe the pro pilots here don't have trouble but I just didn't have the patience for doing a 3 parallel dock.  

Reasons include : game has unrealistic wobble on spacecraft coming in for a dock, wobbling your docking port side around from feedback.  Game doesn't handle time warp physics the same as regular physics, so time warping to skip a slow and boring approach will often end up with you farther from your target than when you started.  Game lacks adequate automation tools and mechjeb has problem as it is tied to the faulty game.  

And when you approach for the 3 parallel dock, magical gigantic magnets suck 1 docking port first, and this tends to make the other 2 not want to connect.

KIS?

Edited December 10, 2015 by SomeGuy123

[Temstar]

How big are we talking here? As others have mentioned ever since docking was introduced long before Sr docking port came about people were already doing multi-port docking for heavy duty on orbit construction, here's an Eve mission using quads:

Alternatively to avoid the wobble you could also use tractor configuration for your mothership.

[Hobbes Novakoff]

5 minutes ago, SomeGuy123 said:

And when you approach for the 3 parallel dock, magical gigantic magnets suck 1 docking port first, and this tends to make the other 2 not want to connect.

Which would you prefer: Occasionally having those weird magnets get annoying when docking 3 ports at once, or every time you want to dock you have to line up within nanometers of the attitude and altitude of the docking port, otherwise it explodes a la Interstellar?

[inigma]

10 minutes ago, SomeGuy123 said:

Yes.  I tried this.  Maybe the pro pilots here don't have trouble but I just didn't have the patience for doing a 3 parallel dock.  

Reasons include : game has unrealistic wobble on spacecraft coming in for a dock, wobbling your docking port side around from feedback.  Game doesn't handle time warp physics the same as regular physics, so time warping to skip a slow and boring approach will often end up with you farther from your target than when you started.  Game lacks adequate automation tools and mechjeb has problem as it is tied to the faulty game.  

And when you approach for the 3 parallel dock, magical gigantic magnets suck 1 docking port first, and this tends to make the other 2 not want to connect.

KIS?

Kerbal Inventory System. Use with Kerbal Attachment System to EVA and strut your parts together in space. Orbital construction at its finest. Oh, and install mods from CKAN. Doing it manual is so early 2013.

Edited December 10, 2015 by inigma

[katateochi]

If it's been a couple years since you last played, that may have been before the addition of the large docking port (it's proper name has decoupled from my brain at this time). That docking port makes for very solid connections.  The original (medium) docking port makes a good connection for small/med payloads and you can always double (or even triple) it up, but if you're doing that the large docking port will probably be a better fit anyway (and less parts).  

Craft joints overall have been made less wobbly, it's no longer the Kerbal Strut Program, you don't have to lash everything together these days (I quite often launch things with 0 struts!!).  Less wobble in the craft makes for less forces applied to the docking connection, and I think the actual docking connections are stronger than they used to be.  I'd still not want to push a heavy payload joined with just a single small or medium port, but that's what the large port is for.

For really big payloads you may still need some reinforcement (which probably isn't totally unrealistic), or use multiple large docking ports (never actually seen anyone do that though).  I never considered Q-struts to be cheating, they're either a patch to fix a faulty game mechanic or just a time saver for the alternative which is attaching KAS struts while on EVA (fun for a few times, but gets tedious if you need to dock and undock often).

[Chaos_Klaus]

There is a 2.5m docking port. Also, there is Kerbal Joint Reinforcement. It prevents stupid wobble.

[SomeGuy123]

28 minutes ago, Hobbes Novakoff said:

Which would you prefer: Occasionally having those weird magnets get annoying when docking 3 ports at once, or every time you want to dock you have to line up within nanometers of the attitude and altitude of the docking port, otherwise it explodes a la Interstellar?

I would prefer a "target movement mirror" mode.  You approach a target.  You choose "target mirror".  Once you are close enough, your spacecraft control thrusters make tiny millisecond burns so you stay exactly at the same orientation in position relative to the other spacecraft, auto-correcting for phasing from orbital mechanics. 

This would drain your RCS fuel but in real life the dV corrections would be so tiny you could do this for months.  

You then can go into a docking mode where you can specific position changes.  The integral of acceleration is velocity, and the integral of velocity is positon.  So this would be a control scheme permitting you to control 2 integrations up.  You have a GUI that ways "you are 5 meters back, 2 meters up, 10 meters left" essentially, and you can say "move 10 meters right".  A tiny puff of gas, and you begin moving to the right, automatically at the end of the maneuver you come to a stop exactly 10 meters over.  

Same thing for angular differences.

I suspect, though I don't know this for certain, that the computer-assisted docking the Soyuz modules use does exactly this.  

You wouldn't need cheat magnets because one you align all 3 rotation axes and 2 of the translation axes, the only difference between your 2 docking ports is distance on a single axis.  Your spacecraft is continuing to burn a tiny trick of RCS to keep you here.  You then just do "5 meters forward" or whatever and boom, docked.

Edited December 11, 2015 by SomeGuy123

[problemecium]

^ You may want to have a look at Navball Docking Alignment Indicator

[The Yellow Dart]

I agree that this is a shortcoming in KSP, I posted a suggestion a while back for a part that would allow permanent joining in orbit, requiring a kerbal on EVA to join them together. Docking ports are for temporary attachments, not for permanent constructions.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/95228-orbital-construction-part-idea/

[JohnF]

5 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

Yes.  I tried this.  Maybe the pro pilots here don't have trouble but I just didn't have the patience for doing a 3 parallel dock.  

Reasons include : game has unrealistic wobble on spacecraft coming in for a dock, wobbling your docking port side around from feedback.  Game doesn't handle time warp physics the same as regular physics, so time warping to skip a slow and boring approach will often end up with you farther from your target than when you started.  Game lacks adequate automation tools and mechjeb has problem as it is tied to the faulty game.  

And when you approach for the 3 parallel dock, magical gigantic magnets suck 1 docking port first, and this tends to make the other 2 not want to connect.

KIS?

If you think the wobble in KSP is unrealistic, you should try in Realism Overhaul without superpowered reaction wheels to stabilize your craft. I bet you'd have less trouble if you tried to design a more balanced craft and used a reaction wheel or two. Lots of people consider docking to be the hard part of KSP, but with practice the multi-dock thing isn't bad. Also, here's the trick to large loads linked together with docking ports, the same semi-trucks use: pull, don't push. You can pull a noodle, you can't push it. Frankly one 2.5m port for each module and a pull-tractor style design is usually enough.

[Plusck]

6 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

Yes.  I tried this.  Maybe the pro pilots here don't have trouble but I just didn't have the patience for doing a 3 parallel dock.  

Reasons include : game has unrealistic wobble on spacecraft coming in for a dock, wobbling your docking port side around from feedback.  Game doesn't handle time warp physics the same as regular physics, so time warping to skip a slow and boring approach will often end up with you farther from your target than when you started.  Game lacks adequate automation tools and mechjeb has problem as it is tied to the faulty game.  

And when you approach for the 3 parallel dock, magical gigantic magnets suck 1 docking port first, and this tends to make the other 2 not want to connect.

KIS?

Lol. Priceless.

Of course, I'm sure you also hate the fact that time warping locks craft in position so they don't drift around while you're fumbling your way toward them. Or that RCS thrusters which are badly placed on a ship will leave SAS struggling to stop you from (realistically) spinning hopelessly out of control (I think "unrealistic wobbling" is the term for bad spacecraft design, no?).

[Hobbes Novakoff]

6 hours ago, katateochi said:

If it's been a couple years since you last played, that may have been before the addition of the large docking port (it's proper name has decoupled from my brain at this time).

I believe you are speaking of the Clamp-O-Tron Senior.

6 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

-sniiiiiiiiiip-

So, your solution to something that in your opinion makes the game less fun is to... take the entire mechanic out and replace it with Kerbal Spreadsheet Program?

[Overland]

I happen to like wobbly docking ports..the features exploited by many a driver and flyer of exotic craft..

 

While I do see the point.. We should get a stock omni directional ball socket joint in its place once docking ports are "fixed"

 

They got annoyingly rigid recently.. But I see how that benefits some people too

[SomeGuy123]

1 hour ago, Overland said:

I happen to like wobbly docking ports..the features exploited by many a driver and flyer of exotic craft..

How do you take advantage of the wobble?

[sieve]

8 hours ago, Temstar said:

How big are we talking here? As others have mentioned ever since docking was introduced long before Sr docking port came about people were already doing multi-port docking for heavy duty on orbit construction, here's an Eve mission using quads:

Alternatively to avoid the wobble you could also use tractor configuration for your mothership.

Are those conic white things that support the motors stock? I keep seeing them everywhere 60 hours of gameplay later I still can´t figure wich part it is lol

[monophonic]

1 hour ago, sieve said:

Are those conic white things that support the motors stock? I keep seeing them everywhere 60 hours of gameplay later I still can´t figure wich part it is lol

Tail connector A under aerodynamic parts. Very stock and in the basic plane parts tech node.