Speed for grabber arm/ideas?

[mavric1298]

Any thoughts on how on earth to grab this part?!  I tried landing on it, but thats near impossible, I got ridiculously close and slid down the hill at about .5m/s and hit it dead on, and it seemed to almost want to grab it, then the part went shoooooooooting out to the bottom of the slope 

 

Edited July 7, 2016 by mavric1298

[Plusck]

I'm not sure what part you are trying to grab. Is it the Thud engine?

I'd say : just add capable RCS (place-anywhere ports would probably do fine) and landing gear to the basic design of grabbing ship you've shown here*. You land in the general vicinity, you throttle up while looking down and use IJKL to translate over the target, you drop down and you rinse and repeat until it connects.

Grabbing things on the surface is always a bit of a pain.

If you don't want to send a whole new ship there, then do alt-F5 then keep trying to stab the thing. You'll at least increase your hovering skills dramatically...

* it might be easier if the engines were set lower down, with landing gear on the outer fuel tanks.

[mavric1298]

yeah the thud didn't want to be grabbed, even thought I came down on it several times, it just "popped" out and went flying off.  I'm thinking of reverting, and sending the same ship back but with legs, hopping over to it, and retracting the legs to drop straight down on it.  I think the problem is I came in really soft - the grabber doesn't appear to have anything like the port magnetism, and lightly bumping with it did nothing.  Is there a specific velocity needed to engage it?

[bewing]

No, no particular velocity. The two vital things with the klaw are: angle and centerline. For a flat part, centerline doesn't matter. The angle of the klaw to the object needs to be 80 degrees or more. And (for curved objects) the klaw has to touch within maybe 10 percent of the centerline of the object. If a klawing attempt doesn't meet these criteria at the moment the klaw touches the object, then the klaw will bounce off.

So you have to come at objects nearly perpendicular to their surface. And on a rockomax fuel tank it's much easier to hit the centerline than it is for some little MK0 part.

And no, there is no magnetism on a klaw.

Edited July 8, 2016 by bewing