Help! Robotic arm docking breaks my ship

[suchtorment]

Hi all,

I am relatively new to breaking ground so I could use some help. I have a ship (Left in the pictures), with a robotic arm and claw attached to dock with a mobile refinery (Right in the picture). When I arm and grapple the ship it works fine, I can transfer fuel and stuff. As soon as I disarm the claw it's like it "disarms" itself from the ship and the ship suddenly floats away. The ship becomes almost completely uncontrollable. trust and turning do nothing. I also can't go to the tracking station or switch ships because its moving. Would love some advice on what parts of this I'm doing wrong.

I hope I'm doing this right. I'm new to posting.

Cheers

 

 

[Vanamonde]

Hello and welcome to our forum.

I have not experienced the problem you describe but I have moved your question to the KSP1 support sub where I hope someone else might have helpful advice to offer. 

[suchtorment]

Thank you so much!

[Lisias]

Can you reproduce the problem?

If yes, reproduce it then quit KSP and find a file called KSP.log on the directory where your KSP executable is. Then publish it on Dropbox or something and post the link here.

With a hit of luck, we will find a exception somewhere that explains this problem,  and then we can try to do something about.

[suchtorment]

Hey Lisias, thanks for the tip. I actually ended up using an engineer to take the arm apart and put it back together on a building node instead of surface mounting and it seemed to fix the problem. Not sure why that worked but I'm happy.

 

Cheers

[Lisias]

9 minutes ago, suchtorment said:

Hey Lisias, thanks for the tip. I actually ended up using an engineer to take the arm apart and put it back together on a building node instead of surface mounting and it seemed to fix the problem. Not sure why that worked but I'm happy.

Humm… Nice information! You probably diagnosed something on KSP!  

Cheers!

[ColdJ]

Hello @Lisias and @suchtorment.

This and other similar glitches have existed in the Klaw module since it was first introduced. I tried to get an explanation 1 to 2 years ago but never could get anyone in the know to answer. It is the program Module itself, not the part that is to blame. I have seen grapples made by other modders have the same problems. One of the weirder ones is when it causes the part it has grabbed to stop being affected by gravity. When the part is let go it just floats slowly away and can't be grabbed again. I have had it happen to a one Kerbal cockpit and been able to have the Kerbal EVA and hang on to the side as it drifts away. Another one is when a wing gets grabbed and it detaches from the main craft.

This stuff seems to happen randomly, so you never know if it will happen the same next time.