Parallel docking?

[exafro]

I'm a Kerbal noob, so forgive me if this has been answered. I did a quick search and didn't find what I was looking for. I've been messing around with docking in orbit, I can do simple nose to nose connections with basically no complications. But I was wondering if instead of doing that vertical style dock, is it feasible to dock multiple craft side by side using more than one port?

[NoMrBond]

My latest space station uses 3x hexway hubs w/docking ports side-by-side for docking, so yeah, absolutely doable. I did it for extra strength (3x ports) and so that part rotation (on docking) would be exactly where I wanted it. The catch is getting the ports exactly spaced for the docking to work (which is why I used 3x hubs, so that the layout was completely reproducible).

Occasionally when I lined up a docking strip then got to the mag-grapple, one of the ports wouldn't 'catch' and I'd end up with 2 mated couplers and 1 which didn't but when you have the docking magnets from 3x ports pulling together it didn't happen to often and I could always decouple, pull the section out with the tug and redock.

Side-on docking sounds like it will need to be done with RCS translation though

Edited June 17, 2013 by NoMrBond

[SDIR]

If you mean docking one craft to the side of another, then yes, just add docking ports radially. Just make sure to leave enough room for them. You can use use the linear docking ports for 1m vehicles that can't accomodate a 1m docking port.

[sumghai]

I experimented with parallel docking (i.e. two or more points of contact between vessels) via MechJeb the other night, as part of a series of test runs for constructing my space station.

Of the two "vessels" involved:

- One was a segment of Semni's THSS trusses, with two docking ports on the bottom face

- The other was a pair of FusTek Mk III space station nodes, connected lengthwise and also with two Clamp-o-tron docking ports attached radially and facing the same side

   1    2
===∨===∨=== truss

===∧===∧=== space station modules
   3    4

(Do excuse my lousy ASCII art)

I started by taking control of the truss (it had a probe part) and set docking port 2 to connect with docking port 4 on the modules. I then quickly switched flights to the modules and set port 3 to dock with port 1 on the truss. With both vessels running the Docking Guidance system simultaneously, they eventually wobbled their way towards each other via RCS and docked perfectly at both points.

[Tokay Gris]

But I was wondering if instead of doing that vertical style dock, is it feasible to dock multiple craft side by side using more than one port?

It is possible, although the distances between the ports has to be exact. In my eperience, you can't just "eyeball" it.

One way to do this is to take the exact same piece from one craft and copy it to another craft. That way the distances between the ports are exactly the same.

These are exactly the same... even the tiniest difference and it doesn't work anymore.