Docking Clamps not quite grabbing....

[mellojoe]

Can you guys take a look at my lander/rover design and tell me what is wrong? I've got this lander that uses two arms to hold two mini rovers. I've deployed them on Minmus and the Mun. The idea is that they have little RCS jump jets in order to drive back under the lander and re-attach. Everything works perfectly, except the clamps won't actually clamp. They sort of hover and hold the rover an inch or two away from actually clamping. I've jiggled the rover, pushed it up into the clamp, turned it 180 degrees, etc, everything I can think of to wiggle the rover into position. But the clamps won't actually grab. You can see the magnet doing its thing and holding it in place. Even when I release all the RCS, the little rover just hovers being held by the docking magnets. But no clamp.

Here is the lander with two rovers attached:

Here is an up close shot of the docking port holding the rover but not actually clamping.

Can you see that tiny air gap between the docking ports? I can decouple them, drive them around, but when I go to re-attach, I get this hovering but no clamping.

???

[sanity]

theres probably something blocking the re-attachment, a collision mesh from another part too close to the docking clamp most likely (RCS tanks maybe, cant really see), you can often undock things built in the VAB that have conflicting meshes just fine but cannot reconnect because of the conflicting collision meshes, try moving some of the parts close to the port so they arent so close and see if that works

[ASnogarD]

Try switching to the mainship (save before trying this) , switch on SAS for a sec and then off, then back to the rover.

[DMagic]

Try raising the landing legs on the main ship (save it first). Sometimes this works to force together two crafts, and sometimes it just breaks things, but you never know.

[Xiphos]

Maybe you could try it with the Jr. Docking port? That one looks a little big for the rover maybe that is the issue.