Docking Alignment on Navball

[KwirkyJ]

I would be unsurprised if this has been suggested before, but my cursory glance did not reveal it...

A feature that seems lacking is the inability to determine axial alignment of docking ports when attempting to rendezvous. While the ports and velocities can be well aligned by virtue of the indicators on the navball, orientation remains unknown. I would like to see this remedied in some fashion, be it a 'gunsight,' inverse-normal, etc. At present, users have to make do with the functionality found in the Lazor Docking Camera mod (subset), or comparable.

[TMS]

I usually look out the window to check orientation.

[Beeman]

I've found(in the three times I've docked things) that the big mamma jamma docking ports are really easy to dock with, even if your RCS is unbalanced and you have no idea what you're doing(like me >_> ).

The teeny, tiny docking thingeddies, however, kill my brain trying to dock. I'd love it if they had a wonky periscope type thing for early docking ports with more advanced docking ports(in career mode, i mean) have like fancy docking computers or cameras.

But yeah, being able to target a docking port and have a marker show up on the navball would be nice, too >_>

[Tw1]

What if I told you..

you already can. Click in docking ports to target them.

[Anton P. Nym]

What if I told you..

you already can. Click in docking ports to target them.

I don't think that's quite what he's asking for. That will show the direction to the correct docking port, but not whether you're perpendicular to the port so that the docking adaptors will engage. Right now the only way to check that is to use the free-view or chase camera, or be absolutely militant about preplanning docking port alignments.

This may go away if we get more (and more useful) IVA/first-person views, but for now it's a bit of a hassle.

-- Steve

Edited July 28, 2013 by Anton P. Nym
fixing busted grammar, clarifying

[Kimberly]

I still don't really get what the suggestion is. If you right-click on your docking port to "control from here", and you select the other ship's docking port as your target, then you can use the Navball to perfectly line up both ships' docking ports. The only thing you can't match with this method is rotation, which does not affect docking itself.

[Kimberly]

Why not just switch to the other craft and turn the docking port the right way?

[Yourself]

Why not just switch to the other craft and turn the docking port the right way?

If you're not in an equatorial orbit, there is no "right way". It may also be a huge pain to re-orient the target. Overall having an orientation indicator on the Navball is way simpler and way easier to deal with. The way I envision it is that there would be another indicator on the Navball that, if you were to point towards it, your docking port would be oriented properly for the target. This has the added bonus that if the orientation indicator and existing bearing indicator are lined up, then you're perfectly lined up to dock.

[innovine]

If you're not in an equatorial orbit, there is no "right way".

Could you elaborate on this a bit? Why is a non-equatorial orbit any different, doesn't it just tilt everything to the inclination?

I've been trying to avoid external views and use mostly IVA for approach and docking, and I think I'll get it eventually (I'm sticking to equatorial orbits at the moment tho). But I think that as long as the target port is pointing to the orbit normal, and you approach from there, oriented towards the orbit anti-normal, it's a matter of translating so you line up the pink target on your nose and then close the distance. I suspect you could calculate the rotation of the docking port by where you are in the orbit. Docking like this is perfectly achievable just looking at the current navball, and I guess with a bit of practice it's possible to do the approach this way too..). Doing all this in a non-equatorial orbit seems to my limited understanding to be the very same, just at an inclination (making the navball harder to read, but I don't see how any ambiguity would come into it, making it impossible). AFAIK there is always a 'right way', which is pointing to the orbit normal.

[innovine]

that there would be another indicator on the Navball that, if you were to point towards it, your docking port would be oriented properly for the target

The navball is already pretty crowded. Another indicator on it is not necessary, just a little marker on the edge, which moves around along the outside edge. When it's at the 12 o clock position you know your port at the target port are aligned. If it's at 5, you'll need to roll over 30 degrees.

[Yourself]

Could you elaborate on this a bit? Why is a non-equatorial orbit any different, doesn't it just tilt everything to the inclination?

No, it doesn't just tile anything. Typically when docking you point everything in the north-south direction, because that's orbit normal and anti-normal (so it doesn't change throughout your orbit, whereas the radial/anti-radial and prograde/retrograde directions rotate as you move through your orbit). The problem is, there's no clear indication on the navball of the normal direction except in equatorial orbits (and to a slightly more limited extent in polar orbits as well). In an equatorial orbit, pointing north along the horizon on the navball is orbit normal. If you're in an inclined orbit, there is no one reference spot on the navball for orbit normal, you kind of have to guess by watching very closely for when the prograde and retrograde markers switch sides (this can be tricky because they're mostly hidden by the edges of the navball).

For example, you can't simply aim 30 degrees east of north if you're in an orbit that's inclined 30 degrees from equatorial. There's exactly two spots in your orbit where orbit ±normal will be 30 degrees from north and that's at the ascending and descending nodes and at one node you'll be pointing east of north and the other will have you pointing west of north. In between those points your normal direction will swing through north or south. I mentioned polar orbits earlier and that's because they're a somewhat degenerate case here. Their reference direction flips from east to west and vice versa each time you cross a pole, so orientation is workable there, but it gets wonky at the poles.

I've been trying to avoid external views and use mostly IVA for approach and docking, and I think I'll get it eventually (I'm sticking to equatorial orbits at the moment tho). But I think that as long as the target port is pointing to the orbit normal, and you approach from there, oriented towards the orbit anti-normal, it's a matter of translating so you line up the pink target on your nose and then close the distance. I suspect you could calculate the rotation of the docking port by where you are in the orbit. Docking like this is perfectly achievable just looking at the current navball, and I guess with a bit of practice it's possible to do the approach this way too..). Doing all this in a non-equatorial orbit seems to my limited understanding to be the very same, just at an inclination (making the navball harder to read, but I don't see how any ambiguity would come into it, making it impossible). AFAIK there is always a 'right way', which is pointing to the orbit normal.

The problem I have with this is it makes things more difficult than it needs to be. For example, when I'm building a space station I usually launch up that 6-sided hub first. If I have to line my docking ports up with orbit normal (which as I pointed out above is not always trivial to find), then there's 3 different orientations I have to put the station in to attach the various pieces. Having to reorient all my docking spacecraft because the interface is lacking a basic feature isn't really that fun.

The navball is already pretty crowded. Another indicator on it is not necessary, just a little marker on the edge, which moves around along the outside edge. When it's at the 12 o clock position you know your port at the target port are aligned. If it's at 5, you'll need to roll over 30 degrees.

I disagree with it being too crowded since there's only 2 things on it when you're docking and the goal in this case would be getting them all lined up (which kind of reduces it to one "thing" on the navball when your alignment is good). And, the typical docking procedure would be to first line up the direction you're pointing with the orientation marker, so most of the time it's not something you really have to pay attention to. But putting that aside I'm reminded of previous suggestions to have the navball horizon align itself with the target docking port. I feel that's a bit confusing (and I would argue that it might even be an easy thing to miss), but it does avoid the "3 things" complaint.

The problem with using a marker on the edge is that it's only capable of displaying one rotational degree of freedom and, in order to dock, you need at minimum two rotational degrees of freedom to line up with the docking port axis; 3 would be nice so we could get the roll stuff lined up as well, but strictly speaking it's not necessary to do that to dock successfully (and it's also not what we're talking about). A marker at the edge would be fine for doing the roll orientation, but you don't need that to dock. You do need to line up with the docking axis, which is where the whole orbit normal thing comes from: it's a convenient axis that's invariant throughout the orbit, so rather than actually aligning the spacecraft with one another, we actually align them with some other axis.

That said, aligning things with orbit normal also requires that you be able to control the target vessel and, while that's usually the case, I think it's an unnecessary limitation. Maybe I want to go rescue a dead probe or something

[Kimberly]

Maybe I'm doing things very differently than you guys when docking. What I do is this:

Get a rendezvous. Target ship. Point towards it and burn to approach, then come to a standstill. Switch to the target, then turn so that the docking port is facing the approaching ship. Switch back to your original ship, line up your docking port with the target docking port, do a burn so you approach. Readjust carefully to correct for drift, and dock. You don't have to be concerned about lining the ports up relative to your orbit at all.

[razark]

Switch to the target, then turn so that the docking port is facing the approaching ship.

While it works, this part doesn't always work well when docking to a large, oddly shaped vessel. (Aside from the habit of some vessels to explode when switching vessels. Maybe that's been fixed, though.) I like the idea of having an alignment marker on the navball.

[boomerdog2000]

Agreed something similar to mechjeb's smart A.S.S. with +Par, -Par indicators just like retrograde and prograde would be nice.

[Pixel of Life]

Lazor Docking Cam helps a lot. A similar thing in the stock game would be nice though.

[allmhuran]

The navball is already pretty crowded. Another indicator on it is not necessary, just a little marker on the edge, which moves around along the outside edge. When it's at the 12 o clock position you know your port at the target port are aligned. If it's at 5, you'll need to roll over 30 degrees.

I don't think roll is the thing the OP is talking about, it's about skew. And I think the problem can be solved without really crowding up the nav ball with any more iconography. We can just extend the functionality of the existing navball icons slightly, by making the centre dot of the target reticle represent a position arbitrarily far behind the target docking point along the docking point normal, like so:

With this iconography, if you align the "ring" icons (target and velocity vector) and also align the "dot" icons (target rear normal and craft nose) then you will hit the target with the docking ports properly aligned. If you align all four icons then you will hit the docking port perfectly perpendicular.

Edited July 29, 2013 by allmhuran

[LoneRider]

Well, this might be useful, but personally i dont think i need it (have done over a dozent docks without any help like that). You can see when you are not in line with the direction of the docking port and use RCS to burn sideways to correct it by looking out of the window. If it was just a small dot like in your example, it would be ok, but not any bigger please.

hmm... might be a help, yes... hmm...

[allmhuran]

Well, this might be useful, but personally i dont think i need it (have done over a dozent docks without any help like that). You can see when you are not in line with the direction of the docking port and use RCS to burn sideways to correct it by looking out of the window. If it was just a small dot like in your example, it would be ok, but not any bigger please.

hmm... might be a help, yes... hmm...

You don't need it for small craft, since it's easy to make any necessary corrections to attitude at the last minute.

With big craft that take a long time to change attitude, or when attempting to connect multiple docking ports, things are a lot harder and being able to get properly lined up ahead of time is pretty important. The bigger you get, the more necessary it becomes.

It also becomes harder to simply *see* the docking ports properly once ships get really big. The ship on the right in the picture below has a really complex 8 point docking with two of the ports hidden away inside the structure of the ship to make the central spine look nicer. This was VERY HARD to dock without an alignment indicator.

[TMS]

I think, realistically, these kind of refinements will come in the form of a docking cam.

The dot on the navball idea isn't bad... but it may, ironically, make it more difficult for new players to use (too many things to master and understand). Might be good as a settings option.

[Tw1]

Though I've never really used docking mode, maybe this could be something that comes with that?

Come to think of it, not sure how that extra display you get in docking mode works. To the tutorial section!

[Anthlon]

I don't think roll is the thing the OP is talking about, it's about skew..

With this iconography, if you align the "ring" icons (target and velocity vector) and also align the "dot" icons (target rear normal and craft nose) then you will hit the target with the docking ports properly aligned. If you align all four icons then you will hit the docking port perfectly perpendicular.

This might solve the idea, which I do agree, maybe only if "docking port" is targeted, and than you will try to maneuver to have ring around dot and maintain suitable approach speed, and its done.

Yes! - you can look out from window/use external camera, but when we do have IVA pods, we can dock from IVA, why not, nothing leaved, just added option-to. This will not add anythin extra (new dot) to navball to make it even crowded.

Maybe for another discusion, navball could be with switchable symbols (the other ones..) including this at that point.

[filami]

Plus one for the indicator on the navball. Not so sure about the moving dot however, really nice idea but I am afraid that it will be hard to properly align the dot to the centre of the ring. Our eyes could misjudge centrality and that would be enough to miss the docking port. I would suggest the Purple ring to have a small dot in the centre while Par+ indicator would be a bigger purple dot. I think that would help better.

[allmhuran]

Certainly, it's more just the idea that matters. The actual navball icons right now are quite large and cartoonish, fits the style of the game very well but they do take up somewhat more space than they need to and their thickness is what makes things look a bit cluttered. I also play DCS (flight sim) and the amount of information and iconography packed into an equally small space is much much higher. So it's not the overall amount of information that is the problem, it's just that the icons need to be cleaned up slightly, made a bit sharper, so you can more easily use them when they are overlayed.

By the way, if by "miss centrality" you mean it would be difficult to judge where the centre of the purple circle is... that's no different from now. Right now you have to align your nose (a dot) in the velocity vector (a ring) as part of the process. That's partly why I suggested aligning the rings (velocity vector to target ring)... easy to tell when those are over each other, and similarly with the two dots.

Edited July 29, 2013 by allmhuran

[filami]

Actually, you got a good point there. Lets hope devs will read this and try it out, that would be great =)

[KwirkyJ]

I feel bad, reposting the image (below), but it captures the idea I meant to convey very well. This is exactly the concept, and I apologize for any confusion. Yes, one can point your heading directly towards the other docking node, but that is no guarantee of the two being parallel (coaxial, etc, etc), and this is an issue that comes into play very much when maneuvering bulky craft -- even in general, a trivial craft needs to be fairly well aligned to dock easily. While the quoted implementation might not be ideal, it's a step in the right direction, I think. The level of attention this thread has received is... unexpectedly great.

I don't think roll is the thing the OP is talking about, it's about skew. And I think the problem can be solved without really crowding up the nav ball with any more iconography. We can just extend the functionality of the existing navball icons slightly, by making the centre dot of the target reticle represent a position arbitrarily far behind the target docking point along the docking point normal, like so:

With this iconography, if you align the "ring" icons (target and velocity vector) and also align the "dot" icons (target rear normal and craft nose) then you will hit the target with the docking ports properly aligned. If you align all four icons then you will hit the docking port perfectly perpendicular.