Docking port requirements? Or just a bug?

[cowbs]

Do docking ports have orientation requirements? I tried to dock a shielded clamp-o-tron to, I'd guess you call it the male-end of, a standard clamp-o-tron. I.e. the bottom side as shown in this picture is my outward facing port:

I got what looked to be the magnetic effect of the dock to kick in, but it would always push my station I was docking with away. So I tried using RCS to reduce the acceleration from the magnet and finally got it to stabilize, but it never considered itself logically docked.

Did I screw myself by not orienting my docking ports correctly on my station? Or is this a manifestation of the docking bug that requires a save file fix? I only seem to have one docking node in my quicksave, which is in state 'Acquire'. Checking it to 'ready' and 'docked' just resulted in my shielded clamp-o-tron being permanently locked close with no way for me to open it. Although both the ships I'm trying to dock with have multi-nodes with four docking ports on them, each.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Can't decide if scrubbing the station because of a design flaw or this just being a game bug is the worse case.

[Budabacon]

I think they are placed upside down on your station, from the picture of the docking port and the picture from the station thats what it seems.

1 trick i use to fix this is that the docking port itself has a yellow and black trim on it, if you can't see it when building then they are placed in the wrong orientation.

PS: theres no trim on your spacestation.

[blizzy78]

Did I screw myself by not orienting my docking ports correctly on my station?

Yes. The 5 unoccupied ports that can be seen in the picture are all facing inwards into the 6-way hubs.

[Tiron]

You'll note that when you open your shielded clamp-o-tron it looks exactly like the 'top' part of the port in that little picture. The docking system in KSP is 'genderless', the connection is held together with magical magnets of awesomeness, so both sides of a docking setup are the same (not the case IRL, as a general rule). The stuff sticking out the bottom clips into the part they're attached to, deliberately.

[NeMeSiS]

When they first came out i also that they had a male and female end. However, after running a bunch of carts on Kerbin into each other it turned out that you just have to rub two top ends (When you grab a new docking port, that top) together.

[cowbs]

Ahh damn. Looks like I may be editing the clamp-o-tron wiki in my near future to aid future kerbalnauts.

At least it shouldn't be hard to get a new version in orbit around Kerbin. Plus I feeling like I finally got a hand on the mechanics of orbital rendezvous.

Thanks again for the help guys!

[lammatt]

you put the ports inside-out