Dock Orbiters that are in diffrent orbits

[Tsevion]

Alrighty I've done it... Stock (with Kerbal Engineer for readouts)

I went and grabbed an E class asteroid, put it in a roughly circular orbit, then ran a multi-clawed beast into it at 120 m/s until it stuck... it took more than a few tries, but eventually I was successful

Score:

+120 (120 m/s)

+285 (95 m/s over 25 m/s, *3)

+10 (no KAS)

-10 (Parts exploded... many parts exploded)

+1342 (1362 tons total slamming together... a ~1200 ton asteroid with a ~150 ton tug, being hit by an ~8 ton clawbeast)

= 1747 pts

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I'm probably going to cut together a video of the footage, with a great explosion montage, but I'm notoriously slow at producing videos... so I figured I'd post an album now.

[JumpsterG]

I'm suddenly very glad I never unsubscribed from this thread. Awesome result, Tsevion! That is a high speed "docking" if ever there was one.

[bitslizer]

So I was testing out some high speed docking possibilties..... and came up with this proof of concept, basically my idea was that high speed docking/crashing typically result in BOOM, but that docking port are bouncy.... what happen if I stack multiple docking port together as a shock absorber?

http://youtu.be/t7ixlmdU9Cc

http://youtu.be/VW75EPsl2Pk

Note that these aren't "TRUE" dock... more like glitch docking.... the 2 crafts do end up stucked together/cannot be separated but remain 2 separate crafts. seems the first docking port would interpenetrate and get stuck in between the first and second docking port

True docking can be achieve more reliabily but the pursue craft closing speed must be under 10m/s and be accelerating as the target craft would "bounce" and the pursue craft need to catch up again until the bounce reduce enough for true docking to occur

http://youtu.be/2I6uxKFyVo4

Lastly.... if you fit the "FUNNEL" tight enough it can be used to negate the kinetic energy, but this require high precision on the approach, and the approach speed is relatively slow, in the example the speed was still greater than 5m/s though

http://youtu.be/MOp1ryVYBNs

Next i just need to see if I can figure out how to generate one elliptical and one circular orbit that both have about the same velocities where they intercept at the PE. I did managed to get the 2 orbits to intercept, unfortunately the closing velocities was upward of 250m/s and the results were alot of spectacular BOOM

Edited December 12, 2014 by bitslizer

[RuBisCO]

I've added a few photos, I've managed as high as 71 m/s, 40 ton total, no parts blowing up (although at that speed it was lucky).

I tried robotics flaps to make a pseudo-funnel (like your funnel bitslizer) testing different funnel angles and ways of clamping the ships together to prevent bounce out. I can manage consistently colliding and garbing each other (and eventually docking by fiddling with the flaps) at speeds of up to 60 m/s, by 70 m/s or above the ships clip past the flaps and stuff blows up. Too wide a funnel angle and the docking ports collide and fuse as you have seen, but too small a funnel diameter and more precision is needed to get a perfect head on collision.

I think with the improvements in the unity engine and coding by squad that 0.25 allows for absolutely insane collision speeds to be completely survivable and non-damaging with stock parts (aside for IR hinges) with just a little engineering. Clearly Tsevion has show that the asteroids need to be made destructable: their hardness is game breaking.

I really need to get some video making software and make a youtube video.

Edited December 15, 2014 by RuBisCO