More ways to dock?

[Bilfr3d]

This isn't as much of a "I want this!!" thing, but I was just wondering what other people though about this. I've noticed that docking can be really hard with the lack of a good camera sometime, so I was wondering if anybody had ideas to share about this. One I thought of, was you can send a kerbal on EVA with a camera and attachment line on him. He flies out to the other ship you're trying to dock with, turns his camera on and stays there. You go back to the ship, press a button, and hey presto - a camera screen pops up showing what the kerbal can see. You could even send out several kerbals for different vantage points.

What do you all think about this idea?

[Tech Support]

you could use Lazor's docking camera mod, its very effective. link

for multiple camera angles, use this mod which lets you place cameras anywhere on your ship and see the view. link

Edited November 12, 2013 by Tech Support

[Bilfr3d]

I know there's mods, but I really want to stick with the vanilla, soooo......

[Tech Support]

ohhhhh, can't help you there

[Superfluous J]

Honestly, I think vanilla should have what the NavBall Docking Port Indicator mod has. It should also do what Enhanced NavBall does but that's a separate issue

All you need to know is where to aim to dock. All you generally need to look at to aim your ship everywhere else in the game is the NavBall. It just makes sense to put an indicator there.

[Bilfr3d]

ohhhhh, can't help you there

May I ask, how?

[Kasuha]

All the docking camera mods are proof people often need some assistance with docking.

My only complaint is that the vanilla game completely screws up if your docking port is placed on an "irregular" place because in such case navball indicators fall completely out of alignment and you're left to pure visual docking, swirling your camera in chasecam mode and doing minute corrections to make the ports align. But even that can be done with the right know-how and sufficient patience.

[Bilfr3d]

Patience sometimes slips past me, especially when you're going to dock, looks like you're right on the mark - buuuuttt, you go straight past, smash into the space station and it blows up...........

[Dun Kirk]

it'd be nice to have a laser pointer thingy, which shines a croshatch/target

that way you can see where your port is relative to the target. could be used for landing to. at present the lights seem weaker than previously.

[konokono]

Docking is a real pain without mods. If you insist on no mods, then your best bet is to make sure your docking ports line up with your control part and your thrust vector. Then, when the two ships are in range, use the navball to get them to face directly at each other, and then simply thrust forward with one until docked. This is how I did it until I started using the Lazor System, and now MechJeb as I'm lazy