[Spike88]

Originally Posted by Oberon

Dayum, the .18 list looks as impressive as the .17! This is a game that just continues to deliver! Been looking forward to docking for some time, my Kerblas III design will work a lot better if it can recover the Munar lander.

There are two mods out there that add docking to .17 if you're impatient. Although the game treats them as two separate vehicles still, you can do fuel transfers and crew transfers.

Originally Posted by Arclight

Gonna be great, really has picked up with the last patches. Rather bare-bones before.

I think it's because they hired NovaSilisko and C7. Both were modders who were hired on. C7 is the one responsible for the aircraft parts. Nova is responsible for all the new parts(except for a couple made by C7), and the planets.

Edit: A post by Harvester(lead Dev) on how docking multiple ports works:

Originally Posted by HarvesteR

It is perfectly possible to dock a hub-type assembly to your space station, to add more docking ports to it. I did that here a few days ago, and if I hadn't decoupled the control unit at the wrong time, I would have had a nice space station... instead of created a small ring of debris around Kerbin... oh well...

But piloting blunders aside, the game fully supports recursively docked vessels (as in, a vessel docked to another vessel, with other vessels docked to itself).

As was said before, docking merges vessels, so every time you dock to something, you're creating a single larger vessel, and the next vessel to dock to it will also merge into the superstructure. Think of docking as attaching parts in the editor. There's no limit to how many vessels you can chain together (well, the cost to simulate that large a vessel will eventually make it impractical, but that's a hardware limitation, not a game one).


And you can actually dock to two ports at a time if you want. If you mount three docking ports on a tricoupler facing a similar docking 'interface' on the other vessel, all three nodes will attach.

Internally, only the first node to attach will merge the vessels. The others will dock in same-vessel mode, where they just create a physics joint between the ports. If you detach the "primary" node, one of the others will become the new primary, until all are disconnected.

So if you had a big robotic arm with a docking port on either end, and several ports along your vessel, you could make it "walk" from port to port, like the one on the ISS does.


(robotic arm sold separately)

Cheers

The robotic arm bit is interesting. I may have to download the mod that adds robotic parts to the game(you move the joints with different key presses). Found here also is a video.