I think they pretty much are, though they might have a higher breaking tolerance. Not sure. I want them for their mystical part count reducing qualities. It's easier to make more secure docking assemblies with them over using a larger number of smaller ones. Meaning bigger ships built in orbit. Which means more landers, habs etc on a single ship without my system grinding to a halt. Thing is in vanilla there's no way to attach struts in orbit, you need KAS for that. So to avoid wobbly interplanetary ships you need to use multiple docking clamps between sections. So it's just a performance thing.FlowerChild wrote:
Hmmmm...what is it about the large docking ports that's making them so desirable? If there is a key aspect to them I'm missing, then it would really be helpful for me to know what it is so I can place them appropriately in the tech tree. Up until now, I had assumed they were "just another docking port", and never paid much attention to them.
To give you an example this is a ship I built ages ago using various mods. It had one lander for Duna, one for Ike and a rover for the Ike lander, plus one drop habitat and a drop vehicle garage with a buggy in it. It's about the limit of what my system can run without heavy slowdown. It was built in about 8 separate launches and used multiple docking clamps for the main sections as the bigger ones didn't exist at that point.