Again, my entire point is that custom building a dock for every ship you have is harder than it has to be.Please enlighten me aa to why I'd need a bay twice as big as the ship to dock it if they rail dockers are on the wings.
So we are talking generic docking here.
If the docker in the bird of prey is in one of the wings, then it is at the outside edge of the ship. Since a generic dock doesn't know which wing the docker is going to be on, it has to have enough room to dock it either way.
If the docker was in the middle of the wings, much less room is required. If you have a default docker placement at the bottom middle of all of your ships, or at the same point on the sides of all of your ships, or wherever else, you can build a dock that can handle anything of size XYZ or smaller regardless of what shape it is.
Pick a universal placement for your docker, and build your dock around that placement. Now all of your ships can dock anywhere they want. When you build a new ship, you don't have to build a hanger just for it, it'll fit on any of your existing docks. We go from nothing but custom builds for everything to generic docks overnight.
We could have that right now, if we didn't mind having the dockers floating out by themselves for everyone to see.