I have built countless hangers and when i fly my dropship in, click stay, and fly up into the dock it never stops moving. then i go fight and when i need to drop more troops i find the dropship blew up and killed everyone...
Any ideas?

Just use the rocket docking module. Dropships are extremely shock-sensitive, so much so that touching a wall or anything static will cause the engines to fail. They're also air-cooled so if it isn't moving enough the engines will catastrophically overheat and the whole thing blows up without warning.

Rockets were never designed with that fault since they can "land", and are just better to use with the docking things.

The docks have never really worked all that well for me either, I don't think they're quick finished. But there's a zombie defense mod that has a rocket dock that works well, if I recall correctly.

Those are just called "bullets".

Your dropships don't explode on you when they sit still too long? I've always experienced that problem.

If your dropships were damaged, even one bullet hole, then they could've bled out and died.

The docks work by making it so that the dropships never cease to move, thereby resetting the automatic self-destruct timer on all crafts.

If you build a really stable dropship and make it just float, it will blow up midair, regardless of human control.
The docks are a stupid fix for a stupid problem. But the rockets are better, and the crates docks are a good way to hold guys. Combined with a gravity gun it works pretty well.

Unfortunately, until dropships can stop moving without exploding, there won't be a proper dropship dock.

Rotate it and move it around veeery gently?

AKA Rock-a-bye dropship? Could be cool. Rotate it by one degree in the time span of ten seconds, then one degree in the other direction in ten seconds, ensovoort.

Yeah something like that.
Or just make Dan make the hardcoded scuttle toggleable.

The latter will happen eventually. Trust me when I say that a lot of testing went into the dropship docks - this was the most stable and safe form of docking I could get. Any less subtle movements lead to explosions. Feel free to try and find a technique that works better, though - if you can, maybe I can improve the script (with your permission, of course).

Moving the dropship in a notable "wave" motion would probably work AND look cool at the same time.

What if the dropship gibs into a large metal thing that isn't an ACDropship, so when it's docked ya have its contents memorized and then undock it it''ll essentially be the same dropship. It could just be an ACRocket that looks the same just with no functionality.

Solves that in the most complicated way possible. I dunno.

Oh, if a rocket does not autoscuttle then maybe we just need to implement the engines and hovering with Lua and redo the entire dropship class. Huh.
I have to go fix my battleship now.

The wave function isn't going to happen, because it's going to be terribly inaccurate. It's not going to look nearly as cool as you think it is, and the dropship will be just as unstable as it is now. Imagine the current version, except the point that the dropship is anchoring to moves constantly in a wave. Yeah.
Changing the dropship is also out of the question - not only is that hacky, but it'll remove any wounds and other damage. For a mod, maybe, but for vanilla content, that's too hacked together.
Data will implement something to stop auto-scuttle at some point, because it's an obvious issue. We'll just have to hold tight until then.