A small contribution to users of RemoteTech

[Sokar408]

So I spend a bit of time yesterday, hammering out a spreadsheet for quickly seeing what to do with satellites, when playing with RemoteTech

What it does:

• Calculates Geostationary Altitude for a given planet/moon (yes you can look this up, but I had the numbers, so I thought why not)
  

• When setting up a circular constellation of satellites, it'll tell you the ideal distance between them. So say you want 3 evenly spaced satellites at a 500,000 meter altitude circular orbit around Kerbin, it will let you know what the distance should be between each of the 3 satellites.
  

• Tell you at what altitude you should park your interplanetary satellites at, depending on the range and angle of the dishes you are using. So lets say you enter Kerbin to "From Planet" and Duna to "To Planet", and the Communotron 88-88. It will then tell you the ideal altitude for your Duna satellite. This is the altitude, at which the Duna Satellite will always be within the cone of a Communotron 88-88 around Kerbin. It will also tell you the max altitude. That is the altitude at which, the satellite around Duna will no longer, at any point, be in the cone of a Communotron 88-88 around Kerbin. You can then switch it around, and get the altitude for the satellite around kerbin, and thus have all the information needed to stay within the cones on both ends.
  

• And lastly it provides a range check, telling you how much of the orbital distances the dish will be in range. For for example if the check says 50%, then the dish will be in range, so long as distance to that planet, is only half the maximum distance between the planets. It'll return 0% if the dish range is below the minimum distance between the planets, and 100% if dish range is above maximum distance.
  

This is all done with drop-down menus, where you pick the planets, and the dishes, so no typing is necessary, beyond picking altitude and amount of satellites for the separation calculator. Green cells are the values you want, the red cells are the ones that will be filled out automatically, and the light gray ones, are cells you fill out yourself.

The housekeeping is atrocious, but it works. Not sure if anyone else will need or want it, but I learned a few things about excel while fiddling with this, so I thought I'd share it

Btw feel free to rip my math apart. Despite having checked all the values again and again, there is probably a mistake somewhere xD

Download:

https://mega.co.nz/#!zIZDTAgY!orkbxQvqu8enTzq8QmoKhL4EtWfZoNNhOfBv1UeT_3g

Picture:

Edited June 6, 2015 by Sokar408

[Jonboy]

As a spreadsheet addict, this looks awesome. Not using RemoteTech right now, but this will come in handy next time I do.

[sam.johnson841]

and then there is those like me who just lob 50 sats into random orbits and hope I maintain coverage