Commnet Configurations

[Messernacht]

Greetings all,

 

So I've finally moved on to using Comnet rather than RemoteTech, and am enjoying it a fair bit. However, I've just got a brief query in regards to Signal Strength.

 

With RemoteTech, I always got by with a constellation around Kerbin of four satellites in a square shape, which all talked to each other and to Base. Being a traditionalist, I went for the same setup in Comnet to ensure a constant signal (not wanting to use the multiple base stations), but only got a 5% signal strength once the signal bounces from the Tracking Station off of Sat #1 to Sat #2. Both had multiple relay and direct antennas mounted.

 

Is this something I'm not doing right? Are my little extending Direct Antenaes really fully upgraded? I just feel there should be stronger signal strengths than this, and want to get that sorted before I send probes of to Jool that will just end up calling into the dark silence like that 'Is there anyone alive out there?' guy in 'Titanic'.

 

Mars aeternum/So say we all/cheers,

 

 

[KerikBalm]

List the names of the antennas you were using in your comnet... its hard to tell you if you're doing something wrong (I'm sure you are), without more detail on what you are doing.

First, direct antennas are only useful on the probe/endpoint of the connection. They don't do anything for relays. They also don't work if you haven't extended them.

Put this on your probe, extend it, and its good out to Jool:

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Communotron_88-88

Put this on your relays:

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/RA-100_Relay_Antenna

If playing OPM, and with OPM's range buff disabled, you can combine multiple relays:

This:

paired with this:

Reaches out to plock, except at plock Apoapsis, so for that I have a ground station:

Pics of your relays... Plock is 20x farther than Jool, you dont need setups like this just in kerbin SOI

[Snark]

Moving to Gameplay Questions.

2 hours ago, Messernacht said:

Is this something I'm not doing right?

Depends.  Would have to know, 1. what kind of antennas you're using, and 2. how far apart they are.

 

[Streetwind]

9 hours ago, Messernacht said:

Is this something I'm not doing right? Are my little extending Direct Antenaes really fully upgraded? I just feel there should be stronger signal strengths than this, and want to get that sorted before I send probes of to Jool that will just end up calling into the dark silence like that 'Is there anyone alive out there?' guy in 'Titanic'.

A common mistake that I've seen newcomers make with the commnet system is actually related to a feature that's supposed to help newcomers with the commnet system. But apparently it gets misunderstood quite a lot.

When rightclicked in the editor, each antenna shows its antenna power value, and then a breakdown of three additional precalculated numbers: the actual range this antenna has when talking to a level 1, level 2 or level 3 tracking station. This is supposed to be a helpful shortcut for the player, so they don't have to do the math themselves when they want to know how far from Kerbin they can send this antenna.

But what actually happens is that players completely ignore the antenna power stat and think the three tracking station numbers are actually the antenna's own range. And these numbers are larger than the antenna's own power, so the player thinks that the antenna can go a lot further than it actually can when talking from one satellite to another. Additionally, players get this idea that the antenna itself actually gets upgraded when they upgrade the tracking station. But this is not the case at all - only the tracking station itself gets a boost.

 

Since you're coming from RemoteTech, it might be worth pointing out that stock KSP uses a different, more realistic approach to deep-space communications. Ground stations are so many orders of magnitude more powerful than spacecraft antennas that it's almost never worth to bounce the signal via a relay when you are already in space. A direct link to Kerbin is almost always going to overpower any inter-satellite communication, much like a direct link to NASA's DSN overpowers everything else IRL. You will still use relays to enable communication for landers, bases, planes and rovers, as well as for spacecraft that lose line of sight with Kerbin; but in all other cases, you're better off just making like E.T. and phoning home directly.

If you prefer the RemoteTech style of using commsats, you probably want to make the ground stations a bit less powerful (either via the difficulty options, or for more fine control, via Custom Barn Kit), and the spacecraft antennas a bit more powerful (via Module Manager patches). There are also mods that add additional antennas, which you can use to fill any range gaps you may have.

[Messernacht]

7 hours ago, Snark said:

Moving to Gameplay Questions.

Depends.  Would have to know, 1. what kind of antennas you're using, and 2. how far apart they are.

 

That'd be a triad of Communotron 16's for the receiving and a trio of HG-5s for the relaying. Three sats at equidistant (or as close as I can manage) points at a 5K Km orbit

10 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

List the names of the antennas you were using in your comnet... its hard to tell you if you're doing something wrong (I'm sure you are), without more detail on what you are doing.

First, direct antennas are only useful on the probe/endpoint of the connection. They don't do anything for relays. They also don't work if you haven't extended them.

Put this on your probe, extend it, and its good out to Jool:

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Communotron_88-88

Put this on your relays:

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/RA-100_Relay_Antenna

If playing OPM, and with OPM's range buff disabled, you can combine multiple relays:

This:

paired with this:

Reaches out to plock, except at plock Apoapsis, so for that I have a ground station:

Pics of your relays... Plock is 20x farther than Jool, you dont need setups like this just in kerbin SOI

Oh yeah, I'm doing things WAY wrong. My setup is a triad of Communotron 16's for the receiving and a trio of HG-5s for the relaying on each sat. I was of the mindset that the relay dish transmitted to the deployed antenna. Obviously I was way too sober when I came up with that plan.

 

1 hour ago, Streetwind said:

A common mistake that I've seen newcomers make with the commnet system is actually related to a feature that's supposed to help newcomers with the commnet system. But apparently it gets misunderstood quite a lot.

When rightclicked in the editor, each antenna shows its antenna power value, and then a breakdown of three additional precalculated numbers: the actual range this antenna has when talking to a level 1, level 2 or level 3 tracking station. This is supposed to be a helpful shortcut for the player, so they don't have to do the math themselves when they want to know how far from Kerbin they can send this antenna.

But what actually happens is that players completely ignore the antenna power stat and think the three tracking station numbers are actually the antenna's own range. And these numbers are larger than the antenna's own power, so the player thinks that the antenna can go a lot further than it actually can when talking from one satellite to another. Additionally, players get this idea that the antenna itself actually gets upgraded when they upgrade the tracking station. But this is not the case at all - only the tracking station itself gets a boost.

 

Since you're coming from RemoteTech, it might be worth pointing out that stock KSP uses a different, more realistic approach to deep-space communications. Ground stations are so many orders of magnitude more powerful than spacecraft antennas that it's almost never worth to bounce the signal via a relay when you are already in space. A direct link to Kerbin is almost always going to overpower any inter-satellite communication, much like a direct link to NASA's DSN overpowers everything else IRL. You will still use relays to enable communication for landers, bases, planes and rovers, as well as for spacecraft that lose line of sight with Kerbin; but in all other cases, you're better off just making like E.T. and phoning home directly.

If you prefer the RemoteTech style of using commsats, you probably want to make the ground stations a bit less powerful (either via the difficulty options, or for more fine control, via Custom Barn Kit), and the spacecraft antennas a bit more powerful (via Module Manager patches). There are also mods that add additional antennas, which you can use to fill any range gaps you may have.

I'm picking up a pattern here that I might not know what I'm doing, but all of these explanations has clearly shown that I've put on my Stimpy hat. I'm going to take off the direct antenna's and just use the relay dishes, see if that pushes the strength up. Most of my issues seem to be still being locked in the Remotetech mindset.

[KerikBalm]

Ok, well, the examples I have shown you are very extreme.

First you should know about diminishing returns. The default combinability exponent is 0.75. So 3 HG-5 have a power of 3^0.75 = 2.2795x the signal strength of a single HG-5. That gets you sqrt (2.2795) = 1.51 x as much range... not a whole lot.

Lets look at the antenna powers:

HG-5: 500k       RA-2: 2,000,000k         RA-15:     15,000,000k   RA-100:  100,000,000k   Just stepping up to the RA-2 gets you 2,000,000k strength compared to the 500*2.28 = 1,140k relay strength of your HG-5s. That is 1,754x more powerful, allowing you to connect at ~42x the range.

The HG-5 is really only good for surface to orbit relays. the RA-2 is good for relaying withing kerbin SOI, the RA-15 is great for relaying in kerbin SOI, or ok for nearby planets, or across wide SOIs like Jool. The RA-100 is what you want for interplanetary relays. Of course, the antenna on the end also matters, and you can put smaller ones on your probes if you have giant relays.

Here's a spreadsheet I made a while back:

		Mun Orbit Radii
antenna	Com16	HG5	RA-2	RA-15	Lvl3 DSN
								Mun radii
Com16	0.0416	0.1317	2.6352	7.2168	29.4627		Minmus	3.9166
HG-5	0.1317	0.4166	8.3333	22.8217	93.1694		Kerbin SOI	7.0133
RA-2	2.6352	8.3333	166.6666	456.4354	1863.3899
RA-15	7.2168	22.8217	456.4354	1250	5103.1036
RA-100	18.6338	58.9255	1178.5113	3227.4861	13176.1569

 

As you can see, the pairing of the comm 16 and the HG-5 does not reach very far. A single com=16 and an RA-2 will get to 2.6x the distance from Kerbin to Mun, but that won't reach minmus. If you were to use multiple comm16's or multiple RA-2s, then an RA-2 to comm 16 connection would work. You'll want at least RA-2s for your commnet around kerbin if you'll be using it to connect while visiting Mun and Minmus. Since you've got no ground stations, to connect to Mun without RA-2s, you'd need a relay at one end with 4 HG-5s and a relay at the other end with 3 HG-5s (or a ton of Comm-16s, which I think have a combinability exponent of 1.0 instead of 0.75, but a very weak base strength).

An RA-2 in orbit around kerbin will easily reach an HG-5 in orbit around minmus, as an HG-5 to RA-2 connection is good to 8 mun radii. A good setup is a square/triangle of RA-2s or RA-15s around kerbin, and HG-5s in orbit around Mun/minmus to relay to the dark far side. However, what I prefer to do is to do a big square or triangle of RA-15's outside the orbit of Minmus, so that all destinations are inside the "constellation", and I don't need relays specific for Mun and Minmus. You can bump them up to RA-100s if you've got the ground stations on kerbin switched off, and then just 3 sats will handle all your interplanetary connections (in stock), as well as communication around Mun/Minmus

*edit*, and for interplanetary connections, expressed in "KU", aka the distance from Kerbin to its sun. Jool orbits at roughly 5 KU for reference, while Plock in OPM orbits at something like 30-50 KU

		KU
antenna		HG5	RA-2	RA-15	Lvl 3 DSN
HG-5		0.00036	0.007	0.020	0.082
RA-2		0.007	0.147	0.403	1.644
RA-15		0.020	0.403	1.103	4.503
RA-100		0.052	1.040	2.848	11.626

Edited April 11, 2017 by KerikBalm
Added more info

[Snark]

6 hours ago, Messernacht said:

a trio of HG-5s for the relaying. Three sats at equidistant (or as close as I can manage) points at a 5K Km orbit

Ah.  Well, there's your problem, right there.  You're operating at the extreme outer limit of the antennas' range, so of course they have a low signal strength.

Three satellites in an equilateral triangle, at an altitude of 5000 km (i.e. 5600 km radius), will be 9660 km apart from each other.

If I'm reading you correctly, you have three HG-5's on each satellite, yes?

The power of an HG-5 is 5000 km.  That is, if each satellite had one HG-5 on it, they'd have to be within 5000 km to communicate at all, and your constellation simply wouldn't work.  But you've got three of them, and they have KSP's default combinability exponent of 0.75, so 5000 * 3^0.75 = 11,400 km.

So.  You've got satellites that can talk to each other at an absolute maximum range of 11,400 km, and you have them 9660 km apart from each other, i.e. at about 85% of their max range.  So, no wonder that you're getting weak signal strength. 

Solutions available to you:

• Move your satellites to a much lower orbit.
• Have a lot more satellites.
• Wait until you unlock the RA-2; it's literally 400 times more powerful than the HG-5, and will easily solve all connectivity within Kerbin's SoI.

You'll note that nowhere in the above calculations do I mention the signal strength talking to KSC itself.  That's because KSC is so much more powerful than any of the antennas available in the early game-- by a truly ludicrous margin-- that any time one of your ships happens to have KSC in line of sight, your relay constellation becomes pretty much irrelevant, and you can talk at very long distances.  For example, even the level-1 tracking station can talk to a lone HG-5 at a distance of 100,000 km (i.e. bigger than Kerbin's SoI).

[Messernacht]

Excellent. I'm going to go ahead and keep that table. I'm seeing that my old RemoteTech way of thinking about this is not really cutting it.

 

Time to change mental gears a bit, it seems.

5 hours ago, Snark said:

Ah.  Well, there's your problem, right there.  You're operating at the extreme outer limit of the antennas' range, so of course they have a low signal strength.

Three satellites in an equilateral triangle, at an altitude of 5000 km (i.e. 5600 km radius), will be 9660 km apart from each other.

If I'm reading you correctly, you have three HG-5's on each satellite, yes?

The power of an HG-5 is 5000 km.  That is, if each satellite had one HG-5 on it, they'd have to be within 5000 km to communicate at all, and your constellation simply wouldn't work.  But you've got three of them, and they have KSP's default combinability exponent of 0.75, so 5000 * 3^0.75 = 11,400 km.

So.  You've got satellites that can talk to each other at an absolute maximum range of 11,400 km, and you have them 9660 km apart from each other, i.e. at about 85% of their max range.  So, no wonder that you're getting weak signal strength. 

Solutions available to you:

• Move your satellites to a much lower orbit.
• Have a lot more satellites.
• Wait until you unlock the RA-2; it's literally 400 times more powerful than the HG-5, and will easily solve all connectivity within Kerbin's SoI.

You'll note that nowhere in the above calculations do I mention the signal strength talking to KSC itself.  That's because KSC is so much more powerful than any of the antennas available in the early game-- by a truly ludicrous margin-- that any time one of your ships happens to have KSC in line of sight, your relay constellation becomes pretty much irrelevant, and you can talk at very long distances.  For example, even the level-1 tracking station can talk to a lone HG-5 at a distance of 100,000 km (i.e. bigger than Kerbin's SoI).

OK, so we now have full and complete confirmation that I've not thought this one through. Yup, I had the smaller dishes on, which I've now replaced. I'm also getting my head back around the understanding that the KSC has truly face-melting power, and will take that into account for my probe heading to Eeloo.

 

Well, not heading to Eeloo yet. Taking it back into the shed for a rework now.

Right oh. So we've learned that I've placed way too much confidence in the power of some dishes, that my maths has a few issues to iron out, and that the old RemoteTech way of solving issues just won't fully cut it. I've redesigned my relay sats now, and have clear cover all the way out to Minmus for the moment, which will do in these initial stages. Then it's on to the larger and gruntier sats, and we'll figure the rest out from there.

 

Many thanks all. The help's been greatly appreciated.

[Snark]

59 minutes ago, Messernacht said:

I'm also getting my head back around the understanding that the KSC has truly face-melting power, and will take that into account for my probe heading to Eeloo.

Just to put things in perspective, here's how the tracking station stacks up:

• Level 1:  2G power, equivalent to the RA-2.
• Level 2:  50G power, i.e. midway in power between the RA-15 and the RA-100.
• Level 3:  250G power, i.e. 2.5 times more powerful than the biggest stock antenna

If you're ever playing with a modded solar system that's a lot bigger and 250G isn't enough to reach the outer fringes (e.g. OPM, or New Horizons, or Galileo's Planet Pack), and you need a whoppin' huge antenna, you may want to consider this:

[KerikBalm]

Quote

If you're ever playing with a modded solar system that's a lot bigger and 250G isn't enough to reach the outer fringes (e.g. OPM, or New Horizons, or Galileo's Planet Pack),

I just want to point out that OPM includes a default range (or was it power?) buff of 4x. I disabled that because I wanted the challenge of building huge relays... but standard OPm doesn't present too many relay problems because of its included buff.

Personally, I thought it was fun to plan to set up a relay around neidon consisting of one "interplanetary" relay of 3x RA-100s, and then 2 additional "local" RA-100 relays to set up a trianlge around Neidon to cover communication with the moons. Of course, occasionally the one main relay gets occluded, and the entirenetwork goes down temporarily, but I'd take that over 3 large relays instead of 1 large relay and 2 additional RA-100s (RA-15's would probably work for that SOI size too, but I didn't want to risk it)

Of course... that was assuming that at the other end was one of those massive relays that I already showed on this thread. Occlusion from one of those is quite rare, as I had one of 20x RA-100s at "pseudo L4" (60 degree's ahead of Kerbin, co-orbital), and a 25 RA-100 on kerbin (I had planned to putting another one at the opposite side of kerbin, but never got around to it)

With those massive relays in place, I was good with a single RA-100 out to Urlum

[Messernacht]

23 hours ago, Snark said:

Just to put things in perspective, here's how the tracking station stacks up:

• Level 1:  2G power, equivalent to the RA-2.
• Level 2:  50G power, i.e. midway in power between the RA-15 and the RA-100.
• Level 3:  250G power, i.e. 2.5 times more powerful than the biggest stock antenna

If you're ever playing with a modded solar system that's a lot bigger and 250G isn't enough to reach the outer fringes (e.g. OPM, or New Horizons, or Galileo's Planet Pack), and you need a whoppin' huge antenna, you may want to consider this:

Have just downloaded this antennae and GPP. I get the feeling I'm going to be spending my lunch break sketching a whole bunch more relay designs...

[Spricigo]

On 11/04/2017 at 6:21 PM, Snark said:

If you're ever playing with a modded solar system that's a lot bigger and 250G isn't enough to reach the outer fringes (e.g. OPM, or New Horizons, or Galileo's Planet Pack),

 

12 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

I just want to point out that OPM includes a default range (or was it power?) buff of 4x. I disabled that because I wanted the challenge of building huge relays...

 

Quote

JX2Antenna currently includes compatibility patches for the following mods:

• Outer Planets: Undoes the 4x antenna power and 8x tracking-station power boosts that "vanilla" OPM adds to the stock

Holly quoting, Batman!