RemoteTech + Root Mode

[DrPastah]

I'm using Remote Tech for 1.3.1, and I was recommended to turn on root mode where I then made the range multiplier 0.5 as was recommended in RemoteTech's documents. I sent a probe to Duna with a 90 Gm dish and had it set to be pointing at Kerbin. The satellites orbiting Kerbin are only 90 Mm. I was told the better dish should compensate for the weaker one. However, I have no connection with the duna probe and it's only 20 Gm away. Is it because Kerbin's satellites need to be the ones with the strong dish?

[Zhetaan]

@DrPastah:

No, there's no preference for which side of the link gets the stronger dish:  the range in root mode depends only on the antenna combination, not the order.  However, the solution is easy:  add stronger dishes at Kerbin.  You won't even need to re-do your current satellite constellation:  just have one new satellite in a large-radius polar orbit (this reduces the chance of occultation) that has a dish powerful enough for Duna and enough antennas to connect to your existing constellation.

As to the reason why you cannot connect, the range is not the average or arithmetic mean of the component antennas' ranges; it's the geometric mean.  The formula for it is √(r₁r₂), where the r values are the antenna ranges involved.  90 Mm x 90 Gm gives 8.1 x 10¹⁸, and the square root of that is 2.846 Gm.  There is also something called a clamping value, which says that an antenna is limited to a hard increase of 100x its base range for omnis and 1000x its base range for dishes, but we're not running up against that.  The idea there is that it keeps you from using a DP-10 to communicate from Eeloo just by linking it to a stupidly-overpowered dish at Kerbin.  This also means that you will never be able to connect a KR-7 (which, if I have it right, is what you're using at Kerbin) to anything more than 90 Gm away, because 90 Gm is 1000x the KR-7's range.  When linked to a sufficiently-powerful dish, they can reach Duna, but the dish you chose to use at Duna is not powerful enough.  You'd need something rated to 4.5 Tm or better to connect when Duna is 20 Gm away.

The issue is essentially that while Duna has powerful dishes orbiting it, the ones at Kerbin are so weak that they can't transmit a usable signal with enough strength for the Duna dishes to sort from the background noise.  In reality, more powerful antennas are perfectly capable of picking out the signal from weaker antennas.  For example, sensitive antenna technology is what allows us to continue communicating with the Voyager probes (at least, I'm fairly sure that no one's upgraded Voyagers' radios), but the simplified model used in RemoteTech does not allow for that because it doesn't simulate noise at all.  They're working on it for RemoteTech 2.0, but there's nothing like a release date on that yet.

Edited December 7, 2017 by Zhetaan

[Snark]

On 12/6/2017 at 6:00 PM, DrPastah said:

I'm using Remote Tech for 1.3.1

Just as a side note for future reference:  if you have a question about a specific mod, then usually your best place to ask questions about it would be in the thread for that mod.  That's where the experts / enthusiasts for that mod will tend to hang out, so that's usually where you're most likely to get help.