I wonder if landing on one of the moons of Mars, Phobos or Deimos is not more realistic than on Mars itself

[Mitchz95]

On 1/9/2019 at 3:15 PM, DDE said:

However, it is politically unacceptable - and politics decide where the money goes in manned spaceflight. No Buck Rogers, no bucks - the public wants to go on Mars.

I think the public would absolutely accept a Phobos mission, so long as it was promoted as a prelude to landing on Mars.

And can you imagine the kinds of pictures the astronauts would send home? The surface of an asteroid, with a giant red planet dominating the sky above them... it would be a scene straight out of classic sci-fi.

[KerikBalm]

18 hours ago, DDE said:

No, it bluntly bases connection range on the weaker antenna involved

Which is not realistic. The New horizons probe's antenna isn't that strong... but we've got really really big antennas back home that enable communication

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it’s further combined with a limited cone angle, meaning that you also have to manually target a given relay constellation (or, if you’re too close, a given relay sat);

That's realistic for parabolic dishes

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Oh, and no soft occlusion whatsoever,

Not realistic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_duct

The stock system is actually pretty good with different vacuum occlusion and atmospheric occlusion modifiers. On vacuum bodies you have just this effect:

"Normally radio "ground waves" propagate along the surface as creeping waves. That is, they are only diffracted around the curvature of the earth. This is one reason that early long distance radio communication used long wavelengths."

Whereas with atmospheres, you get other effects like: "The best known exception is that HF (3–30 MHz.) waves are reflected by the ionosphere.

The reduced refractive index due to lower densities at the higher altitudes in the Earth's atmosphere bends the signals back toward the Earth. Signals in a higher refractive index layer, i.e., duct, tend to remain in that layer because of the reflection and refraction encountered at the boundary with a lower refractive index material. In some weather conditions, such as inversion layers, density changes so rapidly that waves are guided around the curvature of the earth at constant altitude."

Sure, the stock system is simple (and I change the values to be more stringent... 0.99 and 0.97), but IMO its better than acting as if there is no diffraction at all.

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plus a minimum requirement of 6 crew for a control centre,

Meh, don't see why you need 6, whereas in stock it may be 2 (or just 1 in some cases? I forget)

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and optional lightspeed lag.

Meh... realistic, but I don't think we have the other tools necessary to properly deal with it... we can't even set up multiple maneuver nodes and have the probe execute one and go to the next.

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P.S. And yes, surviving RT does make me look down on new stock comms.

Well, considering it doesn some things more realistically, I don't think that you should