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Communications "Network"


NewtSoup

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I have recently started playing again and I was considering undertaking one of the projects that I had started previously.

This was in fact a communications network.  In my head I had powerful satellites in orbit around Kerbin all with LOS to each other so that the KSC is always contactable.  Then I was going to have similar satellites around planets and possibly a few in solar orbits to bridge gaps.

However reading up on the Wiki it seems that the game will only use a single hop.   

My questions are then:

Is there any point in trying to build a communications network to cover the entire system?
Is there any mod that will make such a huge task worthwhile?

How do people get probes to places like Eloo?

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9 minutes ago, NewtSoup said:

However reading up on the Wiki it seems that the game will only use a single hop.   

It doesn't. https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/CommNet#Connections_through_relays The relay will just relay your signal to another relay, and so on all the way back to Kerbin.

Edited by OrdinaryKerman
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I did read that.

The section finishes with:

"The game always favors a direct connection to Kerbin even if a more powerful relay is nearby."

Meaning that if I have a mothership in orbit of say Duna and that has a 4% direct connection but I have my solar-orbit RA2 arrays midway between Duna and Kerbin orbits the game will still use the 4% over the stronger relay.    This is why I'm wondering if my vision of a fully connected Kerbol System is a waste of time.


Of course if I were to destroy my hypothetical mothership and the ground vehicle / station could contact the RA2 network then the game would favour that as the ONLY connection. 
I suppose I could just make sure my spacecraft are never capable of a direct connection to Kerbin and then that would force them to use the satellite network.

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Key word being “favours”. 
 

Also, and someone else will need to confirm this, but you’re missing relay strength. For example, 4% connection direct to KSC is still stronger than relays because of how unbelievably powerful the KSC dishes are at level 3. 
 

Also, setting up relays is best practice because it means you don’t need big expensive dishes on landers/rovers plus you’ll have constant connection as the celestial body rotates.

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I can verify. Everytime I start a new "game cycle" I always use relay satellites. I like to start with a relay at the 2683 km mark above KSC and launch relay satellites with experiments to every object in the Kerbol system.

 

I eventually use very large dishes to make your standard 3 satellite ring around Kerbin with one large "double dish" around Dres and one around Jool. Unless I do something different, this setup has so far done me very well for the game that I play with minimal comms loss for any of my bases.

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I am doing it at the moment.  I am setting up 4 sats in a 17,340Mm orbit between kerbin and duna

 

I have  3 x 4RA2 satellites in orbit around Kerbin and I just realised what's wrong.  Only the KSC has DSN and I have extra ground stations turned off.   The two sets of 4RA2  are not strong enough to talk to each other as they can only do 5.8 million km between satellites.

I'm an idiot.  I thought for a second that I could just turn on ground stations for the time being. But I'm going to have the same issue on Duna.  RA2 are not good enough for interplanetary coms.  RA 15 will do the trick.  It's going to be easier to send Kerbals rather than probes to Duna in terms of Coms networking.  However I'm still going to set up relays and at least Valentina will have a nice chunk of experience after 7+ years orbiting  Kerbol and dropping useless satellites.  Good practice of course.  

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On 8/9/2021 at 2:48 PM, MR L A said:

Also, and someone else will need to confirm this, but you’re missing relay strength. For example, 4% connection direct to KSC is still stronger than relays because of how unbelievably powerful the KSC dishes are at level 3. 

Relay strength is irrelevant to science transmissions. All the game cares about is the 4%, regardless of whether it's 4% via Communotron or 4% via RA-15.

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I am not junking my satellites.  Even though the mission has somewhat failed each satellite has a docking port jr on it.  They will become the foundation for full on relay stations and I will simply upgrade them via the docking ports.


Also I've not played in so long I've missed most of the content of the DLCs.  I can see that Kerbals can carry cargo now.   I think they can add things to craft if need be?

 

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Thanks.  I did load an old save in 1.12.1 but I found out that Kerbal Experience was broken and I kind of needed that for my style of play.  I'm currently using the latest version of 1.10 where experience was working.  The August patch notes seem to say that XP is fixed now so I think I will update my KSP to the latest version.

 

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