Transmitting Science from Research Labs

[Meid]

Hi there, I'm about 20 years into my career save and I keep on running into this really annoying problem of sorts.

I'm playing a heavily modded install, and tech nodes have started reaching prices of around 2000. For stock research labs this would be annoying, as thats 4 labs worth of science transmitted back. I however made a patch to change the science amount to 5000 and the data amount to 7500 (cheaty I know, but there's nothing I hate more than having to stop timewarp every 5 months because another research lab has finished and I need to transfer the data)

However, I've run into a problem with regards to transmitting this data. If anyone has used the labs before you will know that not only is research slow asf, but transmitting also takes ages. Time warp does not seem to help speed up the process as well, and I have to physics warp if I want to speed up transmitting. This is made much, much worse by the amount of science (5000 to be precice :P) I'm transmitting back every time.

This is getting super annoying, because even though I have to sit through less loading screens, the transmission goes up by 0.02% each increment. I'm playing with no communications network mods, as well as the stock communications network disabled. I'm transmitting with an RA-2 Relay Antenna out as Dres. Could this be the problem?

Any advice would be greatly appriciated, I just want to be able to speed up transmitting the data. Would a better antenna help? Or is there a way that I can actually time warp through?

[Zhetaan]

On 8/31/2021 at 7:07 PM, Meid said:

I however made a patch to change the science amount to 5000 and the data amount to 7500 (cheaty I know, but there's nothing I hate more than having to stop timewarp every 5 months because another research lab has finished and I need to transfer the data)

I disagree with it being cheaty; if you're expanding the tech tree, then you need to expand the science pool, and that means re-balancing everything that goes into it.  You may not be modelling the change in technological capability in your game, but it's not unreasonable to think that data storage and transmission can improve immensely in twenty years:  twenty years ago, some digital cameras recorded images on floppy disks inserted into the camera, and streaming video was ... well, no, it wasn't.

On 8/31/2021 at 7:07 PM, Meid said:

This is getting super annoying, because even though I have to sit through less loading screens, the transmission goes up by 0.02% each increment. I'm playing with no communications network mods, as well as the stock communications network disabled. I'm transmitting with an RA-2 Relay Antenna out as Dres. Could this be the problem?

That's a big part of it.  The RA-2 is literally the worst-transmitting antenna in the stock game.  Switch to a Communotron 88-88 or HG-55 (the HG-55, not the HG-5).

On 8/31/2021 at 7:07 PM, Meid said:

Any advice would be greatly appriciated, I just want to be able to speed up transmitting the data. Would a better antenna help? Or is there a way that I can actually time warp through?

I don't think you can warp through transmission, but you can definitely make transmissions work better.  Since you're comfortable with modding and writing patches, let me give you the essential idea behind data transmission, so that you'll then be able to decide whether to use a better stock antenna or else go in another direction.

Science is transmitted in units called mits.  It's like a bit, but mumbled.  Individual experiments have fixed mit values.  This is not automatically related to the science value of the experiment--that depends on whether you're recovered the experiment before, where you did the experiment, and so forth.  For example, a temperature reading always has a value of 8 mits, but the science value changes if you take the reading in low orbit of Jool instead of Kerbin.

Mobile Processing labs factor the science multipliers into the conversion to data, which is a trade-off:  you transmit science from the lab at a transmission rate of one mit per science point, so you need more and longer transmissions for the same mit value of experiments as you collect them from higher-yield situations.  Of course, the lab multiplies the data value, too, so it's a net positive, but you knew that already, I think.

Antennas gather mits into bundles called packets, and different antennas have different packet sizes.  The HG-55 has a packet size of 3 mits, the RA-2 has a packet size of 1 mit, and all other stock antennas have a packet size of 2 mits.

Antennas also have a packet interval, which is the time taken per packet transmission.  The reciprocal of this value is the number of packets per second, and taken with the packet size gives the transmission rate in terms of mits per second, or, if transmitting from a lab, science points per second.  The HG-55 has an interval of .15 seconds with a packet size of 3, and the Communotron 88-88 has an interval of .10 seconds with a packet size of 2.  This means that they both transmit science from a lab at a rate of 20 science per second.

Lastly, antennas have packet resource cost, which is simply the EC used per packet.  I get the impression that you don't have an electrical scarcity problem and are more interested in speed, but for your information, the HG-55 has a relatively low EC cost per mit but its high transmission rate means a high EC cost per second.  The 88-88 is the worst in terms of electric use per second (but the RA-2 is the worst in terms of EC per mit).

Anyway, if you're transmitting something of roughly 5,000 science points per transmission (though probably less given diminishing returns), then doing it through an RA-2 will take about half an hour.  Using an HG-55 will do the same thing in four minutes and ten seconds, though at roughly double the electricity per second (but at one quarter the total electrical consumption).

If you should decide to mod an antenna, then you will want to increase the packet size, decrease the packet interval, or do both in order to reduce the transmission time.

Edited September 2, 2021 by Zhetaan

[Meid]

2 hours ago, Zhetaan said:

I disagree with it being cheaty; if you're expanding the tech tree, then you need to expand the science pool, and that means re-balancing everything that goes into it.  You may not be modelling the change in technological capability in your game, but it's not unreasonable to think that data storage and transmission can improve immensely in twenty years:  twenty years ago, some digital cameras recorded images on floppy disks inserted into the camera, and streaming video was ... well, no, it wasn't.

That's a big part of it.  The RA-2 is literally the worst-transmitting antenna in the stock game.  Switch to a Communotron 88-88 or HG-55 (the HG-55, not the HG-5).

I don't think you can warp through transmission, but you can definitely make transmissions work better.  Since you're comfortable with modding and writing patches, let me give you the essential idea behind data transmission, so that you'll then be able to decide whether to use a better stock antenna or else go in another direction.

Science is transmitted in units called mits.  It's like a bit, but mumbled.  Individual experiments have fixed mit values.  This is not automatically related to the science value of the experiment--that depends on whether you're recovered the experiment before, where you did the experiment, and so forth.  For example, a temperature reading always has a value of 8 mits, but the science value changes if you take the reading in low orbit of Jool instead of Kerbin.

Mobile Processing labs factor the science multipliers into the conversion to data, which is a trade-off:  you transmit science from the lab at a transmission rate of one mit per science point, so you need more and longer transmissions for the same mit value of experiments as you collect them from higher-yield situations.  Of course, the lab multiplies the data value, too, so it's a net positive, but you knew that already, I think.

Antennas gather mits into bundles called packets, and different antennas have different packet sizes.  The HG-55 has a packet size of 3 mits, the RA-2 has a packet size of 1 mit, and all other stock antennas have a packet size of 2 mits.

Antennas also have a packet interval, which is the time taken per packet transmission.  The reciprocal of this value is the number of packets per second, and taken with the packet size gives the transmission rate in terms of mits per second, or, if transmitting from a lab, science points per second.  The HG-55 has an interval of .15 seconds with a packet size of 3, and the Communotron 88-88 has an interval of .10 seconds with a packet size of 2.  This means that they both transmit science from a lab at a rate of 20 science per second.

Lastly, antennas have packet resource cost, which is simply the EC used per packet.  I get the impression that you don't have an electrical scarcity problem and are more interested in speed, but for your information, the HG-55 has a relatively low EC cost per mit but its high transmission rate means a high EC cost per second.  The 88-88 is the worst in terms of electric use per second (but the RA-2 is the worst in terms of EC per mit).

Anyway, if you're transmitting something of roughly 5,000 science points per transmission (though probably less given diminishing returns), then doing it through an RA-2 will take about half an hour.  Using an HG-55 will do the same thing in four minutes and ten seconds, though at roughly double the electricity per second (but at one quarter the total electrical consumption).

If you should decide to mod an antenna, then you will want to increase the packet size, decrease the packet interval, or do both in order to reduce the transmission time.

:0 legend! Exactly what I was looking for! In my ~1000 hours of playing career mode I have never had too much of an idea of what goes into transmissions, I rarely play with communications on so I just click button get science lol.

Trust me to randomly pick the worst option for antennas lol. On all my new science ships I will be putting HG-55 or Communotron 88-88s, or any modded antenna from NFT or any of the other mods I have installed that have good rates. I should have everything I need now to build my next generation of interplanetary spacecraft to fuel my Jool programme