What I think is a good idea

[Ikaneko]

OK, invisage this: you've just landed on the Mun. You have a rover and you send it to a different biome. You collect a shed ton of data. For obvious reasons, you don't want to hike all the way back to the mothership. Therefore you have to transmit it to KSC. Boom. Half your precious science lost. Alternatively, you could be presented with an option to beam back to the mothership (or any other craft within a preset 3D radius) with no loss in worth. You could also have other bands, say 500km-1000km you lose 10%.

What are your thoughts?

[KvickFlygarn87]

Exploitable. What if you transfer to a vessel on Kerbin to get the full science?

[Sirrobert]

The whole reason you get less data from transmitting is because you can't get all the science out of a sample on site. It has to be brought back to analyze properly.

If you transmit it the mothership, you are still transmitting it. So you're still not brining it home for proper analasys. So you get the same penelty.

PS: you don't lose the data, you just don't get as much. The rest is still there, waiting to be collected

[MR4Y]

The whole reason you get less data from transmitting is because you can't get all the science out of a sample on site. It has to be brought back to analyze properly.

If you transmit it the mothership, you are still transmitting it. So you're still not brining it home for proper analasys. So you get the same penelty.

PS: you don't lose the data, you just don't get as much. The rest is still there, waiting to be collected

This makes sense, except for data that is not sample data, which was transmitted via radio all the time.