JMac

If someone wants to take that on, I'm more than happy to be available to bounce ideas off of. Most of what I know on space-based radio theory I only learned from a friend at school who was related in some way to the guy that developed a lot of the coding for Voyager's signals. Everything else I know about space radio is generally available online, although some seems as difficult to find as the SRB curves seem to be. My actual radio experience deals primarily with short range (<100km... like the time when I was 10 and accidentally jammed TV signals to the block for a while) stuff and most of my recent programming experience is embedded systems so I'd be considerably better at writing the software for the space ship itself rather than the plugin for the space ship game =) I'd generally say that doing something like making radio signals work in kerbal was outside the realm of possibility, but the modding community seems to be insane, yourself especially. (And I mean that as a compliment to the modding community). I also really don't think that RT, in its current implementation does much useful for RO: The signal delay functionality doesn't allow for autonomous processing so removes the vast majority of unmanned mission capabilities which I think is directly against the idea of RO - the only way to improve that is something like a better version of kOS to do things like fire retrorockets at a specific altitude and then deploy airbags. For the majority of users it also needs to be simpler. Preferably with buttons and sliders and a drag and drop mission planner. In Sandbox mode I can lob a network of satellites to pretty much any planet in the solar system in a single launch so I see it as adding only a level of annoyance that everyone has to do once and then forget about. Perhaps one could argue that there aren't a lot of people that can do that and it may take them dozens of attempts... and so on and so forth. But no matter what it's difficulty or annoyance for the sake of difficulty not for the sake of realism. In Career (RPL, which I thought about putting in a bid to take over if I had more time) there is a bit more difficulty in putting together a satellite network. I do recognize, as I said before, that the satellite communications network is unrealistic, especially in the time frames that RPL theoretically deals with, but I did actually enjoy the challenge of launching the first 2 satellites in my simple network (the remainder were essentially automated mechjeb ascents... and bored me to death). I did enjoy being able to upgrade them as my tech improved and I planned out Luna, Venera, etc... but for realism sake I think that would be better handled either in the contract system or as science missions (ie use the dedicated probe concept and place ComSat 1 in such and such orbit). There are already plugins for similar in the contract system. I really see a bit of a merging of the Red and NK concepts for Career mode using a hybrid Tech and Contract system, and I really don't know how my convoluted track on radio theory made it to writing a new career mode, but, there it is, it was a long day trudging through the (literal) desert for me today and that does strange things to a person's head sometimes. Anyway, that's my probably a lot more than $0.02 -JM

Your numbers are (essentially) correct, but actually high. Voyager, at 15 billion km (15Tm) uses what NASA generally refers to as a 20w transmitter and the highest number I can find is 23w with a 3.7m dish to the 34m DSN on Earth. Even the early Russian space probes topped out at about 100w radios, but they tended to have a radio for every system. Remote Tech is designed to add challenge and complexity to a game, and does a good job at that, but it doesn't remotely model real life to the point that I've considered removing it from my RO install a few times. Some of that is because of RT and some of that is because of KSP. The entire satellite network to use deep space probes is... well... inherently flawed, but on the other hand there's no other reason to launch satellites so I kind of like it. (Earth should effectively have unlimited range antennas and range should only be determined by the antenna on the spacecraft and there should be a different calculation of Earth - Spacecraft and Spacecraft - Spacecraft because Earth has bigger antennas and better computers and thousands of watts to throw at transmissions). As far as targeting dishes, Kerbal has no way to, say, send a low powered signal to go to 3-axis stabilization (and has no idea of any other kind of stabilization) and also no way to plot that stabilization in regard to point in space (ie point at Earth). RO lets you just say that a dish is targeted at a location. I'm okay with that workaround. My personal feelings about RT: I like that it forces you to think about communications, I just think it forces you to think about them in a way that is nearly incompatible with RO's mindset of not just making a more realistic KSP but we seem to be headed almost toward making a real space sim. RT implements them in a gamey way, and the one concept that it implements that more follows reality is the signal delay, but there is no way to really build an entire mission in current tools (kOS comes close, but runs into both its own issues and KSP issues). Ideally we would want an RO specific communication plugin and I am not even remotely volunteering to write it with my current workload. It's a little bit like requiring Kethane to produce fuel for your rocket because fueling rockets at the start was actually often hard, you could be modeling that exotic fuel is hard but you'd be modeling it in a gamey way. Radio engineering aside: I can orbit pretty much anything with a dipole using a [steep] loft trajectory and have actually never made a manned flight in RO because I'm uninterested at this time. You either have something not configured per RO (such as didn't get the RT settings config that changes distances and puts earth stations at launch points) or you aren't making a steep enough ascent to stay in line of sight of your launch facility. Steep ascents were pretty much the name of the game in early rocket testing to deal with that and then came downrange radio stations. AIES also has an antenna that I'm pretty much addicted to for near Earth flights that has an always active and an extendable mode. The RO specific RT settings also allow more antennas is better so you can always just, very realistically (no offense, Red/NK, I did read your commentary rationalizing it as more equipment, bigger antennas, etc but Omni.... truly omni doesn't actually matter about antenna size and RT (yes another niggle about RT) treats antennas as truly omni) add more antennas to get more range.