Hi everyone,
I've picked up KSP again recently and am trying to build a comm network local to Kerbin. For context: I'm playing on pretty hard settings, and I only have a ground comm station at the KSC itself, not anywhere else on the planet. This pretty much means that I need a comm network local to Kerbin itself. I'm at the point in the tech tree where I only have the 5M relay antennas. For various reasons it would be really nice to be able to launch and control probes around Kerbin (and due to settings I don't have probe control unless I have a comm-link). In case it's relevant I'm using the Kerbal Engineer plugin (automatic suicide burn and Δv calculations FTW!) and the latest KSP available for download.
My plan was a three-relay-sat constellation at 2.15Mm altitude (so a 2.75Mm orbital radius). Since the three comsats will form a equilateral triangle, that means by the law of sines the side length between any two comsats will be 2.75Mm * sin(3π/2) / sin(π/6) = 4.76Mm. This was based on the understanding that since the 5M relay antennas have a comm rating of 5M, that means the maximum distance two relays can talk with each other is √(5e6 * 5e6) = 5Mm. Since 4.76Mm < 5Mm, they should be in (low-signal-strength) contact with each other. However, I've placed two of the three relay sats (launching 2 at a time, for redundancy) and despite being almost exactly 4.76Mm apart from each other, there's no comm link. They can both talk with the ground station just fine, but not with each other --- the "network" and "vessel link" views don't show a link, nor can I control the one with an occluded link to the KSC.
What am I misunderstanding?
Thanks!
- ethereal
