Peppe

Landings are tricky. The most fuel efficient is to burn at 100% throttle at the latest point you can and hit the ground just soft enough that you don't break anything. To learn how to do that would probably take a lot more kerbal's lives or quicksave (f5) and quickload (hold f9). I generally try to shoot for a speed of altitude / 10. So if you are 1000 m above the surface shoot for 100m/s velocity. With no mods you will want to check inside the cockpit view to see what the difference is between the surface altitude and the altitude seen in flight view. Another trick is to put some big lights on the bottom of your lander and aim them to the surface. Having 3 large spot lights that slowly get smaller and closer can help you gauge how close the ground is before you crash into it and explode (f9) -- land gracefully.

Played quite bit over the holiday and did not have any issues in 1.1. The Speedy response for mod filtering is working very well and much appreciated. I mainly do mod filter and part sorting, so did not really test the other pieces of the mod. Menus felt easier to navigate -- don't think i had them disappear on me once. Before they would sometimes close on me before i was able to click into the next layer down of choices. One thing I thought i noticed was it might have been reverting sorting/filtering choices with the save game? I thought i did some things and quick loaded and my filter choices were back to an old setting. Not a big deal to me. Great work! thanks for the effort.

You might suggest to the kerbal economy modder to look at what the Mission Controller Extended mod did. It basically ran a check before the game deleted something in atmosphere and if it had either enough parachutes or enough fuel / engines it deposited a recovery value to your account. The other option is you take everything to orbit/near orbit. Separate./stage circularize main craft, switch back to other craft before it hits atmosphere again and take it back down to the surface.

I have seen similar bugs. Did not want to report as i was not sure which mod was doing it. Can say I have seen all the behaviors above. Recover vessel triggered a blank display of KSC. It would take me back to the fixed view of KSC, but no buildings showed. Could still click where the buildings were and go into them, but launching anything seemed to duplicate a craft, was the same one duplicated. Potential fix? -- I have not seen this since i added texture compressor mod. Maybe related or maybe performance based and the texture compressor let's thing process in enough time to load the scene properly? Switch craft -- on load craft is invisible, go to map view and back and it is displayed. Happens every-time. Did not test, which mod does it, but if others narrow it down to remote tech i can confirm it is consistent -- could be a compatibility issue with other common mods. Can give a mod list if needed or maybe confirm Remotetech does it alone/stock. Remotetech flight computer -- Sometimes telling it to point at the maneuver node will have it off by 20-30 degrees. Usually it is the first node of the flight... i then do the first manually and try RT2 again and its ok on the next. Or it will be ok if i swith flights and come back. My sats are usually released from docking ports on a manned mission -- docked ship splitting could be an issue here as others have mentioned quirky behavior, maybe an issue when the ship seperates and the sat gets renamed "shipname probe"? On releasing sats from docking port -- sometimes the connection lines from a sat will be fixed in space on the map screen. Rotating the view will not update the lines. If you get this error line of site comm is no longer checked. If you have a connection at the time you will keep it even past your range or the target's range. Sat was a simple manned vessel, vertical to escape, release by docking port with the 50Mm dish pointed back to KSC. I believe switching ships and returning fixed it -- or i may have restarted KSP entirely. Only saw this one once in ~20-30 flights.

Glad it helped. Between space programs I spend more time in excel and paint planning networks than in game. I might try to write something up and draw some clean diagrams and add it to the wiki. Editing my post again... realized that with your geosynchronous if sat 1 is over KSC, then sat 2 and sat 3 would never need to talk to eachother. They can just point to sat 1 and active vessel and cover their section of space, and use sat 1's connection to KSC. So as you said you have enough dishes to do what you wanted, but guess had a kerbal error pointing to the wrong place. There is a coverage if you have inactive kerbin surface based ships. You could cover them with a dish or probably better to use the 5mm omni to point/cover kerbin's surface from sat 2 and 3.

For relay networks you should really consider using omni antennas. Sounds like you are in a 3 satellite 2800km orbit though, which would put each satellite slightly out of reach of omnis. Consider two things, the 5mm omni on a 4 satellite constellation at 2800 orbit would all stay in range of eachother. You could then put a dish on them that points to active vessel. Active vessel could use omni for close kerbin then dish pointed to kerbin and should always hit one of the dishes. Using only dishes. You have 3 satellites... probably an equilateral triangle? First satellite dish 1 has a 45 degree field of view -- pointed at the planet the other two satellites would be about out of view. Here is how i visualize your setup: So you then add a dish to each and point a dish at kerbin and a dish at a neighbor satellite, but there is no reciever pointed back in view, so need 3 dishes on the satellite one to look at each neighbor and one to look for KSC. They should all stay connected to KSC that way, but now have no dish to point at a vessel. The active ship has to be in their path +- half of 45 degrees and target it's own dish or use an omni if close enough to be part of that network. You said one sat in the 3 has an extra dish... it could point at the active vessel, and the vessel back to it and it will relay to kerbin. The connection uptime will only be the period the 2 can see eachother... Your relay has not provided much relay capability. To use dish to dish communication: Sat 1: Dish 1 point to planet Dish 2 point to Sat 2 Dish 3 point to Sat 3 Dish 4 point to Active Vessel Sat 2: Dish 1 point to planet Dish 2 point to Sat 1 Dish 3 point to Sat 3 Dish 4 point to Active Vessel Sat 3: Dish 1 point to planet Dish 2 point to Sat 1 Dish 3 point to Sat 2 Dish 4 point to Active Vessel Or you can add more satellites to your network, so that aiming at kerbin from one side of the planet will hit a satellite on the other side. 5 equally spaced satellites should do this. If you use one dish with a 45 degree cone angle pointed at kerbin it will form a triangle with the 2 satellites on the oppisite side. Any satellite should then be able bounce around a signal to hit KSC with only one dish committed to relaying. Their other dish can point to active vessel or a planet/moon and relay all signals from that target to KSC. Edit: Forgot you were in a geosynchronous orbit. You can eliminate one dish from the above on the satellites not over KSC. So: Sat 1 over KSC: -Dish 1, Point to KSC/Kerbin -Dish 2, point to sat 2 -Dish 3, point to sat 3 -Dish 4, point to active vessel Sat 2: Dish 1 point to Active Vessel Dish 2 point to Sat 1 Dish 3 point to Sat 3 -- not needed Sat 3: Dish 1 point to Active Vessel Dish 2 point to Sat 1 Dish 3 point to Sat 2 -- not needed Edit 2: I guess you would never need to go sat 2 to sat 3 to sat 1 to ksc, so you can eliminate dish 3 on both the relays.

Radio line of site is a perfect sphere @ height of the ocean. The breakable antenna/dishes only occur in atmosphere, so that would only affect a few locations in the kerbol system. It will be harder to maintain contact with un-manned probes around kerbin's surface than on the mun's. I have not tested delayed commands using action groups. Put if you can set the flight computer delay to sometime after your landing time you could setup a re-entry, queue up a command to extend the antenna, remove the delay and retract the antenna's/solar panels etc, land -- wait for queued command to extend antenna/panels. Probe back online on surface. I'd still be concerned where you land your probe on kerbin with just the 300k equatorial sats. A probe on the ground in kerbin won't be able to see them above those same latitudes i mentioned before.

How about 20km of drift over a 7 year 100k warp? Later hitting escape rapidly to dial in the millimeter mark I got 2 sats semi major access 20 millimeters apart. Using 48-7s with thrust tweaked to min and burning near 90 degrees off path. I guess I am a perfectionist, but I will not resort to save game Editting for no drift during the life of my game.

Yeah i was starting on an edit to that. My thought was trying to figure the mean time to failure. How would calculate mean time to failure? Or say worst case. Say we got things down to the meter, but were off on two neighbors in opposite ways. So net they are moving away from another at 2 meters an orbit. The orbit would be over a day, but we'll just call it a day. With 6 satellites failure would be when the 2 reach --- i guess antenna limit from eachother. At 3500km orbits That would require a drift of ~900km? They should start at 4100 km away from eachother and 5000k should be the antenna limit, drift one away = 900,000 / 2 = 450,000 = kerbin year is 426 days? = 1056 years to failure. I must be missing something or not enough people use VOID for fine tuning ;P

I think the ideal is probably an orbit just under the antenna limit. A larger orbit means a longer period, so the rounding/accuracy issues with orbits is reduced. For accurate orbits though to me it is VOID > Flight Engineer > Mechjeb I don't have mechjeb installed, but it only shows down to the second right? Here is Flight engineer vs void: With VOID i use the line below orbital period, semi-major axis. If you want to eliminate drift i don't think you can beat that last meter of fidelity VOID gives. I think the 1/10 second ker shows is less accurate than the millimeters VOID shows. If take that out to a very high and long orbit you should be able to get orbits that drift won't be a problem for the life of your game. If you are patient you can use the milliliters as it saves the values displayed when you pause to leave for space center, but controlling the satellite you can only really narrow it down to a meter unless you want to rapidly puase/resume to get the final cm/mm equal. From that screenshot this was saved in my persistence file for the craft SMA: 1302717.39773173 I went to my other 2 satellites and did the same thing and got them all to 1302717.xxx. Simmed a year at 100k and they were fine, though i did not write down their distances before reverting. They are in 700km orbits, which works fine, but if the goal is max long term stability I think the larger the orbit the better. 3 is a little light for redundancy, so I would probably just double it and make them higher. What is the worst case, sat just coming over horizon and KSC rotating away to the other side? 5mm antenna on 6 satellites @3500 altitude should give max overlap, an accurate orbit, and max equatorial coverage. Here is my scratchpad:

~942 makes sense since that is the circumference of kerbin / 4. Thresholds that would matter are things you could cover/reach at those places. For KSC coverage -- sits on the equator it is simple. I have 3 satellites I need 33% coverage. 4 satellites = 25% coverage and on down. What other points are interesting? Maybe some continent you could cover? Maybe how far to reach the polar region? Simplest comm relay to deploy that gives 100% coverage of the globe?

Only issue would be where you want those ground stations. If all they have is the 500km antenna can probably only go 40-45 degrees above the equator before they are out of range. The further up north/south you go the less time they will be in range as the field of view is a bunch of circles moving across the equator -- at the top of the circles covered will go in and out as the satellites move. The satellites at 300k cannot see much further than the 45-50 degree north/south. What information mod are you using for orbits? With low orbits you run into an accuracy issue. I use VOID to see accuracy of the orbit semi-major access down to the meter, but the game bounces that last meter around whenever it is in physics range, so when synced up my sats I do it down to that last meter. At 300km your orbits are under an hour, so if you warped say 100,000x to line up a shot to Jool your orbits could move even in an ideal case 5-6 meters a day and pretty quickly they won't be a reliable relay. Given our accuracy is ~1 meter per orbit, the higher you can take the orbit the longer their relative distance to each-other will hold and the longer your relay will operate without adjustments. If you have a healthy overlap in coverage say you are at 600km with 4 satellites, start them in a box shop and they won't fail until the sides collapse down to a triangle shape. If you don't use void and instead use kerbal engineer or mechjeb that don't show semi-major axis or go on just orbital period down to the second/tenth of second your orbits relative to each-other could be much more than a meter off. Land based polar dishes for deep space is an interesting plan and think that part is solid. I don't think there would be a blind spot. The sun may still get in your way.

You might check your units. Your relay is past Minmus ~48mm. Best omni antenna is 5mm. So you are well into to dish to dish only communication range.

What players have that setup? Maybe they are not using the current version or it is a video/screenshot from an old version? I think remotetech 1 allowed 2 way communication based on the average or longest range of the two antennas/dishes. Remotetech 2 the comm range is the range of the shortest device. Not sure how your relay showed connected when it was active. Do your lower KEO satellites have dishes pointing to active ship? If so you can lock them onto your deep space relay. At your distances you want a dish in LKO to talk to your relay out past the moons. The relay to to have 2 dishes one to point back to kerbin and one to point at the active ship. So the signal path would be KSC -> Antenna on KEO sat -> KEO Dish -> Deep space Dish 1 -> Deep space Dish 2 -> active craft dish 1 If your KEO comm relay is just antenna's you could launch two dish satellites in polar orbits. They should have antennas to communicate with your local comm relay to KSC. Align them perpendicular and one should always have line of site in kerbin SOI.

Here is an example custom module config: http://www./download/c3z4p6jy596gosi/CustomModules.cfg Put the file in your gamedata folder and edit as needed -- includes remote tech and some other common modules on all stock and b9 pods. If your game does not have the mod for the module it won't affect it.

Do you have line of site to KSC or a relay network that reaches back to KSC? In RT2 you have to have a connection to KSC to transmit.

I thought i used standard algebra to find how they got to 742. Pretty sure 742 is wrong and you could have anything in the range of planet radius to antenna/dish/sphere of influence limit for the orbit of kerbin. If mountains don't block things satellites should gain line of sight at 600.01 km orbits, but they would need near perfect positioning. The higher you go the more positioning wiggle room for a 3 satellite grouping. To reach 742 i think they did something like this. Distance to horizon before it is simplified can be described as: (R+h)^2 = R^2 + d^2 R = radius d = distance h = height We are seeking the height that gives a distance of the radius * 2. So d=2R (R+h)^2 = R^2 + 2R^2 R + h = square root ( R^2 + (2*R)^2 ) h = square root ( R^2 + (2*R)^2 ) - R Now take a known radius like kerbin and you get: 741.6408... Mun 247.2136 Minmus 74.1641 Etc. I don't think that gives horizon to horizon view, or 'half' the planet as someone described earlier. That is the distance from the satellite to the horizon -- if it went straight out it would have view of half the planet, but it travels at an angle, so some distance is used to go out and some is used to down -- reducing the field of view to some area short of the horizon. Your field of view formula probably describes how much of the actual surface is seen.

Anyone know the math on calculating the line of sight that says 742 is the right amount? I would like to calculate it for other bodies as needed. Edit: Is it: square root(radius^2+(radius*2)^2)-radius? Seems to get the right answer for kerbin.

Thanks for the update, will give it a try.

Setup my first remotetech comm relay. Used VOID to get their orbital period / semi-major axis accurate to under a meter (VOID lets you click to change the unit). Simmed at 100,000 warp for a year and they are still dead on with no save file editing. Imagine eventually they could need a correction after a long while. Pretty triangle: Posted the method I used and getting it right here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64457-RemoteTech-Comm-Relay-Getting-Angle-of-Seperation-right

I use KER 6.2.2 (latest) and don't have a problem with VOID. I use modular manager to put KER on all pods, but tried adding KER to a ship without a pod and did not get any errors/display issues. I recall having an error similar to the above, but it went away as started updating mods for .23. Assume it was a built for .22 vs .23 issue. --- Just want to say again I love VOID. Helped me fix up a triangle constellation of remotetech satellites tonight. Used the rendezvous info page to get each satellite equidistant to each-other and the orbital information panel to get their orbital period synced down to the meter! Can you put more orbital information on rendezvous info panel? Not sure it would mean anything for rendezvous, but seeing the local Sidereal Longitude would be another way to confirm their spacing (ideally they would be 120.000 degrees apart). Probably not intended, but being able to see the stats for the actual selected target and a satellite selected in the register was very helpful. Crazy stable now, tested a full year at 100,000 warp and these 3 on just under a 2 hour orbit had almost no change. Shots in this thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64457-RemoteTech-Comm-Relay-Getting-Angle-of-Seperation-right

Thanks. Think that confirms I did things about as well as you can by hand. In the last few minutes I have found the rendezvous information screen on VOID useful. I could set both a target and have another vessel selected from the register. This allowed me to see my distance to both other satellites at the same time. Pretty easy to fix a triangle using that information Since my orbits aren't perfectly circular I just picked a satellite and adjusted so the distance to each other satellite was equal. Watched a few orbits and as they speed up/slow down in Ap/Pe they moved a little, but I think i averaged their distance well. Did the same for a second satellite (affected the first one a little, but mainly dialed in its distance to the final satellite). I also found in this situation the actual angel of separation is local sidereal longitude. If I bounce to each satellite quickly enough their sidereal longitude values are now all ~120 degrees from each other. Before i adjusted they were 124, 118, 118 -- seeing these confirmed what i felt that my triangle was a bit off I think if my orbit was KEO the sidreal logitude would not change and that would be an easy reference point to place satellites along. Looking at adding a satellite to an existing set I used a spreadsheet i have been working on. It calculates the distance to the neighbor satellite. With that as a guide i would launch the 4th satellite roughly in a spot it will eventually go. Use one existing satellite as an anchor and move the other two to the proper average distance, then nudge the 4th around so it too is equidistant. Then use longitude to confirm their degree of separation is right -- hard to use that to do the actual maneuvers since it is a moving target. Maybe you could use the rotation of the planet to predict what your longitude should be at a certain point? seems more complex than figuring out what your distance should be and extending/shorting your orbit as needed for a lap or two to line things up.. Spreadsheet mentioned above: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52132-Spreadsheet-to-Calculate-Orbit-Orbit-Darkness-and-Recommended-Battery-Capacity

I successfully deployed a warp stable network -- it may eventually need a tuning, but the orbital periods are synced by the semi major axis down to the meter (using VOID - clicking on the major access changes the units). My plan worked, but would like to understand why it worked. Also if i wanted to make it a 4 sattelite network how i would move the existing satellites around to equally space the new amount. Should the argument of periapsis be 120 degrees apart or is that only if they are all circularized perfectly? What data can i use other than lost signal to identify if I need to move any of the satellites? or If i had launched each satellite separately what would be the best/easiest way to ensure they were 120 degrees apart? My mission plan to deploy a remotetech comm relay network. 3 Satellites with 5000 km omni antenna. 120 degrees apart to form a triangle around the equator and maintain 100% comm with KSC. Satellites in circular orbit @700km. Deploy on one craft initial deploy orbit 700km 70km. This is 2/3 of the final orbital period. Each apoapsis I released a relay and circularized it. Circularize burn got a little tricky. First two i ended up doing with my deployment craft and then the third had to do it's own burn.

Tried to get this to run, but without the designer code as well you would have to make all the labels/messages. Went ahead and made the same thing in excel / google docs if anyone comes accross this thread in the future: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52132-Spreadsheet-Orbit-Night-Darkness-Req-Battery-Capacity-and-Satellite-Relay-Coverage Spreadsheet version.

Added a satellite tab today. Help plan minimum orbits for line of sight, maximum orbit for antenna or sphere of influence limit. Sat example: