Kimberly

No! A license is permission by the copyright holder to do things which, ordinarily, he has the exclusive right to. No license means he reserves these rights solely for himself. With no license, you can only do what the law considers "fair use".

Maybe it would help if you gave them smaller antennae? I don't know if that would help with RemoteTech's calculations, but one of the reasons I decided to make a system with the 250 km antennae is that my Kerbin communication network won't be talking to ships halfway to the Mun...

Okay, "explosion due to overheating" is definitely a cruel and unusual punishment.

I don't know if you intend to rotate the station for artificial gravity, but if you do, the housing units are upside down.

I believe they correspond to the state of the parachutes--undeployed, semi-deployed, fully deployed, and spent (after landing). I'm not sure which color is which, however. Whether your ship tears apart when the parachutes fully deployed has nothing to do with the parachute itself, it depends on how fast you are going and under how much your craft weighs--that determines the force with which you slow down, f = m * a and all that.

Having a large number of anything in orbit can slow down the game, but it's much less big of a deal than parts being actively simulated.

Suggested already, time and time again. It doesn't hurt to do a quick forum search. You may be interested in some of the telescope mods that are available. Compatibility 0.21.1 is a bit spotty at the moment, though.

Is that a question or a suggestion? If the former, I'm not using KWRocketry. If the latter, I'd rather not use engines from mods; it takes away from some of the fun in designing.

In RemoteTech 1, the minimum range is what counts, so those two satellites would only be in contact if they were within 50 Mm. In RemoteTech 2, the average of the two ranges is used, which is more realistic--after all, a weak antenna can still detect a very strong signal, or a strong antenna a very weak signal. On a different note, this is my preliminary design for the main launcher: I've confirmed it can be launched into the required polar orbit. However, I'm not happy with it--its payload fraction is only 3.1% (counting only the satellites) and it has 257 parts (of which 160 are the satellites), making it quite laggy. Anyone have suggestions for improving it? The middle fairings hide the payload rack, and the top fuselage hides a probe core and two RTGs. The two boosters have Mainsails, the middle engine is a Skipper.

The large scanner should actually only work when it's oriented prograde or retrograde, and not pointed at the surface. This means the mirror goes through a gravitational anomaly before the main craft does, and the anomaly is measured by the change in return time of the laser. Once the main craft passes through the gravitational anomaly, the two are in their previous position again. The gravitational anomalies can be used to map the density of the planet below, and density can be used to predict ore locations. It's basically like GRACE.

Sure, but how many people live in the Seychelles? The EU and US have similar copyright terms, and many countries do base their copyright for foreign works on the term it would have in the country of origin. It was a bad joke. Innsewerants is actually in the Netherlands.

Well I assumed we were going off of US copyright law. (After all, Squad is in the United States, and so is Innsewerants.) But the length is similar among the major nations of the world, anyway.

Just curious, but what's the fun about making of a constellation if, y'know, you don't actually make the constellation? When a constellation requires complex timing (such as with tetrahedral communication constellations), it's fair to place debris in orbit as targets, so you can just intercept with each one to form your network, but I still bring the actual satellites up there myself.

Copyright terms don't change if a work is "abandoned". It would expire 70 years after Innsewerants' death. (Or 100 years after publication, I think, for an anonymous author. But Innsewerants has published his legal name.)

Yup. So long as you have something like Kerbinal Engineer, so you can fine-tune your orbital period, and you are able to stick all the satellites onto a single transport vehicle, it's a pretty much guaranteed way to set up a constellation that will remain in position for a long time. (If satellites have the same orbital period, even if their orbit isn't perfectly circular they will end up in the same relative position at the end of each full orbit.)

Use a phase orbit, silly! Get into an orbit that is 29/30ths of your desired orbital period, but with the apoapsis at your desired orbital altitude. (So your orbit will be slightly eccentric.) At apoapsis, release a satellite and let it burn prograde until its orbit is circular. The next time your transport vehicle is at apoapsis, it will be 1/30th of your desired orbit ahead of the previous satellite, so you can release another satellite and have it circularize, and so on.

Mean epoch? What do you need that for? On a different note, this is the payload rack for the main launchers: It weighs only 5.1 tons, but has 185 parts! I'll add struts so the satellites aren't decoupled with any force, then I just need to design a capable launcher. It really only needs to be capable of getting into a polar orbit and deorbiting itself. (If it can get into a polar orbit, it can get into all the other orbits as well.)

Let me use the calculator myself. An orbital period of 100 minutes, you say? I get an orbital radius of 1.4767e+3km. Minus Kerbin's radius (I specifically cautioned you about this ), that's an orbital altitude (or actually, a semi-major axis, but that doesn't matter if your orbit is circular) of 876.7 kilometers.

Sounds about right to me. If you want to test it, enter 6 hours as your orbital period. Do you get an orbital altitude of 2868.75 kilometers? If so, you're doing your calculations correctly. (Note that you'll probably want to use Kerbal Engineer so you can see your orbital period in-game, it's more accurate to try and get your orbital period right than to get a particular orbital altitude exactly right.)

Oh, I suppose that's true. The design I was going for has relays around each planet that then send the signal on to the moons--less direct, but it allows for e.g. making use of Laythe being tidally locked to Jool, because each system can have a custom network. You mean, for a given orbital period over Earth, you want to know the orbital altitude for getting the same orbital period over Kerbin? Click "solve for orbital radius", enter the orbital period in the "Time" field and enter Kerbin's mass. Be sure to subtract Kerbin's radius from the result you get. Physics in KSP follow Kepler's third law, you're just dealing with a smaller planet, is all.

Why 32? There are only six other planets, after all, plus the Mun and Minmus. That makes 16 relays the most you would need, 18 if you want to communicate with ships in interplanetary space. (Or you can make two relays with 36 dishes each, but that would be silly.) Also, it doesn't really matter what orbit they're in, you might as well just make them all equatorial. That reduces communication delay as well. They can be in a low orbit, so long as their view is not significantly blocked by the curvature of Kerbin. Um, I'm going to upset some mathematicians here, but you can forget all that and just use this handy dandy calculator for Kepler's third law. (Kerbin has a radius of 600 km and a mass of 5.2915793e+22 kg. Add your orbital altitude to the radius of Kerbin to get your orbital radius.)

After further testing, I've decided against designing a dedicated spare launcher. I tested various designs, but found there was simply no solid rocket booster to accommodate the payload--the Sepratrons carried too little fuel, while the RT-10 has too high a thrust-to-weight ratio. Even with the use of a BACC, too much fuel is lost to air resistance. The one functioning solid-fueled design I came up with has a payload fraction of just 1.6%, though it looks elegant: The use of a more complex (and more expensive) liquid-fueled design can't be justified for the launch of just was one satellite. Instead, replacements will be launched as add-ons to other missions, e.g. if a crew shuttle has room for payload. In addition, I will reserve 500 m/s from the delta-v budget for orbital maneuvering. Satellites in an orbital plane can rearrange themselves in an orbit to maintain service at a degraded level if some satellites fail; that means global service can be maintained until an opportunity for launching replacements arises. Up to three satellites per plane can fail until inter-satellite links are no longer possible and certain areas of Kerbin will experience black-outs. This leaves another 500 m/s per satellite for stationkeeping, which guarantees a service lifetime of at least five years (if 70 km over Kerbin is equivalent to 400 km over Earth). It will be desirable to replace satellites every five years or so anyway, to update them with the latest technology.

For continuous interplanetary coverage, you need two relays in opposite points of an orbit around Kerbin. Whenever one is blocked by Kerbin, the other has a line of sight. You also need two relays in the same set-up at the destination to receive the signal, and they can then propagate it to whatever network of satellites you've set up around the destination planet. Each relay needs at least two dishes, to communicate with the two relays it is sending/receiving from. (Due to RemoteTech's limitations, you can get away with less, but if you ask me, the more the merrier!) For bodies that are tidally locked to their parent, like the Mun, you can have only one "receiving" relay. For example, you don't need two relays around the Mun, because if you place one on the surface facing Kerbin it will always be able to see at least one of the two relays around Kerbin. If you really want a highly unnecessary degree of coverage, place a relay in orbit around Kerbol in the same orbit as Kerbin, but 1/4th of an orbit ahead or behind. It will always have a line of sight to both Kerbin, and any object that is blocked by Kerbol from Kerbin's perspective. And sure, you can use my design, though keep in mind it's thoroughly useless unless you have a whole swarm of those. Also, I don't think I deserve much credit, I basically slapped on whatever parts were lightest and would do the job.

Ah, but you here you make an assumption of uniformity. Although every single known object in orbit appears in the output logs, you assume this is universal--how do you know the teapot that may or may not be in orbit isn't an exception?

Here's my satellite design: I've dubbed the system LO-COM, for Low Orbit Communications. For the design, I decided to go barebones, for the ease of mass production as well as being able to carry 20 up with one launch vehicle. Each satellite weighs 203.7 kg, and has 1066 m/s available for station-keeping and orbital maneuvering. Why so much delta-V? Well, I can't help it! That's the lightest fuel tank with the lightest engines. I gave each one two engines for balanced thrust (the bottom surface has to be clear so it can be attached to the launch vehicle), giving the craft a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.5. I've tested it and the satellites can in fact deorbit and land themselves safely! I wondered about whether it would be worth having in-orbit spares. To see if ground spares would suffice, I tried launching a single satellite with an, ahem, simple launch design. It didn't get into orbit, mostly due to this happening: