Recovery Transponder Fitting Strategy not working as intended

[Barking Sands]

KSP Version: v1.0.2.842 Windows 32-bit Steam

What Happens: Recovered vessels produce less than 90% recovery near KSC with Transponders enabled

Mods / Add-Ons: All Stock

Steps to Replicate:

1) Start a career mode game (if no career with upgraded Admin facility and sufficient funds/reputation exists)

2) Modify the "persistent.sfs" file to add 100% commitment for RecoveryTransponders (or 750 reputation and 550,000 funds) and fully upgraded Admin building

3) Build a basic rocket in the VAB

4) Launch the rocket and land safely 5,000 meters from the KSC (heading East just past the shores into Kerbin's water will do the trick)

5) Recover the landed pod and check the "funds" tab in the recovery stats window

Result: Recovered funds from parts will show a negative value in parenthesis indicating that the Recovery strategy reduced the value of the parts recovered

Fixes/Workarounds:

- Don't rely on the Recovery Transponder Fitting strategy if you plan on landing most of your vessels back near the KSC

Other Notes/Pictures/Log Files:

- What the strategy advertises in the Admin building sounds like: If current multiplier is less than 90% then add 15% to current value multiplier, if new multiplier is greater than 90% then set multiplier to 90%.

- Landing ~5 km from KSC produced a 97.8% recovery factor without the strategy enabled. The same landing produced a 87.8% (-10.2%) recovery factor with a 100% transponder fitting commitment. From this data, it appears the game is calculating the transponder recovery boost by reducing a 90% capacity instead of the 100% maximum capacity.

- From what I can extrapolate, landing 372.4 km (screenshot below) without the strategy would produce a factor of about 81.9%. The same landing with the transponder strategy produced a factor of 75.6% (-6.3%). In this scenario, a 15% increase from 81.9% would result in a factor of 96.9%, but the game corrects for the >90% result by subtracting about 6% from the initial factor instead of either adding 8.1% (15 - 6.9) or by subtracting 6.9% from the final recovery factor to stop at 90%.

- Landing back at KSC with the strategy enabled didn't affect the recovery factor even when that factor is slightly less than 100%.

- Images Link: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=438240005

Edited May 8, 2015 by Barking Sands

[sal_vager]

This is actually deliberate, the transponder strategy is intended to increase recovery bonuses when far from the KSC, but the penalty is that recovery near the KSC is reduced.

[Barking Sands]

I was worried about that; thank you for the quick reply. I think it would help if the strategy made that more clear in the description from the Admin building.

Personally, I don't think a recovery transponder fitting should have a penalty. The half a million funds in sunk costs should be more than enough to move forward with the fitting without any ongoing costs to production or reduced part recovery factors.

Also, a reduction in part recovery greater than 10% is quite the penalty considering how close to the space center a 5 kilometer puddle jump is. This can be devastating when performing tests in flight on late-career equipment to complete routine contracts; the costs outweigh the payout for the contract rendering otherwise not-impractical contracts, well, impractical.

Hope the devs buff the transponders yet again; this version of the strategy is still much better than the original (when a maximum strategy commitment increased costs to production to 106% and a maximum recovery value of 100% with a 15% increase at ranges beyond 200 km).

[sal_vager]

Yeah I agree, maybe instead of the current method it should have had a maintenance cost for better recovery vehicles, cranes and trucks etc, so you get more funds back for distant recovery.

But unless you are using the recovery service to recoup funds, the maintenance cost outweighs it over time, this would reward environmentally conscious players who recover as much as possible

[Barking Sands]

Yeah I agree, maybe instead of the current method it should have had a maintenance cost for better recovery vehicles, cranes and trucks etc, so you get more funds back for distant recovery.

But unless you are using the recovery service to recoup funds, the maintenance cost outweighs it over time, this would reward environmentally conscious players who recover as much as possible

I was thinking almost the same thing. There's been a long-standing combat aviation program called DART (Downed Aircraft Recovery Teams); perhaps Squad (or somebody who knows how to add modded contracts) could add in a new DART strategy that either compliments the Recovery Transponder Fitting or replaces it entirely.

You could compliment the RTF strategy by adding a DART strategy which increases recovery factors within a 250 km radius of the KSC, but adds a cost to reputation on recoveries farther away to simulate diplomatic complications due to international borders.

You could replace the RTF strategy with a DART strategy that does literally the opposite of transponder fittings: instead of smoothing out a gradient of recovery factors across the globe, increase that gradient with higher recovery factors within a range of the KSC and lower factors farther away -- this actually rewards players who take the time and effort to plan their deorbit burns to maximize recovery factors and penalizes them when they're too far off target.

The current RTF commitment feels more like a penalty for doing a proper deorbit plan, not to mention it's earned back a negative amount of funds after the 550k I wasted incorporating it. Went back to the save file and refunded my costs of recovery since it was nice enough to give me the percentage value. Then refunded myself the cost of the strategy, and added in the costs of the contracts that I would have been completing in the time it took to do all those maths, then added a commission for the effort, and another commission for the time it took to write this post, and oh look at all the money! I can afford to actually use a recovery transponder fitting strategy now!

[Arsonide]

The original strategy increased recovery rate, allowing you to be less accurate with your recoveries, but it increased launch costs by a percentage. This had two problems:

• The launch cost increased the cost of every part on the ship, despite a very low percentage of these parts actually being recovered. This meant that the profits from the better recovery almost never outweighed the launch cost increase.
  
• If you launched, it would take the increased launch cost, but if you immediately recovered on the pad, you would not receive this increase back. You'd lose funds.
  

So instead of increasing the launch cost, we simulate this increased cost by decreasing the maximum recovery rate. This way the penalty doesn't hit until the actual recovery, and does not affect any parts other than the ones recovered. It doesn't affect KSC itself, but the moment you cross out of KSC, you are subject to this penalty. It does allow you to recover further away, but only up to a certain point. By increasing the minimum and decreasing the maximum, you are essentially "watering down" your recovery rate over the whole planet.

[Barking Sands]

...instead of increasing the launch cost, we simulate this increased cost by decreasing the maximum recovery rate. This way the penalty doesn't hit until the actual recovery, and does not affect any parts other than the ones recovered.

I appreciate the fact that this enhanced RTF strategy is a vast improvement on the old model. What I dislike about the model in general (old & new) is that it focuses its penalties on the recovery of vessels landed near the KSC.

Using this strategy means actively avoiding the continent where KSC is located when deorbiting just to avoid taking an extra hit on recovery (technically, it's to "get your money's worth" when paying out of the ear for this strategy -- it takes quite a few recoveries to get an increased part value of 550,000 funds from the RTF strategy).

Personally, if I had this strategy implemented at the start of my career and I had to earn 750 reputation, 550,000 funds, and level up my Admin facility to level 3 all in order to get rid of it: Totally would be top priority. I would love to see a strategy that is exactly the opposite of what the RTF commitment does: increase recovery rate gradient more than the default so that there is a higher percentage recovery factor over a slightly larger area near the KSC, and then it drops off much more rapidly to penalize you when you plop down vessels on other continents, poles, or far-side oceans. (DART strategy)

Edited May 9, 2015 by Barking Sands

[JoCRaM]

does debris still need a probe core to be recoverable? In which case the transponder cost should have been a % increase on the cost of probe cores (and a weight increase please. Personally I think a responder transponder part would be better)

[Vorg]

No, you don't need probe cores.

[Vorg]

I was thinking this was the recovery mod thread which doesn't require probe cores to recover parts that move out of physics range. If playing stock, before, even if a part had a core, if it moved out of physics range before reaching the ground, but still in atmo, it was deleted. I don't know about parts without cores when not using the mod.

[sal_vager]

Physics range is higher in an atmosphere now, 22.5km, so as long as debris lands before going out of range it should be recoverable.