Remotetech. Oh Remotetech. What am I to do with you?

[OddFunction]

I've been on the fence about Remotetech for awhile now. I like the idea of putting satellites in geosynchronous orbit for communications, I like the idea of line-of-sight for satellites... it all sounds good, but I can't convince myself it won't just evolve into tediousness.

So I guess my question to anybody is did you like Remotetech? Did you uninstall it for any reason? Do any of you find it essential? I'm just asking because I have a lot of time invested in my career save and restarting is a big undertaking.

Any opinions would be nice.

Edit: Current Modlist = http://i.imgur.com/i2xcXlR.png

Edited June 2, 2015 by OddFunction

[soulsource]

I'll shamelessly quote my own Google+ post...

I've been playing with Remote Tech for some time, and I like it a lot, but:

The initial setup of relays is quite tedious, at least in career mode, where you'll need multiple sets of relays, as longer range antennas aren't available from the start. On the other hand if you're playing Realism Overhaul, you'll get the Deep Space Network from the beginning, meaning that initial setup is reasonably short, and usually having some probes in low earth orbit is enough. Nevertheless, in Realism Overhaul most probes will use RCS instead of reaction wheels, and the Remote Tech flight computer is using a lot of RCS fuel to keep the probe stable... A workaround is to use MechJeb, but opposed to the Remote Tech flight computer, MechJeb will only work while a radio connection exists...

[FleshJeb]

They don't even need to be geosynch. ;-) I loved RT, it was fun to experiment with and plan for. I finally had to quit because I play on a potato, so any more than 20 flights and things start slowing down. I'm excited to try Antenna Range, which is like RT-lite.

I don't think you have to restart your career if you uninstall it. Just delete or move the DLL file. I did this for a Sandbox save, and it allowed me to keep craft that already had RT parts (which are fantastic).

[katateochi]

I don't like RemoteTech, I love it!! But that said, I've not used it for a while because I've been playing pure stock recently. But when playing modded games it's one of my must have mods.

[anarkhon]

cant play without it,im fall love with RT at first sigth

[hbkmog]

I played it but now I'm thinking about stopping using it. It's fun if you play it the first time around. It feels great when you set up your first communication network. However it gets old and tedious when you do that the fifth time as you are basically repeating the same thing over and over. Another fatal flaw of this mod is that due to the game engine and scale of universe in this game, unlike real world, your satellites will drift within years and you have yo readjust them again. It becomes a chore when you have multiple network setup.

Don't get me wrong. I like the mod but it's just not sustainable if you play for a long period of time.

[Alshain]

I'm currently on my first RT career and I haven't found them tedious at all. Definitely don't need to be geosync, I prefer 650km for Kerbin because then the communotron 16 will reach everything in LKO. At most they add a mission or two per body if done correctly (depending on whether you want a polar network or not). Sattelites can take decades to fall out of sync so it doesn't require a lot of upkeep once they are in place, but you do have to get their orbital periods correct. Also, 650km is very close for a 3 sat network around Kerbin. Higher will be easier, but then you lose the cheap antenna ability.

Edited June 2, 2015 by Alshain

[Kerb Johnson]

I stick comm gear on all the satellite contracts I get. Eventually sheer volume of spammed satellites gives me constant coverage, paid for by my launch customers.

[LittleBlueGaming]

I've played with it a bit, and tbh it's one of my favorite mods. KSP strikes a fine balance between being a fun game and an ultra-realistic simulator, but for me, RT just makes the game a bit more immersive and full-fledged.

- - - Updated - - -

I played it but now I'm thinking about stopping using it. It's fun if you play it the first time around. It feels great when you set up your first communication network. However it gets old and tedious when you do that the fifth time as you are basically repeating the same thing over and over. Another fatal flaw of this mod is that due to the game engine and scale of universe in this game, unlike real world, your satellites will drift within years and you have yo readjust them again. It becomes a chore when you have multiple network setup.

Don't get me wrong. I like the mod but it's just not sustainable if you play for a long period of time.

My first network I put up, I had everything to within 0.02 seconds, closer to 0.01. That little bit of fine tuning makes all the difference, and I think it would have been about 15 kerbal years before I would have needed to adjust it.

[Alshain]

I was just talking about this in the RT thread last night, but for fine tuning:

1. Small changes to the orbit to gain or lose time to the neighboring satellite (unless you are just way off).

2. Don't use too big of an engine. If you have too much thrust, it makes it hard to fine tune without overshooting. Ant engines with a few batteries and 4-5 Oscar B's make a good satellite. 48-7S are good too but a little strong.

3. Use thrust limiter to fine tune further. Drop the thrust as low as you can for the final adjustment. hbkmog suggests RCS as a low thrust option too, but of course that would require more parts and fuel unless you built an all-RCS satellite.

4. The higher, the better, to a point. You want to get your network as high as you can with the antennas you want to use. This will leave more of a gap between your line of sight and the planet. Use this tool to plan.

5. Avoid asymmetrical satellites. I say this because at the small size these will be, it really throws mass off. My first sats you see below have only one DTS antenna and that made it really hard to control. Even if you never activate it, go ahead and spend the cash and add a second one to the other side. In the future I will not do that again.

Satellite

Network (6 sats, 650km, equatorial & polar, some ScanSats with coms too)

To the Mun

Edited June 2, 2015 by Alshain

[Sma]

I've been using RT for quite ahwile. I consider it a must have when playing. As for it being tedious, I can see that, but in the past I haven't had much problems with it. I usually launched 3 comm sats at a time, put the launch craft in an orbit with 4 hour orbital period, and released comm sats each time the launcher came to geosync AP, switched to the released sat, and circularized. Now in 1.0.2 it is a little bit tougher without the communtron 32, but can still be done as long as you have enough of the first dish you get on each sat, on to point at the sat in front, one to point at the sat behind, and at least one other for active vessel.

As others have said, use the sat contracts to help spam comm sats, or put probe cores, ants/dishes and solar on stages that will be left in kerbin orbit during other missions and it shouldn't be a problem.

I need to replace my geosync network with 3 new sats, now that I have the 32 ant. Although I could use KAS/KIS to go up and switch antennas i guess, but might just be easier to launch a new network lol.

Oh as for deep space, You could do a comm relay. Right now I've got one in orbit between the Mun and Minmus, with docking ports on it so as I need I can add more/longer range dishes to it.

Also, if you use kOS or...."meh" jeb... it makes it easier to get things in position, and helps with the "boring" repetitive launches. At one time I made a kOS program that launched 3 sats on one launcher, got AP to geosync altitude, then made the orbital period 4 hours, and it would release a sat each time it came around to AP. Of course I had to manually switch to the released sat an circularize, but it still made it much easier.

Edited June 2, 2015 by Sma

[Venusgate]

I agree that the techtree is not conducive to realistic satallite networks w/ RT. Try StockRT, which takes away all the added antennae and boosts your initial comm 16 to 5Mm, making it a reasonable geosync antennae

[DoToH]

I love RT. Try it and you'll love it too. Best results if used along with a life support mod (I didn't see any LS mod in your screenshot).

[Goddess Bhavani]

I enjoy the complexity of RT but I uninstalled it as having a huge number of redundant comsat links in low orbit murders my framerates on an ultra low voltage laptop processor.

I switched to AntennaRange which has similar enforced antenna diversity and limited transmission range, but doesn't need to simulate all of the (redundant) commlinks in real time. You just need to have contact with a signal relay with enough range to send data back to Kerbin / send control signals to probes and that's it.

[Mischief]

Use RCS. You use 2 O-10 monoprop engines around a probe core, an FL-R25 monoprop tank and a fore-aft rcs thruster, plus some solar panels and batteries and you've got an awesome, cheap sat with often 2K+ of dV. I generally have 6 of them radially mounted on a planetary expedition ship that also serves as an interplanetary communications hub (IP-COMM) with a 2nd IP-COMM sat.

Go to, for example, Duna. Pop 3 for Duna and 3 for Ike (if you want to have a mining outpost on Ike, which I recommend). Leave the engine + solar cells + interplanetary comm dishes 'body' as one IP-COMM sat and disconnect the nose-mounted engine + tank + panels/battery/big dish probe to move into opposing orbit for the other. This gives you 2 big sats with big interplanetary dishes that you put in 2,000k orbit on opposing sides. They connect to your 3-sat Duna and 3-sat Ike nets. This gives you a perpetual interplanetary network back to Kerbin.

You know you are RT-savvy when you have a huge comm-relay in a solar orbit, 45 degrees ahead of Kerbin. This lets it relay comms around the Sun when you end up in a counter-weight position to the planet you've got your automated mining or exploration missions going on with.

At the moment though I don't have RT. It's a lot of extra work and cost to do well. I play with the whole suite of USI mods (colony, karbonite, etc) plus EPL. I want to get everything else worked out before I add the complexity that RT creates.

[RainDreamer]

My starting stratergy for remote tech is simple: spam cheap omni relay satellites. I design satellites that can be stacked one on another, each under 3k (and that is accounting for aesthetic instead of using barebone design which can be even cheaper). Then I stack them up and launch them all in one shot to low orbit with a manned vehicle around the equatorial orbit. Precision doesn't matter much, since I has a lot of them. Once that is up, the rest is much simpler since you now at least has signal around the planet. Repeat for a polar orbit and you get short range full coverage.

[Alshain]

I enjoy the complexity of RT but I uninstalled it as having a huge number of redundant comsat links in low orbit murders my framerates on an ultra low voltage laptop processor.

You do know there is a button to turn them off, right?

[clivman]

RT+HyperEdit=Win

[FancyMouse]

My fine-tune method: Ant engine+5.5 thrust limit+manual thrust control, which works way better than RCS (remember you're multiplying 5.5% with some other 1~5%-ish multiplier, where for RCS you don't have the last multiplier). Needless to say you can use the same LFO engine to give you enough dV to do other stuff (e.g. rocket just shoot the satellite to a specific altitude and satellite itself is responsible for circularizing w/o additional parts/mass).

There is also an option of not burning exact prograde/retrograde but the error is already getting big so often I don't need this method, but this can be an option if you happened to bring a nontrivial engine or RCS with the satellite.

[everything-is-nominal]

I always play with RT, i can't play without it, even if sometime, putting sattelites in orbit seems to be a bit redundant...

Now it's true that it's sometime a big shame that we get the big dishes at the end of the tech tree, but that's not a big deal for me since i sometime do spacetravel without any communication device ^^.

For the problem of sattelite not staying in a precise order, i always put like 6 sat in prograde, and 6 others in retrograde around kerbin, i never had any big problems that way.

[Beale]

I've been on the fence about Remotetech for awhile now. I like the idea of putting satellites in geosynchronous orbit for communications, I like the idea of line-of-sight for satellites... it all sounds good, but I can't convince myself it won't just evolve into tediousness.

So I guess my question to anybody is did you like Remotetech? Did you uninstall it for any reason? Do any of you find it essential? I'm just asking because I have a lot of time invested in my career save and restarting is a big undertaking.

Any opinions would be nice.

Edit: Current Modlist = http://i.imgur.com/i2xcXlR.png

Tried Molniya orbits? Easier to set up that geosynchronous, don't need maintenance and provide 99% of the connection time.

Four leaf clover, and a few polar orbiting satellites, something like this.

In my own experience, there isn't any going back after trying remote tech. It doesn't feel right (personally) to fly a probe happily around on the far side of the Mun without a relay setup.

Plus, it gives nice reasons to add ground stations, random satellites, etc.

[hbkmog]

I've played with it a bit, and tbh it's one of my favorite mods. KSP strikes a fine balance between being a fun game and an ultra-realistic simulator, but for me, RT just makes the game a bit more immersive and full-fledged.

- - - Updated - - -

My first network I put up, I had everything to within 0.02 seconds, closer to 0.01. That little bit of fine tuning makes all the difference, and I think it would have been about 15 kerbal years before I would have needed to adjust it.

Oh yeah I can achieve that too. But when you do that for the 5th or 10th time, it gets tedious, especially when you try to set up a network on other planet with long signal delay.

[Alshain]

Oh yeah I can achieve that too. But when you do that for the 5th or 10th time, it gets tedious, especially when you try to set up a network on other planet with long signal delay.

I play with the signal delay turned off. Mostly because I like to fly myself, I never touch the little control panel RT has.

[DuoDex]

This thread has been moved to General Add-On Affairs.

[OddFunction]

This thread has been moved to General Add-On Affairs.

Mighty' decent of ya partner.

Thanks to everyone for the opinions. I have decided to try AntennaRange to see if I even like the dynamic. I appreciate all the input