Orbital data relay

[KSACheese]

Let me elaborate the title. Say you have landed a spacecraft on the surface of Eve, but have little to no fuel to get back. Fortunately, you landed on Eve with the assistance of your Eve station/mothership. This mothership has a science lab, while your landed spacecraft does not. If you could send data up to the science lab in orbit and research the data received from the ground, it would yield a higher science gain without the need for a return craft or giant, lag creating landers. Tell me what you think!

[mattinoz]

So it would be similar to the way the new relays will allow transfer pilot skills?

[pandaman]

If the science rewards are better than transmission direct from surface, but worse than getting data/samples up to the lab before transmitting then yes that makes sense. Especially for surface samples.

[stratvox]

I am fully in agreement with this. Furthermore, it'd be good to be able to relay reports from one orbital science lab to another. I have a scilab in both low and high orbit around Kerbin, it'd be great if they could relay the reports they gather to each other, even if you account for data loss in transmission. You could even have them be able to relay the same report more than once. Something like take a temperature reading, relay it to another lab with losses, then take it again, and relay it again with further losses, and so on. This even makes sense from a strictly scientific point of view; more readings allow for better specificity in the data, so multiple readings should be able to result in "better" data for various labs to work on. This can be modelled by having each further report result in less data for the target lab... as more readings are done, it will permit the lab to better hone in on accurate results resulting in more science.

Another nice thing would be to be able to have readings in both low and high orbit work on some other specifics of the situation. For example... for temperature, is Kerbol occluded by whatever body is being orbited? Gravity readings from the seismic accelerometer could be considered useful when taken in different scenarios: is the Mun on this side or the other side of Kerbin? Is Minmus? Are those bodies in line with Kerbin, Kerbol, or are they off at right angles? I could see breaking up the positioning into 90 degree quadrants, meaning there are six positions for each satellite of a celestial body being orbited, each of which can then be used to better quantify the data produced... After all, when you're in orbit, you're not in zero gravity, you're in micro gravity, so having those kinds of values be quantifiable and therefore relevant to research make a lot of sense. The barometer could be considered a particle counter when outside of an atmosphere, or perhaps a new instrument could be created that would perform that task; something like leave it on for a day and then count the number of particles encountered and use that as the basis for science back at the Space Centre as well as data for labs.

Another good thing about the production of these kinds of data could also be making both pilots and AI pods better pilots... better able to hold on to their vectors and so on. This could mean things like starting out something like the Hecs with a certain amount of error and having that error be reduced over time as better data about conditions in space are produced. It'd even be cool to be able to allow things like hitting certain benchmarks and then permitting the upload of new firmware for the various probe controllers making them better at their job as pilots, as well as perhaps better at processing data from instruments and transmitting them back home, resulting in higher science yields from their instrumentation upon transmission.