[1.12.x] JX2Antenna v2.0.5: Giant 1000G antenna for big solar systems

[panarchist]

I absolutely LOVE this mod, and I'm using 4 of these on my Deep Space vessel to go to Cercani.  Unfortunately, it won't be enough when they get there since Cercani is ~7,500Gm from Kerbin, so I'll either need to build another one en route, or put a relay in the outer Kerbin system to get signal back.

Granted, also not entirely realistic since they don't all face the same direction.

[Gorby1]

On 2/14/2017 at 8:27 PM, Snark said:

For example, by a happy coincidence, just recently in the post above yours, @Gorby1 was commenting precisely that he was happy that this fix was being done to OPM with JX2Antenna.  So I assume it's working properly for him.  Gorby1, can you confirm?  Perhaps you and @NeuroticGamer can compare notes as to what's going on?

At the moment I'm not at home to verify this, but I was comparing the strengths of antennas when I found out about the OPM 4x strength increase and I'm 99% percent sure all of my antennas showed the correct stock strengths with both OPM and JX2 installed. I'll check again when I get home in a couple of hours.

Funny this should come up, I noticed something similar but different a few days ago; I have a custom MM config file that I use to make changes to mods without changing the mod files, for a bit more of a challenge I added a section to change the strength of the JX2 to 300G instead of 1000G (300000000000 instead of 1000000000000). When I started the game I was surprised to see that the JX2 strength was listed as 75G - which is, of course, 1/4 of the 300G I had entered. When I removed my changes, the strength was back to 1000G, the exact value in the JX2 cfg file. So it seems that the JX2 also receives the 1/4 power reduction if - and only if - the strength of the JX2 is modified from the mod's stock setting. Whether this is intended or not I don't know, but I changed the setting to 1200G instead, got the 300G I was wanting and then moved on.

And yes, I am thrilled about the removal of OPM's 4x strength increase! I understand why it's needed if OPM is your only mod but I was so upset that my early game was too easy that I started a new game.

[Gorby1]

On 2/15/2017 at 1:21 AM, panarchist said:

Granted, also not entirely realistic since they don't all face the same direction.

No no, that's a feature called "omnidirectional" 

[Gorby1]

@NeuroticGamer @Snark

I can confirm that the stock KSP antennas display the correct/stock range strength when viewed in the space center buildings and in-flight, with both OPM and JX2Antenna installed (along with 40 or 50 other mods). If it helps at all I'm using OPM v2.1.

[horace]

i like thisssssss

 

[Just Jim]

Wow.....  I seriously think I have to have this one..... 

[WuphonsReach]

Signal strength should probably be boosted up to 3.0-3.5 Tm (instead of 1.0) based on the part mass.  Which I realize is completely overpowered for the stock KSP solar system, but works well for OPM.

[Snark]

16 hours ago, WuphonsReach said:

Signal strength should probably be boosted up to 3.0-3.5 Tm (instead of 1.0) based on the part mass.

Compared with the RA-100, the JX2 is about 5 times the mass, and 10 times the power.  So as far as I'm concerned, it's reasonably on par.  I'm happy with it as it stands.

16 hours ago, WuphonsReach said:

Which I realize is completely overpowered for the stock KSP solar system

Well, no argument there; but the antenna as it currently stands is already overpowered for the stock solar system, so I'm not too concerned about that. 

16 hours ago, WuphonsReach said:

but works well for OPM.

Not an unreasonable request, but different folks like different things; it's basically impossible to please everyone.  As for me, I kinda like it the way it is right now (even for OPM), and 3T or 3.5T would feel overpowered to me.

Just to put things in perspective, let's compare "stock solar system, without JX2" to "OPM solar system, with JX2".

• Stock, without JX2:
  • Biggest distance is 127G.
  • Most powerful antenna is 100G, i.e. 79% of biggest distance.
  • Longest comm range without stacking (RA-100 to level-3 DSN) is 158G, i.e. 124% of biggest distance.
• OPM, with JX2:
  • Biggest distance is 689G.
  • Most powerful antenna is 1000G, i.e. 145% of biggest distance.
  • Longest comm range without stacking is the same, i.e. 145% of biggest distance.

So, the JX2 is already more powerful relative to the OPM system than the stock RA-100 is to the stock solar system.

That doesn't mean that it would be unreasonable for anyone to want more-- for example, some people might feel that "the RA-100 is underpowered for the stock system, so that shouldn't be used as a benchmark here."

However, my intent with the JX2 isn't to rebalance the game-- it's just to try to scale the comms with the size of typical modded solar systems.  I find that 1000G works pretty well with the three main modded solar systems I have experience with (OPM, New Horizons, Galileo's Planet Pack), and it's scaled comparably to stock.  So I'm happy with it as it is.

If there's a solar system out there that's a lot bigger than OPM, such that 1000G really doesn't cut it (e.g. the farthest distance is significantly bigger than a terameter)...  well, in that case I suppose it may be worthwhile to add a patch to this mod that boosts the JX2 power when that mod is running.  If someone's wanting that for a specific mod, please let me know the details!

That being said, though, it's easy to tweak the power upwards for anyone so inclined. 

[Warzouz]

@Snark,

I'm using this nice mod and OPM even I'm only around Duna, where I'm laying 2 com sats in opposite 20 days polar orbit as I did around Kerbin. The sats have only your big antenna, a RCS 001 guidance unit (advance prob core) a 4000ec battery and big solar panels.

Strangely, my duna satellites (basic science and Scansat) don't connect to those Duna relays but directly to Kerbin. I'm at 2% control. Both satellites carries a Probodobodyne OKTO2 and a DTS-M1 .

On the other hand, when I transmitted science (mainly gravity experiments), I got 100% science from it. And I don't recall any issues when I was around Kerbin.

I'm very surprised that it doesn't work. Have you any hints ?

 

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Warzouz said:

I'm very surprised that it doesn't work. Have you any hints ?

Yeah, it's annoying.  I see the same thing myself in my own games-- any ship that can link directly to KSC will do so, even if another path provides better signal strength.

Frankly, it looks like a bug to me.  I suspect someone just hard-coded "go straight to KSC if possible" on the assumption that "KSC will always be stronger than the best antenna", which mostly holds true in the stock game.  Other than getting Squad to fix the bug (assuming that's what it is), I don't know of any workaround.

[Calvin_Maclure]

16 minutes ago, Snark said:

Yeah, it's annoying.  I see the same thing myself in my own games-- any ship that can link directly to KSC will do so, even if another path provides better signal strength.

Frankly, it looks like a bug to me.  I suspect someone just hard-coded "go straight to KSC if possible" on the assumption that "KSC will always be stronger than the best antenna", which mostly holds true in the stock game.  Other than getting Squad to fix the bug (assuming that's what it is), I don't know of any workaround.

Is there not a way to specify which commsat you want to connect to? You can do this in RT and, in that way, you can force it to connect to a specific dish.

[Snark]

8 minutes ago, Calvin_Maclure said:

Is there not a way to specify which commsat you want to connect to? You can do this in RT and, in that way, you can force it to connect to a specific dish.

Nope, in stock CommNet everything is automatic. The game just automatically picks the best path. In RemoteTech terminology, every single antenna is an omni.

[Warzouz]

24 minutes ago, Snark said:

Yeah, it's annoying.  I see the same thing myself in my own games-- any ship that can link directly to KSC will do so, even if another path provides better signal strength.

Frankly, it looks like a bug to me.  I suspect someone just hard-coded "go straight to KSC if possible" on the assumption that "KSC will always be stronger than the best antenna", which mostly holds true in the stock game.  Other than getting Squad to fix the bug (assuming that's what it is), I don't know of any workaround.

OK, thx for the reply. I fear I misunderstood something about antennas...

The strange thing is that science transmission is correctly calculated (I got 100% of it, instead of displayed 2% signal strength).  It's only the display in map view which is off. I'm a bit worried about probe control though. I'll tell you when my probes arrived on Dres.

 

[Snark]

5 minutes ago, Warzouz said:

I'm a bit worried about probe control though.

I expect probe control should be just fine.  Reason:  The game always tries to find a path. I don't think that that's bugged.  I think the only bug is that when it's deciding which path, it ignores other options when a direct KSC link happens to be available.  So if you get far enough away that KSC can't be connected to, the game will route elsewhere, if there's a path.

For example, in my current game, I've got "extra ground stations" turned off, which means signals to KSC need to go straight to KSC itself, not just Kerbin in general.  My ships on the outskirts of the system have two "choices" when talking to Kerbin:

• A JX2 in high polar Kerbin orbit, which is always visible
• KSC itself, which is visible half the time (if the correct side of Kerbin is facing towards the ship)

I find that when KSC is facing away from my ship, I've got a nice strong 100% signal, since the path is forced to go through the JX2.  But when KSC is facing me, my signal strength drops to a feeble remnant, because my ship ignores the Kerbin JX2 and goes straight to the (weaker) KSC.

[Warzouz]

I think this qualifies as a bug...

[Warzouz]

After more testing, it seems like a memory bug. When I start the game, the path is correct, but after jumping from scene to scene (ship to ship), paths aren't calculated correctly.

[juanml82]

I'm using this antenna with KSPI and NFT (well, and plenty of other stuff). In any case, I made a ship with two of these antennas (a tug carrying two probes), the tug is powered by a KSPI gas core nuclear engine.

The antennas, even when retracted, keep absorbing thermal power the moment I turn on the engine's reactor, so no matter how many radiators I attach to the ship, the reactor keeps overheating. The only way to keep the reactor from overheating is to block the thermal power "tank" in the antennas right click menu. Here's the craft file

http://www.mediafire.com/file/qckpj97cc54gnr7/Surveyor_3.craft

[JadeOfMaar]

Hey @Snark By chance does this mod support upscaled systems? 10x Galileo's Planet Pack is getting a lot of attention and someone has started complaining about having to repeatedly patch the stock antennae to keep up with the scales.

[steedcrugeon]

5 hours ago, juanml82 said:

I'm using this antenna with KSPI and NFT (well, and plenty of other stuff). In any case, I made a ship with two of these antennas (a tug carrying two probes), the tug is powered by a KSPI gas core nuclear engine.

The antennas, even when retracted, keep absorbing thermal power the moment I turn on the engine's reactor, so no matter how many radiators I attach to the ship, the reactor keeps overheating. The only way to keep the reactor from overheating is to block the thermal power "tank" in the antennas right click menu. Here's the craft file

http://www.mediafire.com/file/qckpj97cc54gnr7/Surveyor_3.craft

This is one that should be pitched at @FreeThinker in the KSPI development thread, not here. I don't have the foggiest how to fix that issue (pretty sure @Snark won't either) as it doens't stem from JX2 Antenna Mod. Sorry I can't be of more help.

2 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Hey @Snark By chance does this mod support upscaled systems? 10x Galileo's Planet Pack is getting a lot of attention and someone has started complaining about having to repeatedly patch the stock antennae to keep up with the scales.

If I may be so bold, as with @Snark's indicator lights; if the community want to submit patches for the JX2 to be compatible with other  mods I'm pretty sure he'd be happy to integrate them.

Edited April 1, 2017 by steedcrugeon

[JadeOfMaar]

4 minutes ago, steedcrugeon said:

If I may be so bold, as with @Snark's indicator lights; if the community want to submit patches for the JX2 to be compatible with other  mods I'm pretty sure he'd be happy to integrate them

Ah, cool. I may do just that.  

[Poodmund]

On 2017-3-30 at 2:45 PM, Snark said:

Yeah, it's annoying.  I see the same thing myself in my own games-- any ship that can link directly to KSC will do so, even if another path provides better signal strength.

Yes, CommNet will always directly connect to the KSC at a first or next hop basis when it can over any other connection even at a weaker signal strength. I asked RoverDude about this a while back and he confirmed that it was too avoid getting stuck in endless calculation loops. For example, if you had a LKO relay network around Kerbin's that all had RA-100 antenna's on, the signal could get bounced around them for an ordinate amount of hops before the signal strength dropped 1%. This would cause unnecessary bloating as the signal would then have to be calculated to any other path at this same time and you end up with a runaway exponential amount of massive calculation paths that KSP is having to do each reference frame.

It's unfortunate but i understand why this is the way the game handles the connection, its just really annoying for science transmission... however, DMagic's Science Relay mod is perfect for getting around this issue.

[Snark]

19 hours ago, juanml82 said:

I'm using this antenna with KSPI and NFT (well, and plenty of other stuff). In any case, I made a ship with two of these antennas (a tug carrying two probes), the tug is powered by a KSPI gas core nuclear engine.

The antennas, even when retracted, keep absorbing thermal power the moment I turn on the engine's reactor, so no matter how many radiators I attach to the ship, the reactor keeps overheating. The only way to keep the reactor from overheating is to block the thermal power "tank" in the antennas right click menu.

Sorry, as @steedcrugeon already mentioned, no clue about this.  Bear in mind that, thermally speaking, there's nothing special about JX2Antenna at all.  It's just a part, like any other part.  You can see in the config file here that it doesn't do anything with thermal stuff at all, other than specifying maxTemp and skinMaxTemp (and the values that it specifies are fairly typical ones).  For example, it doesn't specify thermal conductivity or anything-- it just uses whatever the defaults are, like most KSP parts.

So whatever's going on here is purely something that KSPI and NFT are doing.  Since I've never used either of those mods, I don't have the slightest notion what may be going on-- your best bet would probably be to figure out which one of those mods is doing it, and then post in that mod's thread.

16 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Hey @Snark By chance does this mod support upscaled systems? 10x Galileo's Planet Pack is getting a lot of attention and someone has started complaining about having to repeatedly patch the stock antennae to keep up with the scales.

It doesn't do anything specifically, it just has the power that it does and that's that.  The only mod-specific patches that it has for dealing with modded solar systems are for undoing the things that OPM and GPP do to the stock antennas to make up for the fact that the 100G antennas don't reach to the outer planets.

Not sure why anyone would need to "repeatedly" patch stock antennae... it's just one simple MM config that would address all antennas (stock or otherwise).

For example, suppose you want to boost the range of all antennas by a factor of 10.  Just make a little .cfg file with Notepad or whatever, stick it somewhere in GameData, and put the following content in it:

PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleDataTransmitter]]:FINAL {
    @MODULE[ModuleDataTransmitter] {
        @antennaPower *= 10
    }
}

...that ought to do the trick.

My guess is that if there's a mod out there that greatly scales up the solar system (in whatever planet pack), it would probably make sense to put antenna-boosting patches there (e.g. like the above), rather than with the antennas themselves.

[FreeThinker]

On 1-4-2017 at 4:08 AM, juanml82 said:

I'm using this antenna with KSPI and NFT (well, and plenty of other stuff). In any case, I made a ship with two of these antennas (a tug carrying two probes), the tug is powered by a KSPI gas core nuclear engine.

The antennas, even when retracted, keep absorbing thermal power the moment I turn on the engine's reactor, so no matter how many radiators I attach to the ship, the reactor keeps overheating. The only way to keep the reactor from overheating is to block the thermal power "tank" in the antennas right click menu. Here's the craft file

http://www.mediafire.com/file/qckpj97cc54gnr7/Surveyor_3.craft

Found and fixed the problem

[Funtime60]

Something is up with this antenna. While admittedly I didn't check all 65 other mods, none seemed like it could account for this. All my antenna were at quarter values including the JX2. This was only resolved after removing the JX2 from the game. No clue whats happening behind the scenes.

[Snark]

31 minutes ago, Funtime60 said:

Something is up with this antenna. While admittedly I didn't check all 65 other mods, none seemed like it could account for this. All my antenna were at quarter values including the JX2. This was only resolved after removing the JX2 from the game. No clue whats happening behind the scenes.

Almost certainly it's JX2Antenna that's doing this.  Specifically, it's this patch here, which is designed to work with OPM by undoing OPM's 4x buff to antenna strengths.  It undoes that 4x patch by cutting the power of all antennas by a factor of 4, to cancel it out.

Obviously, it would be bad if it did that all the time.  It's important that this "divide by 4" patch should only be applied if OPM happens to be installed.  That's why the patch starts with this line:

@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleDataTransmitter]]:AFTER[OPM]

...the :AFTER[OPM] bit means, "run this after OPM finishes doing its thing, and only run this if OPM is present."

It sounds to me like what's happening here is that you don't actually have OPM installed, but for some reason ModuleManager thinks you still have it installed.

By any chance do you have an empty or otherwise malformed "OPM" folder sitting in your GameData directory?  For example, this would happen if you installed OPM in the past, and then went to "uninstall" it by deleting the contents of the OPM folder but not deleting the OPM folder itself.  ModuleManager bases its judgment of "is OPM installed?" on whether that folder exists, regardless of whether the folder actually has anything in it.

If that's what's going on here, then the way you fix it is to just delete that empty OPM folder.  Moral of the story is, to "uninstall" a mod you really need to delete the folder itself, not just the stuff inside it.

If that's not what's happening, then something else is going on that I'd need to look into.  But I'd like to check that, first.  Sounds a lot like what @NeuroticGamer ran into (see his post a little earlier in this thread).