How do I recover science from a mobile processing lab if I can't transmit?

[J534]

Hi everyone,

I have a mobile processing lab in orbit around Mun and Kerbin. I'm trying to figure out how to retrieve the science. Right now if I try to transmit I run out of power before the transmission is done. Is there any way to manually retrieve the science?

Thanks!

[Aegolius13]

As far as I know,  you can't take the results like a regular experiment.   You could try to land and recover the whole lab, but that's likely  gonna be hard if you did not build it for reentry. 

I think the easiest solution is going to be to send a small craft with some more batteries,  and dock to the lab.   If the lab has no docking ports, you can use the Klaw.

There also at least used to be an exploit where if you time warp,  power input from from your solar panels etc. increases with the warp,  but drain from transmission does not.  This let you maintain enough EC to finish.   I consider this fair game,  since in any realistic situation the lab could send the data in batches anyway.  But not sure if it still works. 

[James Kerman]

Not as far as I know however all is not lost if you have a docking port on board or have unlocked the claw.  Just add a battery pack to your vessel. 

How far through the transmission do you get? - this will give you a rough estimate of how much power you need to send up.

Another thing that might help is that different antennae have different transmission speeds - the early ones being the slowest.

If you are just short of power you can try to angle your solar panels to get the most light, turn off lighting, hibernate probe core, ect.

Edited December 10, 2017 by James Kerman
Ninja'd

[bewing]

I've never tried doing it, but the antennas have an option for partial transmission.

If you select that option, as I understand it, the antenna will go into a loop of waiting for a little power to be generated, then sending a little more data, until the transmission is complete.

And you will need to remain focused on that vessel for the entire time.

Alternatively, you can just pretend that you did that, and go into the Debug menu, and turn on Infinite EC until the transmission is complete.

 

[J534]

Thanks for the tips everyone. I wonder why the mobile processing lab doesn't allow for partial transmissions. I opted to cheat and alt-f12 one of them. Then I used the Klaw for the other.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

17 minutes ago, J534 said:

I wonder why the mobile processing lab doesn't allow for partial transmissions.

It does allow partial transmission, but it still needs an antenna to transmit with. The antenna is what does the "partial" or "full" transmission bit; the MPL has nothing to do with it and has no built in antenna afaik.

Edited December 10, 2017 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Plusck]

5 hours ago, Aegolius13 said:

There also at least used to be an exploit where if you time warp,  power input from from your solar panels etc. increases with the warp,  but drain from transmission does not.  This let you maintain enough EC to finish.   I consider this fair game,  since in any realistic situation the lab could send the data in batches anyway.  But not sure if it still works. 

This still works, but only if you can get warp up to the fourth or fifth level. That means you need enough batteries to cope with the transmission as you ramp up the warp, and you need to be in an orbit (or landed) which lets you set warp that high.

Roughly, I've found that this lets you send a full lab of science if you have about 2000 units of electricity in your batteries (out of the 4000 or more that you need in total).

[J534]

Quick and dirty space station courtesy of the Klaw!

[pioneer160]

I had this exact same problem after setting up stations around Kerbin, the Mun and Minimus. You can either just dock a ship with a lot of batteries, or you can add batteries on your next addition to the station.

[StrandedonEarth]

On 2017-12-10 at 2:35 PM, pioneer160 said:

I had this exact same problem after setting up stations around Kerbin, the Mun and Minimus. You can either just dock a ship with a lot of batteries, or you can add batteries on your next addition to the station.

Similar to this, if you have KIS/KAS, you send an engineer with some more batteries to slap on the MPL