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(Drop Support )[1.6.1] Antenna Helper : Math your Antenna Range and Signal Strength [v1.0.6] (29 Jan 2019)

Li0n

By Li0n
in KSP1 Mod Releases

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Gordon Dry

Gordon Dry

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Posted (edited)

@Li0n now I have the next opportunity to check this, because actually I send a quadruple Sat deployer to Mun ...

I set the "Flight and MapView Seconds Between GUI Update" to 0 as you suggested.

Edit:

So, it looks a little better but I can't finally say that it's really better because the "2.5 km range issue" still exists and I guess when this is fixed then the performance also gets better.

Edited by Gordon Dry
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Gordon Dry

Gordon Dry

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@Li0n I loaded a vessel in Mun orbit that has no other vessel nearby (so not the 2.5 km range issue).

No AH icon and this was written to the log: 

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at AntennaHelper.Link..ctor (AntennaHelper.Relay transmitter, AntennaHelper.Relay relay) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at AntennaHelper.LinkPath.SetLinks () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at AntennaHelper.LinkPath..ctor (.Vessel v) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at AntennaHelper.AHFlight.SetRelayList () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at AntennaHelper.AHFlight+<StartSecond>d__0.MoveNext () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at UnityEngine.SetupCoroutine.InvokeMoveNext (IEnumerator enumerator, IntPtr returnValueAddress) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
 
(Filename:  Line: -1)

Full log and full craft as it was at launch:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zlruyszkasb2dj3/2018-06-02_1 KSP.log.7z?dl=1

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JH4C

JH4C

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Posted
1 hour ago, General Apocalypse said:

Silly question here but won't a 100G antenna with a with a fully upgraded tracking station cover any place in the Kerbol system ?

Or is this mod for sending out probes before you have those improved antennas ?

That, or any of the numerous enhanced solar system mods. If you start adding extra planets, or even extra stars with their own planetary systems, the default antennae soon run out of steam and you need to look at building relays to communicate back to Kerbin. Also, bigger antennae need more power to operate, and if you're a fan of tiny probes there's a real danger of exhausting your available power reserves before you can complete a transmission; it's much nicer to find that out before spending years in-game getting the probes into their positions - assuming you retain control for long enough to manage that!

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General Apocalypse

General Apocalypse

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Sounds fair - didn't knew antenna power was a sum of all antennas on a vehicle. As for control I kind of just imagine that automatic high level probes can remember to execute some manuvers without holding a direct line of contract , IRL we do that quite a lot since antenna issues are much tougher for deep space missions.

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Li0n

Li0n

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17 hours ago, General Apocalypse said:

Silly question here but won't a 100G antenna with a with a fully upgraded tracking station cover any place in the Kerbol system ?

Not sure every place is covered with a 100% signal strength, important if you plan on transmitting science.

And this is true only if you use the stock range settings, which are, IMHO, very OP. I personally set it between 0.1 and 0.2 (Antenna Helper do account for it ;) )

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General Apocalypse

General Apocalypse

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4 minutes ago, Li0n said:

Not sure every place is covered with a 100% signal strength, important if you plan on transmitting science.

And this is true only if you use the stock range settings, which are, IMHO, very OP. I personally set it between 0.1 and 0.2 (Antenna Helper do account for it ;) )

Well you made this so I'll take your word for it. I am in the process of making a contract pack that features a 140 x 106 km orbit for a beyond Eeloo deep space relay network contract so eventually I might run into some relevant data to share.

In regard to the comm network being OP , why do you say that ? I am a huge fan of realism but given the gargantuan power of surface based radio telescopes I wouldn't have suspected a oversimplification of the comm network rather just a multiplication of bandwidth so the player dosen't sit in front of the PC for 5 hours while the probe is sending a single photo.

What's your take on this ?

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AVaughan

AVaughan

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26 minutes ago, Li0n said:

Not sure every place is covered with a 100% signal strength, important if you plan on transmitting science.

According to the spreadsheet I use 1x RA-100 Relay antenna has only 10% signal strength to a fully upgraded Tracking station at their maximum separation.  So I'm not sure why you think that is OP?  What antennas do you use for Jool/Eeloo missions if you turn antenna range down to 0.2? 

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Li0n

Li0n

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Posted (edited)
On 6/2/2018 at 9:42 PM, Gordon Dry said:

No AH icon and this was written to the log:

AH can't initialize correctly. For whatever reason the info I needed by AH from the API are not available right at the start of the flight scene so I add a delay of 1 second before it starts (or re-starts if you switch to another vessel), maybe this delay is too low. I haven't run into issue with it but I did my test on an, almost, stock install and I got a beefy cpu. In this version I add a setting to change the delay, try to play with it see how it goes.

As for the 2.5km range issue I still don't see where it is coming from, the number of ship in-flight will make an impact, the number of relay will have a bigger impact but not the fact that they're physically loaded or not... That puzzled me...

35 minutes ago, General Apocalypse said:

In regard to the comm network being OP , why do you say that ? I am a huge fan of realism but given the gargantuan power of surface based radio telescopes I wouldn't have suspected a oversimplification of the comm network rather just a multiplication of bandwidth so the player dosen't sit in front of the PC for 5 hours while the probe is sending a single photo.

What's your take on this ?

It's more about gameplay than realism, as you said in your first post, once you have access to big enough antenna the commnet system feels pointless, lowering the range make it challenging more longer. Anyway there are as many KSP playstyle as there are KSP players ;)

Edit (because of auto-merge thingy...) :

7 minutes ago, AVaughan said:

What antennas do you use for Jool/Eeloo missions if you turn antenna range down to 0.2? 

Easy : MOAR antenna, not matter which, just MOAR ;)

I also like placing relay everywhere, not much interest in doing it if I can already reach the DSN.

Edited by Li0n
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General Apocalypse

General Apocalypse

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Posted
12 minutes ago, Li0n said:

It's more about gameplay than realism, as you said in your first post, once you have access to big enough antenna the commnet system feels pointless, lowering the range make it challenging more longer. Anyway there are as many KSP playstyle as there are KSP players ;)

I see your point , I also just remembered how tiny the Voyagers probes are and that we still talk with them. Now as the game progresses a lot of things do get left behind , as with IRL rocket development so there is no bypassing that.

Maybe by adding multiple foldable antennas one could make them act as a crude relay antenna - those things are a nightmare in terms of dV and we will always hate them.

 

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AVaughan

AVaughan

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Yeah I have the extra tracking stations turned off to force me to build a proper interplanetary relay network, and whenever I visit a planet for the first time in a new game, I send along at least one relay sat designed to establish a relay network that can reach kerbin, even if it is behind the sun.

But at 0.1 range multiplier even 12 x RA-100 relay antennas talking to another 12 x RA-100 antenna have only 10% signal strength at closest approach to Kerbin, and no connection a most of the time.  So do you also build a set of dedicated relay satellites between Duna and Dres?

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Li0n

Li0n

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5 hours ago, AVaughan said:

Yeah I have the extra tracking stations turned off to force me to build a proper interplanetary relay network, and whenever I visit a planet for the first time in a new game, I send along at least one relay sat designed to establish a relay network that can reach kerbin, even if it is behind the sun.

But at 0.1 range multiplier even 12 x RA-100 relay antennas talking to another 12 x RA-100 antenna have only 10% signal strength at closest approach to Kerbin, and no connection a most of the time.  So do you also build a set of dedicated relay satellites between Duna and Dres?

In my last save, if I remember correctly, for sending probes to Duna I've set 4 relays around the Sun, between Kerbin and Duna. And another (smaller) relay around Duna. No idea which antenna I used tho, it was sometimes ago.... I do have the ground station on tho.

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Li0n

Li0n

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1 minute ago, Gordon Dry said:

@Li0n setting slider 1 to 0 and slider 2 to 2.5s seems to have solved the issue.

But I will investigate further.

Good to hear. If you can, try to reduce the start delay (second slider) until the issue come back, I'll use this value as the default.

First slider is not related to this issue, I mentioned it as a way to troubleshoot the 2.5km range thingy.

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Gordon Dry

Gordon Dry

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About the 2.5 km range issue:
So, I got another bunch of relay sats deployed at Minmus, and also with the 2nd slider set to 10s I have the issue that the icon disappears.

It's another issue, but just wanted to mention.

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Li0n

Li0n

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@Gordon Dry thanks again for your report.

To summarize :

  1. AH fail to initialize, when you start a flight scene the icon never appear and this error appear in the log : issue 39 
    NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	AntennaHelper.Link..ctor (AntennaHelper.Relay transmitter, AntennaHelper.Relay relay)
	AntennaHelper.LinkPath.SetLinks ()
	AntennaHelper.LinkPath..ctor (.Vessel v)
	AntennaHelper.AHFlight.SetRelayList ()
	AntennaHelper.AHFlight+<StartSecond>d__0.MoveNext ()
	UnityEngine.SetupCoroutine.InvokeMoveNext (IEnumerator enumerator, IntPtr returnValueAddress)
  2. AH crash when a new vessel (only relay ?) appear, the icon disappear at the time of the staging event. issue 40
  3. Low fps when there are multiple vessels (relays ?) in physic range. issue 41

1 & 2 will be fixed in the big rewrite I planned to do, will take some time...

For 3, again, I don't see what I can do about it, we'll re-test once the re-write is done, see what's what...

@Gordon Dry can you confirm that a reload (F5/F9) do solve 1 and 2 ?

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Gordon Dry

Gordon Dry

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1 hour ago, Li0n said:

can you confirm that a reload (F5/F9) do solve 1 and 2 ?

I will check.

Edit: ofc I can only do this in a situation when

  1. the AH icon disappears
  2. it's a non-critical situation where saving even is possible
Edited by Gordon Dry
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Gordon Dry

Gordon Dry

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So, after F5/F9 the icon still did not reappear (Apollo orbiter, just after undocking LEM after returning from Mun surface). 

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at AntennaHelper.Link..ctor (AntennaHelper.Relay transmitter, AntennaHelper.Relay relay) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at AntennaHelper.LinkPath.SetLinks () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at AntennaHelper.LinkPath..ctor (.Vessel v) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at AntennaHelper.AHFlight.SetRelayList () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at AntennaHelper.AHFlight+<StartSecond>d__0.MoveNext () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at UnityEngine.SetupCoroutine.InvokeMoveNext (IEnumerator enumerator, IntPtr returnValueAddress) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
 
(Filename:  Line: -1)

 

Edit:

After leaving the 2.5 km range, a F5/F9 also didn't bring the icon back.

It did - but not after 10s (I set the slider in the settings to 10s) - it was about 20s ... and the physics time ratio was about 95% so that wasn't the issue.

Edited by Gordon Dry
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Ruedii

Ruedii

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Posted (edited)
On 5/28/2018 at 11:33 AM, Li0n said:

Thanks for the suggestion :) Maybe it's possible to change the stock info/line of the right click menu, I'll prefer that other than adding stuff. Instead of showing the "Antenna Rating" I could display the actual power of the antenna and/or the power of the vessel. And replace the "(Combinable)" (or not) by something a bit more descriptive. 

 As for the distance from relay and signal strength those info are already in the right click menu of the pod (I guess because they are about the whole vessel, not just an antenna).

It's a good idea but it's not high on my priority list, so don't expect it any time soon ;)

I meant the one when you right click on the part in flight.

However, yeah, added info in the VAB part info box would be nice as well.

Edited by Ruedii
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  • 2 weeks later...
Neofito

Neofito

Posted
Posted (edited)

Stupid question, but whats the name of the mod in CKAN? I can not find it. Is the first time im usin CKAN, so im pretty sure im missing something, ahahahahah.

 

EDIT: ok, i found it, but i can not install it 0_o'

 

7OWPCBX.png
Edited by Neofito
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