Transmitting Science From MPL's

[The Flying Kerbal]

Believe it or not, but in the four years since I first played KSP I've never used a Mobile Processing Lab until now.

I normally don't bother with them, but the game I'm playing, a career using based around the Rusty Star Rockets mod and keeping non RSR parts to an absolute minimum, combined with only accepting contracts offered by RSR or SETI, and suddenly it's getting really hard getting more science.

So an RSR space station was launched with an MPL being an essential part of it, but now I've just realised I have to transmit the science produced in it, I can't just shove them into a capsule when I'm doing a crew rotation, and bring them back down.

My question is, what happens if I've too much science to transmit for the amount of EC on the station?  Can I set the antenna to allow partial for science, will it simply transmit what it can automatically and then stop until the batteries have time to recharge, or do I need to send a "power pack" to the station to boost the EC sufficiently to let me transmit all the science?

I suppose this is a stupid question, but like I said, I've never used this thing before and had planned to just take it back down to Kerbin on a capsule.

Thanks everyone.

[bewing]

Transmitting science takes a hell of a lot of EC. So yes, you can set it to do partial transmissions, but you will need to babysit the transmission realtime for hours and hours if you do.

[Superfluous J]

49 minutes ago, bewing said:

Transmitting science takes a hell of a lot of EC. So yes, you can set it to do partial transmissions, but you will need to babysit the transmission realtime for hours and hours if you do.

Assuming it's like other science, you should also be able to time warp to kick it in the ... uh... space suit. Yeah.

I partial-data transmit "actual science" all the time (I tend to forget batteries ) and find that time warping over 100x can help a lot in the transmission rate. Like, it can even make stuff complete without ever going partial.

[The Flying Kerbal]

Thanks everyone for the help!

[Elrond 5]

Why does Transmission of data seem unrealistic?  Requiring  a flaky ex-WD cadmium battery, constantly needing to be recharged.    Are Kerbal Physics so unnatural, if I could get to the "Moon" with my 70cms Transceiver I'm sure I could transmit on 1watt for 5hr to a single planet base Mbs => of data.

[Spricigo]

1 hour ago, Elrond 5 said:

Why does Transmission of data seem unrealistic? 

Well, it's a game.