Distances?

[Primal68]

I have a mission to put a satellite in orbit around kerbin nonproblem, but it has to have combined rating of 900 G.  All my antennas  show either Km, Mm, or Gm.  I have looked and this is all I can find on them pasted below. So my question is about G it is billions of what? how does it compare to GM

m=metres
G=billions
K=Thousand
M=Million
T=Trillion
Gm= 1 billion metres

[jimmymcgoochie]

900G is 900 gigametres, all antennae in KSP are rated in (multiples of) metres. Getting a combined rating of 900G will be tricky though as there are diminishing returns for adding more dishes- two 100G dishes produce less than 200G and it gets worse the more dishes you add. Spamming a load of 88-88s is probably your best bet, if you don’t have that then you have no hope at all of completing the contract- RA-100s are too big and heavy to add a lot of them and nothing else has the range to get up to 900G.

You might want to look at a mod with better communications tech- near future exploration would be a good one as it has signal reflectors that can boost the range of any dish that points at them by a fixed amount, meaning even a small, weak antenna can be boosted to considerable power with a big reflector and you can stick a lot of those onto one craft without worrying too much about cost or weight.

[Superfluous J]

That sounds like a non-stock contract. I've never seen one from the base game that cared how strong your antennas were.

[KerikBalm]

11 hours ago, Primal68 said:

m=metres
G=billions
K=Thousand
M=Million
T=Trillion
Gm= 1 billion metres

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefixes

k = Kilo = 1,000 (one Thousand)

M = Mega = 1,000,000 (one Million)

G = Giga = 1,000,000,000 (one Billion)

T =Tera = 1,000,000,000,000 (One Trillion)

P =Peta = 1,000,000,000,000,000 (One Quadrillion)

Its the same prefixes as you should be used to with computer hardware like GHz, Tb, etc...

 

[Snark]

Moving to Gameplay Questions.

19 hours ago, Primal68 said:

I have a mission to put a satellite in orbit around kerbin nonproblem, but it has to have combined rating of 900 G.  All my antennas  show either Km, Mm, or Gm.  I have looked and this is all I can find on them pasted below. So my question is about G it is billions of what? how does it compare to GM

As others have mentioned, every antenna has a rating.  The ratings are in meters, but they usually leave the "m" off.  So, a 100G antenna is rated for 100Gm range when talking to an antenna of the same power as itself.

The stock antennas' powers are listed here:

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/CommNet

The most powerful stock antennas in the game are the Communotron 88-88 (direct) and RA-100 (relay).  Each of those antennas is 100G.

However, it's important to understand that most antennas do not stack linearly.  If you need a combined rating of 900G, then using nine 100G antennas would not be enough.  You'd need 19 of the 100G antennas on the craft.

(There are mods that have more powerful antennas, but 100G is as high as the stock antennas go.)