Fairing and antenna's for rover capsules

[Alien21]

Hi guys.

There is a way to allow communications with any antenna inside a fairing  the I would made for rover capsules with Kerbin? I can't maintain deployed these antenna's from the outside and if I will close them, I will be unable to re-estabilished a contact with Kerbin, but if I would maintain them open inside a fairing shield after a certain distance became impossible maintain communication because" antenna can't communicate for obstacles (fairing)".

Someone can help me for solve it? thanks in advance

[jimmymcgoochie]

If you’re playing with the “require signal for control” setting switched on, you’ll probably need some kind of fixed antenna- stock KSP is limited to the Communotron 16S and the relay dishes, which are very weak and rather large and heavy respectively, so putting a relay dish on a probe of some kind that you drop off ahead of landing the rover might be a good idea. If you aren’t using that setting, just use an action group to deploy any antenna you like once the fairing is gone.

[Alien21]

On 3/28/2022 at 11:02 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

If you’re playing with the “require signal for control” setting switched on, you’ll probably need some kind of fixed antenna- stock KSP is limited to the Communotron 16S and the relay dishes, which are very weak and rather large and heavy respectively, so putting a relay dish on a probe of some kind that you drop off ahead of landing the rover might be a good idea. If you aren’t using that setting, just use an action group to deploy any antenna you like once the fairing is gone.

Thanks for the reply, I will test it soon!

[TheFlyingKerman]

IME any antenna other than the 16S on a rover breaks in no time.

[Alien21]

18 hours ago, TheFlyingKerman said:

IME any antenna other than the 16S on a rover breaks in no time.

Please no abbreviation if no correlated with KSP components. I can understand without issue english, but slangs and generic abbreviations aren't perfect with me (i'm Italian), so if you can explain what did you mean with IME it could be appreciated.

[jimmymcgoochie]

39 minutes ago, Alien21 said:

Please no abbreviation if no correlated with KSP components. I can understand without issue english, but slangs and generic abbreviations aren't perfect with me (i'm Italian), so if you can explain what did you mean with IME it could be appreciated.

IME = In My Experience.

[KerikBalm]

On 4/1/2022 at 5:13 PM, TheFlyingKerman said:

IME any antenna other than the 16S on a rover breaks in no time.

As mentioned, the fixed relays don't break easily like the deployable ones 

So use an RA-2 if a 16s isn't up to the task.

Consider having it decouple on landing to have a relay base station, and drive away with a 16s, or the deployable comm-16 (fairing is gone at this point), since RA-2s use a lot of power relative to a comm-16, it may be annoying to transmit science (assuming science gathering is the rover's function).

Sure, it's .15 tons instead of .015 for the 16s, but it's still not very heavy. It also takes 4x the amount of EC to transmit the same data, but hey, it solves the problem.

Of course, I think leaving a relay in orbit and using a 16s on the descent vehicle is the best option, it's what I do.