How does remote probe control work?

[king of nowhere]

I've been playing this game for years, and yet remote probe control still eludes me.

I am trying to make a rendez-vous between two unmanned vehicles around Rhea, a moon of saturn.

One is the Fat Man stage. it has a okto2 core, it's equipped with 3 communotron 88-88 and one HG-5 relay. it has signal to Trypophobia, a manned ship around Iapetus. Trypophobia has a crew of 3, 1 pilot. none of them inside an actual command pod, I'm keeping them in hitchhicker containers for kerbalism reasons, but it doesn't seem to make a difference; trypophobia has no relay antennas.

The lander Clamp, instead, is equipped with two communotron 16. it's 500 m from Fat Man, and uncontrolled. It can sometimes pick up signals from Cylinder, another manned vessel (crew 6, 2 pilots) which also has relay antennas powerful enough to connect to earth. Clamp has no control.

Both Trypophobia and Cylinder have a RC-001S probe core.

Now the question is: why don't Clamp use Fat Man's HG-5 as relay to connect to Trypophobia?

Would slapping a Communotron 88-88 on Clamp (by eva construction as soon as I get back to a manned vessel, because I have to go to other moons too) help? How about a HG-5? Is it better to have both, or just the most powerful communotron 88-88 would do the trick in all situation?

 

Please, don't link the wiki page on probe control point. I am already familiar with it, and i'm still unsure on the details

[Echo__3]

When trying to relay a signal, only the relay antenna is used for calculating range. Relay and direct antenna do not stack this way. You are going to need some RA-100s to relay a signal from the outer planets.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Unless you have an RC-L01 Remote Guidance Unit (the 2.5m version), remote probe control only works for single-hop connections i.e. the vessel being remotely controlled needs a direct CommNet connection to the controlling vessel. Trypophobia can control Fat Man because the two are communicating directly via Fat Man's trio of 88-88 dishes, however Clamp's puny C16 antennae are far too weak to directly connect to Trypophobia so it won't be controllable even if Fat Man relays the signal.

The solution is to add a more powerful antenna to Clamp so that it can communicate directly to Trypophobia and be remotely controlled. It might also be able to be remotely controlled by Cylinder, assuming that ship has either an RGU or one of the crew modules (Mk1-3 command pod, Mk2 lander can or MEM) so the pilots can control it.

I'm surprised that Trypophobia is actually able to provide remote control at all, since according to the wiki page the controlling ship needs a relay antenna to serve as a probe control point. Are you sure there are no relays on it?

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

I'm surprised that Trypophobia is actually able to provide remote control at all, since according to the wiki page the controlling ship needs a relay antenna to serve as a probe control point. Are you sure there are no relays on it?

no relays, but there is a pilot on board.

[king of nowhere]

Well, I also discovered a bug in this. I discovered that in a subsequent mission Clamp had contact with Trypophobia, but not with Cylinder.

Which made no sense, because Clylinder was a lot closer than Trypophobia.

So I changed vessel to Cylinder, then changed back to Clamp, and TA-DAAAH! I got control.

Just another bug. #28 on the list I'm compiling.