How do you build your relay network? Stylewise

[CrazyJebGuy]

I ask because I've always liked the chaotic style of antennas absolutely anywhere, but clearly it's a bit unpopular, at least from what I see online.

A lot of my relays around Kerbin are spent spages with antennas. When I do send out purpose built relays, I just fling them anywhere. Sometimes I attach them to SRBs and hope for the best. The only real organisation is naming them. Eg. "LKRS XXV-SP Gregory II", low kerkin (orbit) relay satellite, number 25, SP (spent stage), from the mission Gregory II.

My relay network, looks like this.

I like it, but just ask this because when I shared a savegame with a friend, this messy style bothered him so much he deleted it and made his own, it was 6 or 10 relays in perfectly circular, polar orbits around Kerbin, perfectly spaced. It seemed way too artificial to me, but he likes it. All the tutorials and questions are "hey how do I set up my satellites to be in perfect geosynchronous orbit" and the like. Functionally, both kinds of network work. My system simply relies on there be enough crap that something can always connect, and it has been very reliable. I think it's fun to just launch stuff whereever. I saw someone say to build a triangular, geosynchronous relay orbit around Minmus with one rocket, then crash the delivery rocket back to deorbit it. I thought he was crazy. De-orbit to clear it? Why? Attach another antenna and you've got an extra relay for free.

Now that I think about it, I totally have to send a relay mission to Duna, and I will surround the transfer stage with relays, then blow it up, like a hand grenade.

[Gargamel]

I don’t have the link on hand, but there are reasonant orbit calculators out there.   These will let you figure the math to:

Send a large probe to another planet with three comm satellites on it.  Then you find an orbital time that your apogee is exactly 1/3 (2/3?) of a circular orbit time at that apogee altitude.  When your mother probe reaches apogee, you release a comm sat and have it circularize.    Next apogee of the mother ship, rinse and repeat.      And again.    This will give you 3 sats equally spaced around the same orbit.   When it has launched all three comm sats, I then push the mother ship up to a very high altitude, high inclination orbit and circularize.     This gives me the deep space relay I need to communicate between planets.   

Edited November 14, 2022 by Gargamel

[jimmymcgoochie]

I tend to stick with the simple method of a) stapling a load of relay dishes to one probe, b) parking it in something vaguely resembling an orbit of the target body and then c) just hoping that it'll be in position for future missions to use.

I've done perfectly spaced relay constellations with millisecond-synchronised orbits; yes, they're good for ensuring you always have coverage no matter where you are, but it's also a bit of a faff to set it all up properly and most of the time I just stick a big enough antenna on each craft that it doesn't need a relay, with a couple of tactically positioned heavy relays in high orbits of e.g. Jool, Duna and Eve to bounce the signals along if the planets aren't aligned right to reach Kerbin directly.

[Beamer]

I am a firm believer in chaos theory My deep space network looks like a kid with green, yellow and red pens and a ruler went to town on a blank sheet of paper.

I typically put 3 relays around any planet in a regular triangle, (near) equatorial, a ways outside the orbit of the furthest moon, plus 1 or 2 in a polar orbit, these ones typically inside the orbit of any moons. But the strength of my network mostly comes from the interplanetary relays. I occasionally send up a batch of 4 or so and put them in various Kerbol orbits, at inclinations up to 30 degrees, and any planetary transfer booster I use that won't be crashed into its target gets a relay antenna and is left in whatever Kerbol orbit it ends up in (it's not waste if it has a function). Asteroid scanners also get a relay antenna. At any time I will have several high power relays above and below the plane, covering the higher latitudes of nearby planets and moons. It seems to work, I've literally never lost connection with any vessel in my current career game.

 

[darthgently]

If KSP had L points I'd do more Kerbol orbit relays.  As it is, I rely on equatorial triangles around every body but Jool (Jool moon constellations take up that slack), and two polar long haul relays around every body but Jool's moons. 

The polar relays have an AP near SOI boundary in the Kerbol north direction and a PE as low as safe at the bodies south pole.  They are 180 degrees out of phase. 

The high eccentricity gives them incredible hang time above the plane of the body. 

Sometimes I'll put a triangle around Jool between Laythe and Tylo as a further mitigation to signal blockage in that system and as a medium haul relay hop between moon relays and Jool polar long haul relays as they can get way up there anchored on Jool's gravity

Oh yeah, I typically only have one polar relay around moons after doing SCANsat there.  The dual polars are for main bodies only

Edited November 16, 2022 by darthgently

[MalneyKerman]

Usually I either put three equally spaced relays in a high equatorial orbit or make a tetrahedral Draim constellation.

[Gurkonier]

I used to put three even spaced in an orbit. But more recently i built a satellite centrifuge, where i put a bunch of relay satellites on, rotate it fast enough and decouple them.
The chaos does the rest. You only need enough satellites, so the chance is high enough, that there will always be a relay in sight.

Doing this with a resonant orbit is much more time consuming. (at least for me, because i can't sleep well, if the orbits are not within a tolerance of 10m)

Edit: Then, in the most cases the spent stages with relay antennas thing is enough for moons.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Gurkonier

[Misguided Kerbal]

On 11/13/2022 at 9:52 PM, CrazyJebGuy said:

My relay network, looks like this.

In my past saves, I would just chuck a couple of satellites with a bunch of dishes on them into a medium/high Kerbin orbit and hope for the best, and it worked, most of the time. Any time I had connection issues, I  would chuck some really high power dishes (thanks to Near Future Exploration) near the outer edge of Kerbin's SOI and any connection problems

For another body, I would also just toss a satellite around a target body and use that as a relay. But of course, the signal can be strong enough to melt pigeons and still not get to you if it's on the wrong side of a planet, especially if you only have one such relay in orbit which is quite annoying.

Recently I've just been placing a few strategic relays into a geostationary orbit into a classic triangle, and it's not really as much of a hassle as I expected. The precision of mechjeb is quite useful sometimes. Since this save is still relatively new though, my whole network is just around Kerbin.


 

[CrazyJebGuy]

9 hours ago, Gurkonier said:

I used to put three even spaced in an orbit. But more recently i built a satellite centrifuge, where i put a bunch of relay satellites on, rotate it fast enough and decouple them.
The chaos does the rest. You only need enough satellites, so the chance is high enough, that there will always be a relay in sight.

Doing this with a resonant orbit is much more time consuming. (at least for me, because i can't sleep well, if the orbits are not within a tolerance of 10m)

Edit: Then, in the most cases the spent stages with relay antennas thing is enough for moons.

I like the idea of spinning a ship quickly to fling the relays outwards. And yeah: the basic prinicple of chaotic netowrks is fling enough relays at the problem, chances are that at least one will be in the right position; precision is irrelevant. And that chance gets exponentially better with more satellites. If each relay has a 1/2 chance of covering a point on the planet, then the chance of having coverage is 1 - 0.5^n. If I fling ten satellites out, that's 99.9% coverage. And 1/2 is a bit of an underestimate generally, or rather it is the worst case for when you are operating right on the surface of a moon/planet. Further out, the orbits are relatively larger compared to the body so each relay's chance might be more like 3/4 or 4/5.

[Nazalassa]

Jool Communication Network

[Fraktal]

I use only a few equatorial sats.

'Few' as in, I used to go for three per body but got tired of orbital drift inevitably throwing their spacing off. So now I just use one sat in a medium-height orbit and learn to live with having a limited transmission window.

[Beamer]

4 hours ago, Fraktal said:

but got tired of orbital drift inevitably throwing their spacing off

Kerbal Engineer has an orbital period readout with millisecond precision, that helps a lot. I put 3 sats evenly spaced in orbit, then use that readout and minimal RCS puffs to equalize their orbital periods. They'll be good for hundreds of years without corrections. If there's a few meter difference in Pe/Ap of the orbits it doesn't matter, as long as their orbital period is the same

On 11/18/2022 at 1:22 AM, Misguided Kerbal said:

Recently I've just been placing a few strategic relays into a geostationary orbit into a classic triangle, and it's not really as much of a hassle as I expected.

Although useful for RL communication and positioning systems, geostationary orbits don't offer any advantage over non-stationary circular orbits in KSP because all antennas are omni-directional (as long as you don't get so low that the horizon starts causing large line-of-sight cut-offs). I personally prefer setting up my triangles close to the SOI edge to get maximum ground coverage and minimal relative drift. What matters is their spacing which is as much of a hassle for geostationary as non-geostationary orbits.

Again, the orbital period readout is very useful for this (but it can be done with the base game time to Ap/Pe readouts and some simple calculus too of course). Assuming you release your sats from a single ship in the intended circular orbit, just retrograde burn 2 of them until their orbit is 2/3rd of the initial length, and circularize one of them after 1 orbit and the other after 2 orbits (MechJeb can do this automatically with the resonant orbit function). Then fine-tune using RCS or engine set to 1% thrust until their orbital periods match as close as you can get it and Bob's your uncle, a near perfect triangle for near eternity.

 

[CrazyJebGuy]

11 hours ago, Fraktal said:

I use only a few equatorial sats.

'Few' as in, I used to go for three per body but got tired of orbital drift inevitably throwing their spacing off. So now I just use one sat in a medium-height orbit and learn to live with having a limited transmission window.

Goodness man, a limited transmission window? Why live with that? If you do not like the "right" and high precision approach, do what this thread is about, and set off a handgrenade of relays or something.

Although then again, if you're not playing with probe-control-requires-signal, why bother I guess?

[Caerfinon]

7 hours ago, Beamer said:

If there's a few meter difference in Pe/Ap of the orbits it doesn't matter, as long as their orbital period is the same

The mod Station Keeping is very useful for setting this up

 

[Fraktal]

18 hours ago, Beamer said:

If there's a few meter difference in Pe/Ap of the orbits it doesn't matter, as long as their orbital period is the same

Eh. I had single-digit meter differences in Mun and Minmus relays and they still drifted off after a year.

11 hours ago, CrazyJebGuy said:

Although then again, if you're not playing with probe-control-requires-signal, why bother I guess?

I use probe cores almost exclusively as onboard avionics for manned craft, so I only need the comm uplink back to Kerbin for maneuver nodes.

[Br0wnie007]

For me, I'm a fan of chuck a satellite in orbit and I hope I get a connection when I need it so far it hasn’t let me down. I'll upload a picture of my network when I get back home from school.

[TheFlyingKerman]

For Kerbin, I have 3 relays in Keostationary orbit. Two small RA-15 relays 60 degrees leading and trailing KSC for connecting with LKO probes, plus a huge relay several times the power of the level 3 DTS positioned opposite to KSC (above Nye Island) for interplanetary probes. There is also a powerful ground relay station at KSC. Lastly some survey satellites in polar orbit are also equipped with relay antennas.

For Jool, 4 relays in high orbit.

For other planetary systems, usually I include a relay with every small rover, so 1-2 per system. There would be gaps, but I don't find it to be a major problem for the purpose of controlling a rover.

[KerikBalm]

On 11/14/2022 at 4:52 AM, CrazyJebGuy said:

this messy style bothered him so much he deleted it and made his own, it was 6 or 10 relays in perfectly circular, polar orbits around Kerbin, perfectly spaced. It seemed way too artificial to mel

Ah yes, it lacks the chaotic beauty of those naturally occurring relay networks...

In career, I start haphazard, leaving HG-5's on stages in LKO, leaving them around Kerbin's moons, etc.

But once I have RA-100's, it's clean-up time, and I do a triangle of RA-100's orbiting beyond minmus' orbit.

Then I can declutter the rest of my relays in the Kerbin system so that the save file isn't so bloated, and the game performance is a little better.

[Rocket Witch]

As pictured below, something I saw once posted by @eddiew who I guess is the creator of the image. Relies on a practical minimum of 4 relays instead of the 3 required by networks whose orbits match, but it's a nice smart arrangement that takes like 70% of the setup time while working 95% as well. Emphasis on the orbital periods of each relay not matching!

Edited December 26, 2022 by Rocket Witch

[Mahnarch]

That flower orbit is the one I do.

Just time my launches for every  Kerbin hour and a half.

[eddiew]

On 12/26/2022 at 8:34 AM, Rocket Witch said:

Emphasis on the orbital periods of each relay not matching!

Bit late to the party, but I have arrived  

Very glad that old post is still helping people! Although I believe it related to a mod that made KSC a single point of contact on the ground. Stock KSP should see you able to accept a signal on Kerbin from any direction - although this satellite arrangement is still very valid for ensuring communications with a ground based rover somewhere else in the system! I think we do tend to forget that the Mars rovers are not real-time entities.

It's kind of ok if you try for similar orbital periods, but the intent is to not try for geo/kerbo/duno-stationary orbits because those require active maintenance that nobody really wants to do. We as players are not a dedicated ground crew whose jobs are to micromanage every 0.1m/s of every satellite.

Relying on these highly eccentric orbits means that it's super super unlikely to find all 4 of them on the same side of the planet at the same time. It can happen, but they're moving fast down near their PE and will get up to higher altitude (or at least, more than 1 Kerbin radius altitude) very quickly. Basically if you do get an outage, it should be in the region of minutes - and if you were thinking of landing a probe you can see as you plan that you should probably wait for the next orbit, after which you have loads of time because your relay is on a very long slow route to it's AP.

(Holy smokes 1 month to KSP 2... time to call in some postponed annual leave!)

[Mahnarch]

19 hours ago, eddiew said:

 

(Holy smokes 1 month to KSP 2... time to call in some postponed annual leave!)

Just make sure your boss isn't also taking time off to play KSP 2! 

[eddiew]

On 1/23/2023 at 6:38 PM, Mahnarch said:

Just make sure your boss isn't also taking time off to play KSP 2! 

I mean, he does have an astrophysics degree... but is not a game nerd, thankfully. He's likely to understand the allure while remaining uninterested himself 

[Xheotris]

Most missions take place in the solar plane, so a very eccentric polar orbit gives 99% coverage for most interesting missions around a body. Repeat once each for most bodies and add interplanetary grade comms arrays to all of them, and you can get perfect coverage everywhere with not too many sats. 

Edited January 31, 2023 by Xheotris
Specify number of sats

[suicidejunkie]

Extremely low (3-5km) kerbisynchronous orbits which guarantee that the relays do not drift.

Also, if I did the math correctly, a 50m tall tower at the pole holding a probe with longer range dishes should almost always have line of sight to everything in the system.