How do you build your relay network? Stylewise

[Stone Blue]

On 11/16/2022 at 12:47 PM, darthgently said:

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.

Nuther vote for this method... its how I've been doing it forever

[Ralstemar]

I just kinda throw them wherever, kinda like tic-tacs. I will have a few extremely massive communications crafts around major bodies, and them dozens of really tiny relays, think of it like a mothership and it's fleet, except for communications.

[darthgently]

On 11/14/2022 at 11:24 AM, Gargamel said:

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.   

https://meyerweb.com/eric/ksp/resonant-orbits/

[darthgently]

4+ equatorial SATs for Kerbin, instead of 3, can optionally get a  non-geosynchronous net with KSC a bit less on the edge of path signal strength for early game direct antennas.  They rely less on sketchy surface skimming signal paths while being able to be a bit lower and closer to launching craft.

Probably needs a picture, so carefully imagine what I wrote :p