I had a thought: we have quite a few mods adding extra planetary systems, but even the modded antennas usually struggle to reach them. There is an existing technology that would fit that niche nicely though, but is not yet represented in the KSP: laser communication.
On the plugin side: it needs more testing, but I managed to get the basic functionality working i.e. added new kind of "antenna" and link on top of CommNet. You need 2 optical terminals to connect vessels via laser link, but yo