Best comms device?

[AletzN1]

I was wondering since i started playing on .22, which is the best comms device for transmiting?

Do they have a diference in science%, can they be better depending on the number of them in the craft?

Thanks in advance.

[AletzN1]

come on guys (bump)

[RocketPilot573]

I'm not sure yet, but I think all the comm things are exactly the same...

[sparty48]

No and no, I think they just have different speed...

[TheDarkStar]

The faster ones take more total energy, but you have a lot of time. Take the basic one since they all take similar time (5 vs 8 units of time or something like that).

[UmbralRaptor]

I'm going to say Communotron 16 while you have limited resources (especially energy). Later on, it doesn't matter so much, but the Communotron 88-88 will send data back faster (at a much higher energy cost).

[BigD145]

If you have multiple antennas you can send batches of research in parallel. Got one goo canister? Take a reading and send it off. While that is sending you can take another goo reading and send that off on a second antenna at the same time. If all antennas are busy you have to wait for the retract animation to finish before you can use that antenna again.

[AletzN1]

well thanks for the answers!

[Eric S]

The actual numbers:

The middle antenna takes 80% as long as the -16, and 50% more power for the same amount of data.

The big antenna takes 60% as long as the -16, and 100% more power.

This means that if you don't have enough power to at least keep the antenna mostly active (transmitting about 80% of the time), you'll actually transmit the data faster with a slower antenna.

This also means that multiple -16's are almost always better than fewer of the other antennas provided you're continuously generating reports, not doing one huge batch. The reason for this is because the queueing isn't done very reasonably, if all the antennas are busy, the new report gets queued to the first antenna that was found, which means that if you do a big batch of reports where you finish queueing them before any finish sending, you'll get one report each to all antennas other than the first one, all other reports will go out the first antenna.

[robsr3v3ng3]

Also there is the weight saving with using the smaller ones instead of the larger ones.