Satellite Relays required for science scores when transmitting?

[Melonfish]

Okay, okay i know in the do not suggest list there is satellite functionality however, my idea was not to increase their functionality but rather make them a requirement to transmitting sciences.

At the moment you can beam your science experiments from any location within the kerbal system back to kerbin regardless of line of site or time etc for a fixed % penalty.

The idea is that this penalty should be harsher (degradation of signal) especially where distance is involved and you would have to use a relay of sat's to get your data transmission rate up to a higher percentage.

possibly stupid but what the heck can't hurt to make the suggestion right?

Thanks

Pete

[Grumman]

If this was implemented, it would be a good idea to add a dedicated transponder component. This would make it significantly simpler to calculate a correct path back to Kerbin, as you'd only need to consider ships with an active transponder part as nodes and not every ship in the solar system.

Perhaps instead of changing the penalty, it would be better to change the power consumption? Make each packet cost (distance)^2 / (efficiency), with the cost doubled if you don't have a clear line of sight.

[Melonfish]

Ooh i like it

thus, you wouldn't have the power to be able to send data from say jool in anything more then 1% bits yet if you had a relay system the power drain would be less due to the proximity of your nearest sat. it means it would be worth getting satellites into their own orbits around the sun. perhaps even a power penalty for atmosphere transmissions too?

[betaking]

yeah, It would be nice to have. I would support this especially if it requires remote-tech style relays..

(it would be more cool if remote-tech were made stock entirely, but this is a nice compromise)

[Eric S]

Actually, in the dev streams, they've mentioned that they're considering doing this already.

[ziogatto]

I agree with the general idea tough not so much with making it mandatory.

What KSP essentially needs is a better telecomunications model than the current very basic implementation. I'm not complaining about it since it's the very first implementation and telecom is probably something like a "cherry on top" for most people but in some expeditions this aspect had crucial roles for example in the galileo probe the high gain antenna didn't open so they had to use a low gain antenna to transfer the data at a much lower rate and they were able to salvage a good portion of the experiment data but they had to sacrifice some of the most data heavy experiments (mostly photos).

Other than having a more complex model for data transmission, one that varies the speed and energy cost of transmission based on distance and antennas used, what we really need is something which forces us to use it.

Some real world examples would be:

-Temperature measurement, this is just a bunch of numbers and would likely occupy just a few Kb

-Videos and photos, these can take several Mb or even Gb (think for example a very high definition photo of a space telescope or a video of a landing)

There are orders of magnitude of difference between these two kinds of data, we need that so that if we want to send a probe to measure a bunch of numbers we can probably get away with a small and light antenna, if we want to take HD pics of other planets then we should need to put high gain antenna otherwise it would take an insane amount of time to transmit (weeks or even more).

I really hope this aspect of the game doesn't get overlooked in the final product.

[Mirimus]

Yes, just .... yes

[Grumman]

Perhaps instead of changing the penalty, it would be better to change the power consumption? Make each packet cost (distance)^2 / (efficiency), with the cost doubled if you don't have a clear line of sight.

Having just done some calculations, this might work better if the cost of blocked LOS is higher. I'm using the example of a rover on the exact opposite side of Kerbin, with distances measured in millions of meters.

The radius of Kerbin is 600,000 metres, so the rover is 1.2 megametres from the KSC. This gives a multiplier of 1.2^2, or 1.44, multiplied by whatever effect the blocked LOS has.

But if you have a trio of communications satellites in synchronous orbit you could instead send the packet to the nearest, which then bounces it to the one nearest the KSC, which then sends it down. Since the radius of a synchronous orbit is 2.868 megametres, this gives the following:

Surface-to-relay: (-1.2,0) to (-2.484, 1.434): (2.484-1.2)^2 + 1.434^2 = 3.704

Relay-to-relay: (-2.484, 1.434) to (2.484, 1.434): 4.968^2 = 24.681

Relay-to-surface: (2.484, 1.434) to (+1.2,0): (2.484-1.2)^2 + 1.434^2 = 3.704

Total: 3.704 *2 + 24.681 = 32.089

At the very least, we'd want the surface-to-relay cost to be lower than the cost of transmitting straight through Kerbin - the relay-to-relay cost isn't such an issue since it could be mitigated by building your comms satellites with big, bulky antenna and big, bulky power supplies that you don't want to stick on every single ship.

[Killerdude8]

Except its a Gigametre not a Megametre.

1000 kilo = giga

[jwenting]

so you knowingly demand something that's on the list of things not to ask. What more do we need to know.

[sjwt]

As stated by the OP, this is on the what not to suggest list, if you wish to look at adding this kind of function, please look at mods or at making one..