[1.1.3] AntennaRange 1.11.4 - Enforce and Encourage Antenna Diversity

[Fraz86]

The most significant differences from your recommendation below is the LKO range on whip->KSC1 is more than doubled, so players who don't skate the ragged edge of the atmosphere can still get a link (remember 7.07e+4 is only 70,700 m; that's not a lot of leeway!), and 88-88->88-88 can now stretch all the way to Duna, allowing for some interesting possibilities with interplanetary relay systems. I often think it would be interesting to set up a relay network around Duna's orbit to expedite transmissions from a theoretical Laythe base. It also brings whip->whip up to 18 km, which makes it way more useful for rovers and such. Or really seat-of-the-pants lander/mothership connections.

I am 100% on board; this looks great! Can't wait to test it out!

[toadicus]

Update: dev build using those ranges, with some other fixes: [zip] [tar.gz] [tar.xz]

Edited June 4, 2015 by toadicus

[autumnalequinox]

Update: dev build using those ranges, with some other fixes: [zip] [tar.gz] [tar.xz]

I was going to drop by to recommend something like this. (to overcome the "tech gap" in career where no IP missions with probes can be done for quite awhile).

Toadicus, I love u. *mwah*

Edited June 4, 2015 by autumnalequinox

[rkman]

Similarly, with the "all of Kerbin" short range capability, a player could launch deep space relay satellites into high orbit over Kerbin.

Would be a bit odd though, to be capable of building deep space comms in orbit before being able to do so on the ground. Maybe the 'virtual ground stations' can be upgraded when longer range antennas are unlocked in the techtree?

Update: dev build using those ranges, with some other fixes: [zip] [tar.gz] [tar.xz]

Great, this looks like you are approaching Antenna Range 2.0 functionality we discussed some time ago (minus the noise floor).

Edited June 4, 2015 by rkman

[MOARdV]

Would be a bit odd though, to be capable of building deep space comms in orbit before being able to do so on the ground. Maybe the 'virtual ground stations' can be upgraded when longer range antennas are unlocked in the techtree?

I guess I didn't actually specify that. Yes, I assume that the virtual ground stations would have KSC (deep-space) range, and that the range was upgraded along with KSC's deep-space capability. At least, I'm assuming KSC doesn't have "maintain contact throughout the solar system" range at the start, and that the player doesn't have deep-space antennae available at the start, either. But, again, I don't play career, so I'm not familiar with the nuances of tech / facility upgrades.

[John Nowak]

Yeah I didn't mean a ground station on the order of what's at Kerbin, I meant something more along the lines of a crewed ground station on Duna or Eve that could control local probes, without having to relay signal back to Kerbin, Have a relay in orbit that allows you to see and control probes around the planet?

Yeah, a ground control component would be fun, but I think it's only meaningful if you have signal delay. I know earlier versions of RemoteTech supported this, so it was possible to have a ship orbit the Mun and drop off landers with almost zero signal delay.

Building up a ground station and have a bunch of antennas you could actually visit would be cool, but I kind of suspect that's out of scope. If someone's doing a "Build cities on Kerbin" mod, then it might be easier for that mod to put a bunch of antennas on the locations designated by AntennaRange than vice-versa.

Sort of like "It would be neat if StageRecovery took the range to the nearest tracking station instead of KSC." Sounds like a great feature, but it would probably need to be done by StageRecovery.

[vardicd]

I'm thinking people didn't quite understand what I meant, by ground station. To try and clarify, Say I build a base on Duna, along with this base I have a few unmanned rovers, for moving stuff around, resource drilling, base assembly. the way the mod works now, to control those rovers, a signal must be passed to Kerbin, directly, or through satilite relay. Say this base only has one sat in orbit to relay, and the rovers only have the small antenna's on them. sat goes beyond horizon, signal is lost. rovers dead. What I'd like to see, is an ability in the code, or a part that turns the base into a small control station that can control all the little rovers around it. say small antenna range only? so the base controls all its own little rovers, and doesn't have to wait for a link to Kerbin. It seems realistic to me, if we ever go to Mars, our astronuats on mars aren't going to be sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for a signal to get to the rover to move some piece of equipment around their base. They'll get out their little control and move the rover themselves. This is the idea I was talking about. And if Toadicus doesn't want to do this, that's fine. I'm perfectly cool without it. I just didn't want my idea dismissed because someone miss understood what I was asking for.

This isn't a rant, I'm not upset or anything. I love this mod and all the work that's gone into it. I lack the coding know how to do these things myself, so my only option is to bring my ideas here, and sometimes I don't manage to explain the thoughts going on in my head well enough, and this seems to be one of those times. Sorry for any confusion, and thanks for your time.

[toadicus]

rkman, I'm glad you're still here, and noticed. Sadly (perhaps?), I don't think we're going to get a whole lot closer to the original AntennaRange 2.0 concept than this, for a number of reasons. Chief among these reasons is that I'd have to use such laughably unbelievable numbers to achieve a similar effect (since the whole point of the mod is that it's important to pick the right antenna for the job), I'm not sure I could sleep at night. For example:

Voyager is around 19.5 terameters from Earth, sending 12 W through a 48 dBi antenna. It goes all that way, down through the atmosphere, and is received by a 74 dBi antenna. We get on the order of 10^-20 W out the tail end of that antenna, and we can still hear it. These numbers generally even account for a bunch of the noise. Numbers from here: http://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_new.pdf#page40, PDF page 40 if the bookmark doesn't work.

The most distant conceivable probes in KSP are about 700 gigameters from Kerbin. Common consensus amongst the modding crowd suggests that 1 EC/sec = 1 kW. The stock 88-88 uses 20 EC every 0.1 seconds, making it a 200 kW transmitter. That's four times higher than broadcast AM radio stations are allowed to run in the United States, and more than 16,000 times more powerful than Voyager's radio. These two facts together mean, all else being equal, the received power back at Kerbin would be on the order of 12 million times higher than Voyager's signal getting back to Earth. Even if we break with consensus and treat 1 EC/sec = 1 W, it's still 12000 times more power received.

This means that, in order to make things work as expected, I'd need to handwave the baseline noise levels up by at least 30 dB (and perhaps 60 dB!), or completely trivialize the power usage (which would be more realistic, but clearly out of line with Squad's vision for the system). Also, this wouldn't have any direct impact on the way the mod plays: in the end, it'd still basically be about comparing antennas and their ranges.

So, I've decided to leave the baseline ambiguous, and make it more about comparative gains and powers instead. It puts a little more burden on the antenna designer -- you have to bake gain and power into "range" yourself -- but since that's mostly me anyway, I feel like that's OK.

What I do still want to do is add circumstantial noise, which would have a direct multiplicative impact on "power" (and therefore a sqrt impact on range). I'm thinking I might add optional "atmospheric noise" that could make it harder to transmit off and around bodies with atmospheres, and optional "radiation field noise" based on localities around big planets and such. Again, it'd be defined a bit arbitrarily, but it would act in service to realism without modeling a bunch of lies into the baseline (and also making me rewrite a bunch of code).

MoarDV, you're correct that players do not start with "talk anywhere" capabilities at the beginning of career mode.

In general, theoretical future ground stations (on Kerbin) would have the same ranges as KSC's tracking station, and be upgradeable in the same way.

John Nowak, I can foresee a possible tie in with mods like Kerbinside to make ground stations cheaper to buy near other facilities when they exist. Changing how StageRecovery works would certainly be up to StageRecovery.

vardicd, thanks for the explanation. Let's call that sort of mechanic a "control station" rather than a "ground station", because really its location on or above the ground is pretty unimportant to its actual function, which is to make probes controllable. The primary problem from my end is that such a mechanic would have to only affect probe control -- science transmissions would still need to go back to Kerbin. Currently I don't differentiate between those two reasons in the slightest, and that would need to change first. After that, it's basically a matter of adding a vessel module to see if you have X unemployed Kerbals on the ship (i.e. not being used in a science lab or cockpit). Just being honest: at this point, that sort of feature is pretty far down the list of things I might do, but it is a cool idea.

Edited June 4, 2015 by toadicus
Unmixed a metaphor.

[vardicd]

vardicd, thanks for the explanation. Let's call that sort of mechanic a "control station" rather than a "ground station", because really its location on or above the ground is pretty unimportant to its actual function, which is to make probes controllable. The primary problem from my end is that such a mechanic would have to only affect probe control -- science transmissions would still need to go back to Kerbin. Currently I don't differentiate between those two reasons in the slightest, and that would need to change first. After that, it's basically a matter of adding a vessel module to see if you have X unemployed Kerbals on the ship (i.e. not being used in a science lab or cockpit). Just being honest: at this point, that sort of feature is pretty far down the list of things I might do, but it is a cool idea.

Okay, no worries, I've been getting around this problem, by just having the external command seats I can slap on to the rovers VIA KIS. I will continue doing that. I'm just glad I got my idea across clearly. Good day.

[John Nowak]

...Say I build a base on Duna, along with this base I have a few unmanned rovers, for moving stuff around, resource drilling, base assembly. the way the mod works now, to control those rovers, a signal must be passed to Kerbin, directly, or through satilite relay. Say this base only has one sat in orbit to relay, and the rovers only have the small antenna's on them. sat goes beyond horizon, signal is lost. rovers dead. What I'd like to see, is an ability in the code, or a part that turns the base into a small control station that can control all the little rovers around it...

Ah, gotcha.

This reminds me of how I used to play RemoteTech's early releases. I had the size of a control station set to two Kerbals, so one would fly the ship while the other flew the drone.

[Fraz86]

After that, it's basically a matter of adding a vessel module to see if you have X unemployed Kerbals on the ship (i.e. not being used in a science lab or cockpit).

Given that having multiple Kerbals in a command module currently serves no purpose, I think it would be a nice perk for 2+ Kerbal pods if "control station" functionality simply required a command pod crewed with at least 2 Kerbals (1 piloting the manned craft, 1 to remotely control probes/rovers).

I agree that control stations would be a neat feature, though I do understand this being lower on your list of priorities.

[rkman]

I notice you are now completely at home in that antenna and transmitter stuff that was alien territory for you not very long ago. And an interesting comparison you make there.

This means that, in order to make things work as expected, I'd need to handwave the baseline noise levels up by at least 30 dB (and perhaps 60 dB!), or completely trivialize the power usage (which would be more realistic, but clearly out of line with Squad's vision for the system). Also, this wouldn't have any direct impact on the way the mod plays: in the end, it'd still basically be about comparing antennas and their ranges.

I don't mind at all that noise floor won't make it in. It is indeed little gain for a lot of effort.

The way i see it nominalRange and maxTransmitDistance are like placeholders for respectively antenna gain and receiver sensitivity, with the latter being directly related to noise. Not that i want to keep you up at night, but the receivers are probably unbelievably insensitive. I figure you don't need to worry if you just don't calculate it. All that the mod really does not have is detailed modeling of data-rate vs distance, which probably would not be noticed.

With "fixed power cost" on and datarate (and thereby power use) tuned down it functions close to realistic wrt the basics of radio communication, and it can be tuned so that the batteries won't be drained in short order when transmitting over long distance.

Squad made electric power use a thing for radio transmissions, Antenna Range allows one to change that to time being a thing for transmissions without being excessive - transmission times are roughly in the range of burn times. Insofar that realism is a concern you might want to consider having fixed power cost on by default (and tweak the default data-rates).

Indeed that goes against how Squad intends it, but what they intend here (or maybe it is placeholder, the fact that they call it 1.x does not mean much) is unrealistic to begin with, and uninteresting in terms of gameplay.

What I do still want to do is add circumstantial noise, which would have a direct multiplicative impact on "power" (and therefore a sqrt impact on range). I'm thinking I might add optional "atmospheric noise" that could make it harder to transmit off and around bodies with atmospheres, and optional "radiation field noise" based on localities around big planets and such.

That is very nice. I worry though that having it affect power means it affects electric power use of the antenna, which imho would be undesirably unrealistic. Might be better to have it affect both nominalrange and maxTransmitDistance directly.

[smunisto]

Finally, my preliminary, very rough pass and implementation of the 2 NAU Origami antennas.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1H6D_FLIl8V4rqJd_Ajk0IpKj_xBJxbEYm_kg6pGDp_o/edit?usp=sharing

Unfortunately, I am using some old KSC nominalRanges, and I now saw that the latest dev build uses much lower ones, which would be nice, to be honest, since right now KSC2 makes everything hard to balance around.

Any suggestions are welcome.

[FireFaced]

You have the AdaptiveDockingNode license under the license for this mod. Bad idea.

[toadicus]

rkman, I meant that it would technically actuallly be affecting received power (not transmit power), but in my code it will be abstracted as a multiplier on both nominal and max link ranges, as you said.

smunisto, the nominal ranges on the Comm. 16 and Comms DTS look way too low to me. You could walk out of range of a 16 in about 2 minutes; my kids' walkie-talkies are better than that. In general I think the balance of my Comm. 16 in the last dev build is basically the shortest viable range for an actual part. Maybe try the new KSC ranges, work from the Comm. 16 as a baseline and try to balance a nice progression from there?

FireFaced, I changed the name in the license on the OP. The source files carry the actual license would I care to ever enforce anything; the one on the forum is here because Squad says it must be, and not because of my careful attention to my IP. In the future, though, I'd rather such admonishments take the form of a PM. Thanks!

[FireFaced]

Okay.

[John Nowak]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network

According to the diagram here, ground stations of the DSN don't seem to have a 180 degree cone of coverage; at a guess, it looks more like 150 degrees. So with three ground stations and no orbital relays (TDRS isn't up yet) there are actually blind areas out to 33,000 km.

Sorry to keep prattling on aout ground stations, but it's an interesting subject.

[toadicus]

John Nowak, I'm pretty sure I have tools available to figure elevation angles like that. Whenever I get to ground stations (which I almost certainly will at some point), that's a feature I'd like to include.

[John Nowak]

John Nowak, I'm pretty sure I have tools available to figure elevation angles like that. Whenever I get to ground stations (which I almost certainly will at some point), that's a feature I'd like to include.

Nifty stuff, and thanks!

[toadicus]

Another dev build, which restores support for what we'll call "simple" ranges, i.e. not additive/geometric ranges. This necessitates a new field, "simpleRange", for all module definitions. My values for simpleRange at this point are the same as the nominalRange values in 1.9 and 1.9.1.

This is at least a "beta" grade build.

[zip] [tar.gz] [tar.xz]

[cipherpunks]

And what was that aerodynamic omni antenna name again please? That white one. Can't find it.

[BudgetHedgehog]

And what was that aerodynamic omni antenna name again please? That white one. Can't find it.

Do you mean the KSI blade antenna?

[Sigma88]

hi there,

I've had a request to add AntennaRange compatibility to my little mod

I would like to know if it's possible to do so or if there are some licensing issues

thanks

Sigma

-edit-

Also, since I usually aim to not disrupt the balance of any mod, If anyone has some ideas about which ranges would be best for new antennas I can use the suggestions, I don't know this mod well enough to make a choice right now.

Finally, if any of the devs don't like the idea of adding more antennas (for whatever reason) just let me know and I'll drop the compatibility (even if the license would allow it)

thanks for your time

Sigma

Edited June 8, 2015 by Sigma88

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

hi there,

I've had a request to add AntennaRange compatibility to my little mod

I would like to know if it's possible to do so or if there are some licensing issues

thanks

Sigma

-edit-

Also, since I usually aim to not disrupt the balance of any mod, If anyone has some ideas about which ranges would be best for new antennas I can use the suggestions, I don't know this mod well enough to make a choice right now.

Finally, if any of the devs don't like the idea of adding more antennas (for whatever reason) just let me know and I'll drop the compatibility (even if the license would allow it)

thanks for your time

Sigma

Unfortunately for you, APIs have been ruled to be subject to copyright (though the case that decided this has been appealed to the Supreme Court...though that's hardly a guarantee that they'll take the case or reverse that ruling). Fortunately for you, the MIT license permits use, reuse, "remixing", and all that good stuff, requiring only attribution.

For the time being, the regular ranges of your antennas are probably fine (check out version 1.9.1 to see how the configs are made, and fill in whatever range floats your boat). Things may get more complicated as we implement symmetric links, but again, the DTS-M1 is being sized to be "useful", so as long as you base your antennas on that range, they'll never be useless or game-breaking. (Redundant, maybe, since AntennaRange is meant to be fully playable with the three stock antennas, but what can ya do?)

[rkman]

Unfortunately for you, APIs have been ruled to be subject to copyright

I doubt that adding AntennaRange compatibility to a couple of antennas requires dealing with APIs. A Module Manager config file will do, which as far as i know has no licensing issues.