[1.1.3] AntennaRange 1.11.4 - Enforce and Encourage Antenna Diversity

[Supermarine]

Looking at the patches applied, the 88 works at longer ranges, but at close range (edit: less than interplanetary), the HGA will give better data rates (=faster transmission).

So, it seems the 88 is still the King of long distances. Good to know that; I'm just planning a new Eeloo satellite...

[Supermarine]

I ran into a little situation, which probably means that I didn't grasp the mechanics of this mod at all.

I landed a probe on Minmus, right at the south pole. As it appears, there's no direct line of sight towards Kerbin. And I thought, well, that's OK---that's why I put my Kerbosynchronous CommRelay Sat in the first place. This satellite has both a DTS and Communotron 16 antennas installed. The probe has only a 16. This was per design; all previous 5 probes and 2 Minmus satellites have the whip antenna and transmit by themselves without problems.

But now, my polar lander is stuck without energy and completely incapable of transmitting at all. Not even when the satellites are directly overhead is it able to go green. Only yellow ranges for this poor fellow. It tries to talk to Kerbin, and Kerbin is never visible. Curiously, the other probes, closer to the equator, either transmit directly with a fine green line or get helped by the sats when on the dark side. Not the polar one. All of them completely ignore the Relay I placed halfway there---just for them.

All this time I thought the probes would take advantage of stronger antennas nearby and relay the info effortlessly back if Kerbin was too far/not within LOS. A chain of two or three even, if necessary, in order to preserve the efficiency of the whole system (just doesn't sound right to me that a big antenna is just sitting there unused while its neighbors struggle).

This suddenly became even more important as I realized that my Duna probes were already en route, three of them. Only one with the recently-researched mighty 88 and the other two with conventional whip antennas because I thought I was saving mass and resources and hey, one of them will relay all the info and serve as a Duna comm hub of sorts from now on. I now am not very sure of this.

What am I doing wrong? Has this something to do with the additive ranges?

[tf58]

Just want to that I've been using this mod a little while now and I think it is a good simple way to add a little more realism.

Right now all antennas are capable of performing the relay function assuming range and LOS requirements are met. My one suggestion is that there should be some way to limit the relay functionality, this way will force the player to actually make dedicated relay satellites. I see two ways of doing it:

1) The more realistic way is to add a "Relay Circuit" part, so an antenna can only act as relay if the relay circuit is also on the same craft. But this mean existing saved games will have no comm relays until the player launch new comm sats.

2) The simpler way is just to add a toggle on the antenna's context menu to turn on/off the relay function. This will allow players to retain their comm network in existing save games.

[linuxgurugamer]

Just want to that I've been using this mod a little while now and I think it is a good simple way to add a little more realism.

Right now all antennas are capable of performing the relay function assuming range and LOS requirements are met. My one suggestion is that there should be some way to limit the relay functionality, this way will force the player to actually make dedicated relay satellites. I see two ways of doing it:

1) The more realistic way is to add a "Relay Circuit" part, so an antenna can only act as relay if the relay circuit is also on the same craft. But this mean existing saved games will have no comm relays until the player launch new comm sats.

2) The simpler way is just to add a toggle on the antenna's context menu to turn on/off the relay function. This will allow players to retain their comm network in existing save games.

or, how about this:

1. Have the relay circuit part

2. Have a config option (preferably game specific, if possible) which says whether the relay circuit part is needed or not.

[ModZero]

Just want to that I've been using this mod a little while now and I think it is a good simple way to add a little more realism. (...) My one suggestion is that there should be some way to limit the relay functionality, this way will force the player to actually make dedicated relay satellites.

While this enables additional gameplay, and dedicated parts are planned for stock KSP, please note that this is not actually more realistic (for deep space communications, that is). We're using enormous land-based dishes, relay from nearby scientific probes around planets, and things like Soyuz routinely go out of contact because there's no tracking station nearby. There's fun to be had in building relay networks, but with LOS enabled AR is actually quite close to real life (though AFAIR it does assume a fairly high density of tracking stations on Kerbin).

Spacecrafts do, generally, need specific store-and-forward capability to do relay, though (AFAIK everything that goes to Mars has to have some, for example).

[toadicus]

Supermarine, I have to do a bit of guessing here because I don't know all of the specifics, but here are some guesses mixed in with some facts; hopefully it clears things up. I'm guessing your polar lander is blocked from LOS to Kerbin by Minmus. There are a lot of reasons that this could be the case, but suffice it to say that polar regions are the most likely to suffer from a "false positive" on the occlusion check. As you said, that's fine and why you've got relay satellites.

Now, as to your connection woes with your relays: remember that link ranges are "additive". It's geometrically additive, not arithmetically additive, so it's not as simple as 18 km + 18 km, and in fact two Comm 16s have specifically sqrt(18*18)=18 km range to each other. That is why your satellites can "phone home" on their own just fine, but can barely get a positive connection to each other. This is actually quite realistic; the surface-based radio antennas on Earth/Kerbin are huge and use ultra-sensitive equipment to convert the (literally microwatts of) power we get from e.g. the Voyager probes into a meaningful signal. The gain on the big DSN telescopes on Earth is something like 73 dB -- that means they effectively multiply the strength of the signal by 10^7.3. The gain on the Voyager radio dishes themselves is much lower (but still pretty high); if memory serves it's around 48 dB. I don't model gain explicitly in AntennaRange, but using the geometric mean the way I am, and the way I've designed all the antennas, intentionally and more-or-less accurately models that behavior.

The 88-88 has a really long range (read: high gain), which means connections from 16s to 88-88s will work at much greater distances: about 12 Mm. I think that'll be enough for the 88-88 to act as a relay for all your whips in the Dunan system, unless you're planning some actions well outside Ike's orbit.

Hope that helps. I'd like in the future to make displaying this sort of information in game a little simpler, but it's unclear at this point whether I'll get to that before this behavior gets Stockified in 1.1, and what I do after that point remains very unclear.

The README has a little more detail if you want to look into the maths of it all: https://github.com/toadicus/AntennaRange/blob/master/README.md

tf58, Squad apparently agrees with you, and they're going to have separate "relay antenna" parts necessary to do relaying. Knowing that's coming Soonâ„¢, I'm a little hesitant to add it myself right now, particularly because of the game-breaking aspect. linuxgurugamer's solution for the gamebreaking would work, but I'm still not sold (here or in Squad's future implementation).

Why is this a fun or educational thing? How does it improve (not just add to) gameplay? As usual, I'm happy to be convinced, so start convincing.

You're correct, ModZero, AR assumes 100% of Kerbin's surface is covered in giant DSN antennas. Changing that with integration to something like EPL or KerbinSide is in the "wishlist" part of the "we'll see what happens after 1.1" bucket.

[ModZero]

You're correct, ModZero, AR assumes 100% of Kerbin's surface is covered in giant DSN antennas.

That would explain a lot, including the odd density of Kerbin. It's just that Kerbalkind achieved singularity, and converted the entirety of Kerbin into computronium, acting as a gigantic antenna along the way. The collective uploaded consciousness of Kerbalkind had no more need for cities, but liked the greenery, and eventually grew kinda bored, therefore created its avatars to "explore space". Kerbin (and the entire Kerbol system) used to be much bigger, by the way, but all that computronium has to be made out of something.

BTW, that's also why the Kerbals return after a while. It's just a new shell, after all.

Changing that with integration to something like EPL or KerbinSide is in the "wishlist" part of the "we'll see what happens after 1.1" bucket.

Yesss!

[linuxgurugamer]

Toadicus,

Is there any way that one can see, in-game, the range of each available antenna?

if not, would it be possible to add that? It's annoying that I can't see an antenna's range without consulting an out-of-game document.

It would be great if this could be done in the VAB/SPF when you are looking at parts, and also be good if it can be seen in-flight.

Re. the "relay part", it becomes fun if you are a nuts-n-bolts type of person, who enjoys dotting the i's and crossing the t's, without all the extreme detail of RT. My biggest issue with RT was the need to point antennas at specific targets, and to have an antenna for each target.

Having to put a relay part on a satellite would make it necessary (and fun for some people) to have slightly more specialized satellites. Maybe the relay part could be nothing more than a second omni-directional antenna which is designated as a relay antenna.

LGG

[toadicus]

ModZero, I like the way you think.

linuxgurugamer, the nominal ranges for all of the antennas are given in their detailed information in the VAB and (I think) R&D, along with a "range to Kerbin", which computes the actual symmetric relay range using the current tracking station level.

I'd like to, at some point, get a dynamically-generated table in the game somewhere that gives numerical and qualitative information about the nominal and maximum range of each antenna to each other antenna, and to Kerbin, in some concise way. That's simple to do when there's not a lot of antennas; when you start looking at mod parts you wind up thinking about screen-sized tables of gobbledegook that are going to be hard to fit into anything. I'm hoping KSPedia will have a good solution for this, or that Squad's implementation does a good job by default. At this point the game doesn't have a very graceful way to present that kind of content (coming from someone who has written dynamic table generation code for the game already), and doing all that work just to have it removed from relevance and/or completely reinvented by 1.1 isn't high on my list of things that sound fun. I hate to keep putting things off until 1.1 (because who knows when that's coming), but knowing that it is coming is pretty directly discouraging me from doing Big New Things.

[linuxgurugamer]

ModZero, I like the way you think.

linuxgurugamer, the nominal ranges for all of the antennas are given in their detailed information in the VAB and (I think) R&D, along with a "range to Kerbin", which computes the actual symmetric relay range using the current tracking station level.

I'd like to, at some point, get a dynamically-generated table in the game somewhere that gives numerical and qualitative information about the nominal and maximum range of each antenna to each other antenna, and to Kerbin, in some concise way. That's simple to do when there's not a lot of antennas; when you start looking at mod parts you wind up thinking about screen-sized tables of gobbledegook that are going to be hard to fit into anything. I'm hoping KSPedia will have a good solution for this, or that Squad's implementation does a good job by default. At this point the game doesn't have a very graceful way to present that kind of content (coming from someone who has written dynamic table generation code for the game already), and doing all that work just to have it removed from relevance and/or completely reinvented by 1.1 isn't high on my list of things that sound fun. I hate to keep putting things off until 1.1 (because who knows when that's coming), but knowing that it is coming is pretty directly discouraging me from doing Big New Things.

I know that, but the problem I see is the modded antennas. For example, I have the patch for Antennas to make it work with AntennaRange. But the description doesn't say anything about ranges.

What I was thinking of was some sort of mod which could inject some text into the description of an antenna when the extended information is viewed in the Editor. But I have no idea how to do that.

Alternatively, a simple CSV or text file generated with all available antennas with the basic information (range, mass, electrical usage) would be somewhat acceptable

LGG

[tf58]

Squad apparently agrees with you, and they're going to have separate "relay antenna" parts necessary to do relaying.

Cool, I didn't realize some AR functionalities will be stock-ified.

[FungusForge]

What exactly does the Line of Sight "Fudge Factor" do?

[BudgetHedgehog]

What exactly does the Line of Sight "Fudge Factor" do?

Pretends the planet/moon is X% smaller than it actually is, giving you connection even though the LoS is technically below the horizon (or only just occluded). Just a bit of leeway, that's all.

[Supermarine]

Supermarine, I have to do a bit of guessing here because I don't know all of the specifics, but here are some guesses mixed in with some facts; hopefully it clears things up. I'm guessing your polar lander is blocked from LOS to Kerbin by Minmus. There are a lot of reasons that this could be the case, but suffice it to say that polar regions are the most likely to suffer from a "false positive" on the occlusion check. As you said, that's fine and why you've got relay satellites.

Now, as to your connection woes with your relays: remember that link ranges are "additive". It's geometrically additive, not arithmetically additive, so it's not as simple as 18 km + 18 km, and in fact two Comm 16s have specifically sqrt(18*18)=18 km range to each other. That is why your satellites can "phone home" on their own just fine, but can barely get a positive connection to each other. This is actually quite realistic; the surface-based radio antennas on Earth/Kerbin are huge and use ultra-sensitive equipment to convert the (literally microwatts of) power we get from e.g. the Voyager probes into a meaningful signal. The gain on the big DSN telescopes on Earth is something like 73 dB -- that means they effectively multiply the strength of the signal by 10^7.3. The gain on the Voyager radio dishes themselves is much lower (but still pretty high); if memory serves it's around 48 dB. I don't model gain explicitly in AntennaRange, but using the geometric mean the way I am, and the way I've designed all the antennas, intentionally and more-or-less accurately models that behavior.

The 88-88 has a really long range (read: high gain), which means connections from 16s to 88-88s will work at much greater distances: about 12 Mm. I think that'll be enough for the 88-88 to act as a relay for all your whips in the Dunan system, unless you're planning some actions well outside Ike's orbit.

Hope that helps. I'd like in the future to make displaying this sort of information in game a little simpler, but it's unclear at this point whether I'll get to that before this behavior gets Stockified in 1.1, and what I do after that point remains very unclear.

The README has a little more detail if you want to look into the maths of it all: https://github.com/toadicus/AntennaRange/blob/master/README.md

Thanks for your reply!

As it happens, the polar probe was not only placed on a difficult latitude but also sitting inside a crater. Luckily I managed to take off with the little fuel remaining and transmit while airborne before crashing. Every science bit counts. Now that I understand a bit more about the ranges I gather they do resemble real ones. That said, I will need some more careful planning on my next missions.

If I understand correctly, the 88 will serve as a relay for the Dunan probes as they try to talk to Kerbin, but they will stay in the yellow while the 88 keeps a green line. Is this correct? The problem then is a matter of energy, not range. And that also means that my Eeloo probe, also en route, is doomed, since it only has a DTS. Not even the 88 orbiting around Duna will suffice.

This raises even more interesting questions. How many relays can a "comm chain" have without losing power/gain/range to be effective or useful? If I wanted to, in the far future, establish a base or station around Eeloo, how many antennas and where to place them? What if I wanted to have a full green connection all throughout the Kerbol System? Is this even possible? I'm guessing an 88 at every major celestial?

This is a very fine mod, sir. It adds a nice depth and difficulty to the game.

[toadicus]

AntennaRange has been updated to version 1.0.5! This version brings compatibility with KSP 1.0.5.

CHANGELOG:

v.1.10.3 [2015-11-10]
* Recompiled for 1.0.5 compatibility.

[scribbleheli]

Yey!

Hopefully this fixed my issue of my mobile processing labs being unable to transmit science.

So far nothing happens when I click the button

Also, things got awkward when Valentina kerman went down to the minmus base in a small lander to collect the science from my mobile lab rover. And her doppelganger Valentina kerman brought the science out to her to take back to kerbin.

They took a photo together but sadly Valentina the rover drive was taken by the kraken before I could get her safely back inside.. Rip V^2

[allenby]

The MM configs for the stock antennas are not being applied for some reason (I checked the MM cache). When I change the header for a config from :

@PART[longAntenna]:FOR[AntennaRange]:NEEDS[!RemoteTech] -> @PART[longAntenna]:FOR[AntennaRange]

It works again. I'm not sure why this works as I'm running a clean install without any trace of RemoteTech.

[scribbleheli]

The MM configs for the stock antennas are not being applied for some reason (I checked the MM cache). When I change the header for a config from :

@PART[longAntenna]:FOR[AntennaRange]:NEEDS[!RemoteTech] -> @PART[longAntenna]:FOR[AntennaRange]

It works again. I'm not sure why this works as I'm running a clean install without any trace of RemoteTech.

I still cant transmit any science. At any time, no matter the method I use to try and transmit. From the Antenna, the MPL or on the science dialog once an experiment is run.

Is what your fix was my possible problem? I wasnt sure if you were replying to me.

[allenby]

I still cant transmit any science. At any time, no matter the method I use to try and transmit. From the Antenna, the MPL or on the science dialog once an experiment is run.

Is what your fix was my possible problem? I wasnt sure if you were replying to me.

Hmm. I'm not sure if the two are related. I was just mentioning a possible bug. In my case, the renaming of ModuleDataTransmitter -> ModuleLimitedDataTransmitter wasn't being applied with the included MM patch. I would imagine that even if the MM config is not being applied, antennas should still display stock behavior and be able to transmit normally. I haven't yet tried MPLs in this version.

Edited November 12, 2015 by allenby

[scribbleheli]

Ok

I was under the impression that the next ksp update would ad a stock "antenna range" clone. Did that happen/would it cause a conflict?

[toadicus]

allenby, I just tested my patches including the NEEDS[!RemoteTech] and everything applied just fine. Can you make sure you're using ModuleManager 2.6.13 and that you really don't have any RemoteTech traces around?

scribbleheli, Squad's stock antenna system isn't coming until 1.1, so there's no conflict there at this point. I also just flew a mission and took care to test both direct transmission and relay transmissions, both of which worked just fine. Can you elaborate a bit on your situation and problem?

In general, remember that when reporting a problem the most important things to get to me are a detailed description of the problem including, if possible, the simplest available set of steps by which I can reproduce the problem. An easy way to get me more information than you might think of to include yourself is by including a log (Windows: \path\to\KSP_win\KSP_Data\output_log.txt; Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Squad/Kerbal\ Space\ Program/Player.log; Mac: ~/Library/Logs/Unity/Player.log), preferably by uploading it to any place on the Internet that doesn't require me to have an account to view or download it.

[scribbleheli]

Ill Try and explain best I can. And do more detective work when I get home.

Essentially, I have a Career game started in 1.0.4. I have an MPL/Station in orbit of Minmus, and one landed on Minmus as a biome hopper. I updated to 1.0.5, and updated all available mods which wasn't many.

I transferred my saves and the required mods to my new 1.0.5 install (just the game breaking ones, that deleted my ship because a part was missing) at once. I figured I would have issues until all the mods got updated.

Started my game, went immediately to my orbital station. I right clicked on my MPL, and saw that it had 499/500 science. I clicked transmit, nothing happened. No dialog, no electric charge was used, no science gained. My antenna didn't open. I did a Goo experiment, when the dialog popped up I click transmit. The dialog went away but again, nothing else happened.

My probes and such still work. I have pretty green lines. Connection and control of ones in deep space. But I can't transmit ANY science. Science is recoverable if I land back at Kerbin.

Ill update all available mods tonight again. And add everything one by one until it breaks.

That will likely take a while.

[scribbleheli]

FOUND IT!

Took a while.. because alphabet...

Science alert caused the issue. No idea how or why, but after process of elimination. Removing it allowed science to transmit.

If anyone has hints as how I can patch it myself, that would be great since it hasn't been updated since .23

I am in my first semester of C++ at school. So the level of noob is high.

Thanks for the attempted help!

[toadicus]

Thanks for looking into that! I took a quick glance over ScienceAlert's code, and the incompatibility is not readily obvious. In the interests of full disclosure: it looks like I've got a full weekend of work ahead for my day job, so digging into this is going to be probably a week out. In the meantime, feel free to make a similar report to xEvilReeperx and invite him to contact me directly; if he's got time to do the work I'll make some time to answer any questions he has.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

FOUND IT!

Took a while.. because alphabet...

Science alert caused the issue. No idea how or why, but after process of elimination. Removing it allowed science to transmit.

If anyone has hints as how I can patch it myself, that would be great since it hasn't been updated since .23

I am in my first semester of C++ at school. So the level of noob is high.

Thanks for the attempted help!

ScienceAlert has definitely been updated since 0.23 (the latest version was for 1.0.4 -- http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/76793). That said, because KSP 1.0.5 changed how science transmission works, SA needs an update.