[1.1] RemoteTech v1.6.10 [2016-04-12]

[hab136]

30 minutes ago, blorgon said:

Having a tough time finding any relevant information about my problem.

I have 6 Kerbals in a heavy command pod in orbit around Minmus, I have Communotron 32s on it and a handful of probes I was planning to launch into various orbits around Minmus, using the command pod as a "command station". The only thing I could find about Command stations in the RemoteTech website are really pretty vague about how Command Stations work. I've got the 6 Kerbals, the Remote Guidance unit, and antennas on everything (all of which are active), and yet when I try to switch to any of my probe cores, I have no connection to the Signal Processing Unit. The only thing I can think of is that my "command station" antenna is attached to the pod, and not the RGU itself, but that shouldn't matter, right?

Any ideas?

 

You're doing everything right (you're getting the red dot), but until you detach the probes it's still the same ship, and ships don't connect to themselves.  Notice "local control" in the top left.

Go ahead and detach the probes, then it will connect to the command station.

[RecidivistTwist]

Would it be possible to add a "Relay" or "CommSat" craft type for the map view? This would let us set all our communications satellites as their own craft type instead of the stock "probe" type and seriously reduce the amount of clutter in the map view. (I know some people just set the sats as "junk" or "unknown object" or something but that's not really an elegant enough solution for my tastes [too much potential to accidentally trash a working commsat]).

I think having a way to differentiate our communications satellites from a scientific probe would be a great addition to the mod, and a huge benefit for players. Especially later in the game when comm networks get robust and the map view gets cluttered showing the commsat orbits.

Edited March 23, 2016 by RecidivistTwist

[Andem]

1 hour ago, RecidivistTwist said:

Would it be possible to add a "Relay" or "CommSat" craft type for the map view? This would let us set all our communications satellites as their own craft type instead of the stock "probe" type and seriously reduce the amount of clutter in the map view. (I know some people just set the sats as "junk" or "unknown object" or something but that's not really an elegant enough solution for my tastes [too much potential to accidentally trash a working commsat]).

I think having a way to differentiate our communications satellites from a scientific probe would be a great addition to the mod, and a huge benefit for players. Especially later in the game when comm networks get robust and the map view gets cluttered showing the commsat orbits.

I agree, but it isn't possibles to add craft types to the game. People have tried, but SQAUD's code declares a set number, and screwing with it can break your game. 

[blorgon]

7 hours ago, hab136 said:

You're doing everything right (you're getting the red dot), but until you detach the probes it's still the same ship, and ships don't connect to themselves.  Notice "local control" in the top left.

Go ahead and detach the probes, then it will connect to the command station.

I tried that, and still wasn't able to get a connection. Does it take a little bit of time to connect?

[RecidivistTwist]

2 hours ago, Andem said:

I agree, but it isn't possibles to add craft types to the game. People have tried, but SQAUD's code declares a set number, and screwing with it can break your game. 

Darn! Oh well...

 

thanks for replying!

[Stone Blue]

1 hour ago, blorgon said:

I tried that, and still wasn't able to get a connection. Does it take a little bit of time to connect?

You also ACTIVATED all the antennas BEFORE separating the probes, correct?

[blorgon]

41 minutes ago, Stone Blue said:

You also ACTIVATED all the antennas BEFORE separating the probes, correct?

Definitely. They're all Communotron 32s, and even without them activated, shouldn't the probes' integrated omnis automatically connect?

[eberkain]

2 minutes ago, blorgon said:

Definitely. They're all Communotron 32s, and even without them activated, shouldn't the probes' integrated omnis automatically connect?

Do the same probes work if in range of KSC?   Any mod parts on the probes?

[blorgon]

1 hour ago, eberkain said:

Do the same probes work if in range of KSC?   Any mod parts on the probes?

I figured it out. Noob mistake.

Whenever I detached a probe, I would look in map view to see if there was a connection, which was why I thought it wasn't working. Totally forgot that I needed to actually switch to the probe using the bracket keys. DERP.

Of course, I didn't realize there was an issue with the M700 Survey Scanner, so now my mission is pretty much dead in the water until it gets fixed. Beyond frustrating...

Edited March 23, 2016 by blorgon
Didn't realize there was an issue with the M700 not working anymore

[JohnnyPanzer]

On 2016-03-19 at 7:24 AM, komodo said:

%MODULE[ModuleRTAntenna],1{doStuff_for_ANT1}
%MODULE[ModuleRTAntenna],2{doStuff_for_ANT2},
etc, etc, etc

For the MM module overriding, I would check into the documentation on indexing. I don't have a handy link as I'm on mobile, but it ought to go something like... Ok, mobile being mobile has whacked out entirely... See above apparently for a code hint. Im not certain on % here; it seems right, but double check it. 

In any case, this would be the method to address multiple like named modules. I don't know at all if RT accepts multiple modules in the first place. See if a manual config works, and then nudge MM into generating such, before rending excess hair on correctly working code that doesn't actually do anything 

For model transforms and such, I have absolutely no idea about that.  

Thank you very much for the information. For some reason my subscription of the thread bugged out, so I only just now noticed your reply. I'll take a stab at indexing during the weekend, if I get it to work I'll report back so the information can be of some help to others.

Again, thank you for helping out.

[mr_trousers]

Hi guys. So I'm playing with RemoteTech on RSS, which has much greater distances involved than stock, such that even the largest dishes are insufficient for contact with most of the outer solar system. Additionally, I was vaguely considering the plausibility of adding in the recently "discovered" Planet X, which hovers somewhere around 600 AU out, 20 times further than Neptune, which is already completely out of range.

My question is - does Tweakscale work with RT dish antennae, allowing you to increase the size of a dish and with it, its range? I assume not - if not, can this be added? If not, can someone tell me how I might do it?

My ultimate goal here, aside from long-range satellites, would be to actually build several ground stations on Earth equipped with several very long-range tweakscaled dish antennae. If, hypothetically, dish range scales proportionally with dish surface area (I do not know if this is true and I doubt it is so neat, but I don't know the science behind antennae, so...), then a CommTech-1 which has a range of 350M km and a diameter of 3.5m, and which in stock can reach as far as Eeloo, would only need to be scaled up to 17.5m in diameter to have a range of about 50 AU, which is just outside of Pluto's orbit, which is approximately the same as what being able to reach Eeloo would correspond to. This actually seems rather optimistic scaling, as the actual Deep Space Network site are all equipped with a 70 meter diameter antenna, though I can't even begin to guess what kind of realistic range that would give. With root mode enabled, a Reflectron GX-128 communicating with a 70 meter CommTech-1 would give a connection range of 52 AU - basically perfect for full-solar system communication.

Anyway, the point is, if this isn't already incorporated and it won't be added (both of which I assume are the case), can someone help me out with making it happen for myself? Probably the only dish I would need to incorporate TweakScale behavior for would be the CommTech-1 - just a single dish. That should be doable, right?

Edited March 25, 2016 by mr_trousers

[a_schack]

56 minutes ago, mr_trousers said:

Hi guys. So I'm playing with RemoteTech on RSS, which has much greater distances involved than stock, such that even the largest dishes are insufficient for contact with most of the outer solar system. Additionally, I was vaguely considering the plausibility of adding in the recently "discovered" Planet X, which hovers somewhere around 600 AU out, 20 times further than Neptune, which is already completely out of range.

My question is - does Tweakscale work with RT dish antennae, allowing you to increase the size of a dish and with it, its range? I assume not - if not, can this be added? If not, can someone tell me how I might do it?

My ultimate goal here, aside from long-range satellites, would be to actually build several ground stations on Earth equipped with several very long-range tweakscaled dish antennae. If, hypothetically, dish range scales proportionally with dish surface area (I do not know if this is true and I doubt it is so neat, but I don't know the science behind antennae, so...), then a CommTech-1 which has a range of 350M km and a diameter of 3.5m, and which in stock can reach as far as Eeloo, would only need to be scaled up to 17.5m in diameter to have a range of about 50 AU, which is just outside of Pluto's orbit, which is approximately the same as what being able to reach Eeloo would correspond to. This actually seems rather optimistic scaling, as the actual Deep Space Network site are all equipped with a 70 meter diameter antenna, though I can't even begin to guess what kind of effective range that would give. Going by the proportional surface area to range thing above, a 70 meter dish would have a range of about 935 AU. Which would, conveniently, be sufficient to connect with the hypothetical Planet Nine most of the time.

Anyway, the point is, if this isn't already incorporated and it won't be added (both of which I assume are the case), can someone help me out with making it happen for myself? Probably the only dish I would need to incorporate TweakScale behavior for would be the CommTech-1 - just a single dish. That should be doable, right?

Are you using Realism Overhaul? If so, it changes RemoteTech settings to use a different calculation as well as add a bunch of base stations on earth, most notably the Deep Space Network. The DSN has a range of 1.14e14 meters, or 762au according to Google, but again, that doesn't tell you everything since it uses a very different calculation.

More info here: https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0/wiki/FAQ. It's in the RP-0 wiki, but from what I can see, the actual .cfg is part of RO, not RP-0. In the latest RO releases the antennae descriptions have been updated to reflect the actual range.

[mr_trousers]

8 hours ago, a_schack said:

Are you using Realism Overhaul? If so, it changes RemoteTech settings to use a different calculation as well as add a bunch of base stations on earth, most notably the Deep Space Network. The DSN has a range of 1.14e14 meters, or 762au according to Google, but again, that doesn't tell you everything since it uses a very different calculation.

More info here: https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0/wiki/FAQ. It's in the RP-0 wiki, but from what I can see, the actual .cfg is part of RO, not RP-0. In the latest RO releases the antennae descriptions have been updated to reflect the actual range.

I'm not using RO (Real Fuels is honestly too much added complexity for me at the moment), only RSS - it does, however, come with the same ground station config (and thus the Deep Space Network). Additionally, I think I probably already changed my RT settings to something pretty similar to RO - I activated Root mode anyway, which I think is much more interesting than Standard (and yes, very helpful when it comes to RSS).

There are two problems with this solution, as I see it, and thus my post above. The first is that, for a couple reasons, I don't like the Deep Space Network ground station approach. For one, in a stock solar system game with RT, you have to put a great deal of work into building a communications network over Kerbin in the first place to bounce the not-too-impressive signal of the KSC to everywhere you need it in space reliably. With the three DSN ground stations in RSS, this problem (and thus, challenge, and fun value) is greatly reduced, if not outright eliminated. Secondly, the game nominally starts at the beginning of 1951 in RSS, a time when the space program was indeed in its infancy and the Deep Space Network stations were not even built. For both of these reasons, I would very much like to instead have the ability to build, essentially, the Deep Space Network stations myself, in game, and remove the ground stations from the config. The only thing I'm missing is the ability to build a big enough dish.

The second problem is just that with the huge distances in RSS, even the ground stations and the root model aren't always sufficient for all of the purposes you need. It would just be useful to be able to build some properly more powerful antennae. I could just increase the range modifier by several times, but in my opinion, this would fairly upset the balance and difficulty curve of the existing antennae and I'd prefer not to. All in all, to me the best option really just seems to be able to increase the size of at least one of the dishes.

Edited March 25, 2016 by mr_trousers

[Luis Von Green]

Have two short questions:

1. Do you still need the rss config for playing with RO/RSS/RP-0 ?

2. Can someone give me tips for making a network in rss which reaches behind the moon?

Thanks! 

[mr_trousers]

Okay, I successfully added Tweakscale sizing to the two big dishes... Here's the CommTech-1 in 70m form, and with a Mark 2-1 Command Pod in its shadow down there for scale.

 

I've never done any modding before but that was fairly simple after examining various TweakScale and RT files. Happily, TweakScale seems by default to scale the mass of the dishes. Making it also affect the other properties - most importantly, the range - is something which seems far less transparent and which I'm not having as much luck figuring out how to do. Especially seeing as I can't easily check the new range in the VAB, I'm not even sure how I would test it if I did figure it out. Any help would be appreciated!

 

Edit: Here it is sitting on the launch pad. I have no idea how I'm going to transport this thing... I don't think you can put tweakscaled objects in KIS containers. But I will find a way!

Edited March 25, 2016 by mr_trousers

[a_schack]

3 hours ago, Luis Von Green said:

Have two short questions:

1. Do you still need the rss config for playing with RO/RSS/RP-0 ?

2. Can someone give me tips for making a network in rss which reaches behind the moon?

Thanks! 

As for 1), no, RO comes with the config built-in. No need for separate configs.

[Stone Blue]

1 hour ago, mr_trousers said:

Edit: Here it is sitting on the launch pad. I have no idea how I'm going to transport this thing... I don't think you can put tweakscaled objects in KIS containers. But I will find a way!

Is that for a ground station?.... You could use HyperEdit or VesselMover to place it...

[JohnnyPanzer]

1 hour ago, mr_trousers said:

Okay, I successfully added Tweakscale sizing to the two big dishes... Here's the CommTech-1 in 70m form, and with a Mark 2-1 Command Pod in its shadow down there for scale.

 

I've never done any modding before but that was fairly simple after examining various TweakScale and RT files. Happily, TweakScale seems by default to scale the mass of the dishes. Making it also affect the other properties - most importantly, the range - is something which seems far less transparent and which I'm not having as much luck figuring out how to do. Especially seeing as I can't easily check the new range in the VAB, I'm not even sure how I would test it if I did figure it out. Any help would be appreciated!

 

Edit: Here it is sitting on the launch pad. I have no idea how I'm going to transport this thing... I don't think you can put tweakscaled objects in KIS containers. But I will find a way!

I'll admit that I'm a bit confused as to exactly what you're attempting to do, seeing how I've never used RSS. But couldn't you simply change the range values in the Remote Tech config files? RemoteTech_Antennas.cfg for example. If RSS is using a modifier to scale the range, changing the core values should give you some fine control, right?

If this IS what you're looking for, the values you want to change are:

Mode1OmniRange
Mode1DishRange

They're listed in meters. Again, if I've misunderstood what you're after, I apologize.

[mr_trousers]

5 minutes ago, JohnnyPanzer said:

I'll admit that I'm a bit confused as to exactly what you're attempting to do, seeing how I've never used RSS. But couldn't you simply change the range values in the Remote Tech config files? RemoteTech_Antennas.cfg for example. If RSS is using a modifier to scale the range, changing the core values should give you some fine control, right?

If this IS what you're looking for, the values you want to change are:

Mode1OmniRange
Mode1DishRange

They're listed in meters. Again, if I've misunderstood what you're after, I apologize.

 

I'm trying to make it so that the two big dish antennae have modifiable sizes via TweakScale, so that you still have the original two antennae, to use in times when those two are appropriate, but then when you need more range can scale them up to larger sizes and in so doing also increase their range. So a CommTech-1 might have a variable range of anywhere from its normal 350M km at its normal size, to 140G km if you scaled it up to 70 meters in diameter. I've figured out how to make the size increasable, I've just not figured out how to do the same for range and other properties.

[JohnnyPanzer]

57 minutes ago, mr_trousers said:

 

I'm trying to make it so that the two big dish antennae have modifiable sizes via TweakScale, so that you still have the original two antennae, to use in times when those two are appropriate, but then when you need more range can scale them up to larger sizes and in so doing also increase their range. So a CommTech-1 might have a variable range of anywhere from its normal 350M km at its normal size, to 140G km if you scaled it up to 70 meters in diameter. I've figured out how to make the size increasable, I've just not figured out how to do the same for range and other properties.

I think I understand then. 

One kinda roundabout way, if you ignore the TweakScale step, is to just make your own model-less part and then in the .cfg use a MODEL node to re-use the models you want. Then it's just a matter of adding an RT patch for your "new" part and add the ranges you want. It would clutter up the VAB with two new parts, but it should work.

I've never used TweakScale, so I'm not sure how their modules work. But since they scale the ammount of fuel along with the size on the fuel tanks, it sounds like they have code running to let the scale value change more than one value. It sounds like something that might be hardcoded into the .dll file though, so it may not be possible to simply add more values to be affected via a .cfg file.

[JohnnyPanzer]

I got curious, so I downloaded TweakScale. By the looks of it, you might be able to add support for RemoteTech by either patching or directly editing the file ScaleExponents.cfg

I'm not a coder by any means, but looking at the mod support allready present in that file, something like this might work:

TWEAKSCALEEXPONENTS:NEEDS[RemoteTech]
{
    name = ModuleRTAntenna
    Mode1OmniRange = 2
	Mode1DishRange = 2
	EnergyCost = 2
}

At least that's the way other mods are handled by the looks of it, and those would be the correct names for RT.

Edited March 25, 2016 by JohnnyPanzer

[mr_trousers]

2 hours ago, Stone Blue said:

Is that for a ground station?.... You could use HyperEdit or VesselMover to place it...

Thanks! I've never used those, but if I can't find any way to build it manually in-game I'll probably have to use one of those. Yeah, the plan is to build at a ground station at each of the Deep Space Network sites with several very large dish antennae. That 70 meter one would probably be the largest at any of them. My preferred way would be to transport the materials needed and build them with KIS, but I'm pretty sure we're talking way too large of objects for that. Oh well, haha.

12 minutes ago, JohnnyPanzer said:

I got curious, so I downloaded TweakScale. By the looks of it, you might be able to add support for RemoteTech by either patching or directly editing the file ScaleExponents.cfg

I'm not a coder by any means, but looking at the mod support allready present in that file, something like this might work:

TWEAKSCALEEXPONENTS:NEEDS[RemoteTech]
{
    name = ModuleRTAntenna
    Mode1OmniRange = 2
	Mode1DishRange = 2
	EnergyCost = 2
}

At least that's the way other mods are handled by the looks of it, and those would be the correct names for RT.

Nice! That worked handily. My 70m dish now reads a range of 140 trillion meters, which is exactly what I expected for that size. Funny thing is happening though - everything's all good when I "launch" from the VAB and have its little construct sitting on the launch pad. But if I go back to the space center and then reload, the dish disappears - but not any of the other big pieces. It is probably a tweakscale problem, so I'll be off to ask in that thread about it. Thank you very much for your help though.

[leudaimon]

Greetings,

I've raised these issues in the RP-0 thread, and was directed here:

- I failed to transmit science using the Explorer 6 probe antenna. While it provides remotetech connection, science appears to be transmitted but does not add points or complete contracts. I found this weird, given everything works fine when I use the Communotron-16.

- Finally, I would expect these bugs to be known, but there is a bunch of stuff that work without delay - especially the rcs and thrust controls, allowing for easy total control of the craft. Besides, some stuff don't need a connection to work, such as doing science and turning batteries on/off (this is an easy exploit of insufficient energy for a mission).

[Stone Blue]

1 hour ago, mr_trousers said:

Thanks! I've never used those, but if I can't find any way to build it manually in-game I'll probably have to use one of those. Yeah, the plan is to build at a ground station at each of the Deep Space Network sites with several very large dish antennae. That 70 meter one would probably be the largest at any of them. My preferred way would be to transport the materials needed and build them with KIS, but I'm pretty sure we're talking way too large of objects for that. Oh well, haha.

Hmmm... Maybe Extraplanetary Launchpads or SimpleConstruction  would work?? 

[John FX]

So I`m having an issue where I can`t transmit data from a scan using scansat (in the context of RSS/RO/RP-0, including Remotetech) on the communotron 16 (maybe others, have not tested)

I saw there was a .dll from fancymouse that claimed to allow sending of data again with Scansat but after installing it I find no change.

Is there an updated .dll available?

Should I post a log?

Edited March 26, 2016 by John FX