Antennas

[SmaugBR]

Hi! I'm new to this forum and to KSP. First I was wondering about getting the game or not, when luckly a friend sent me a key as a gift via Steam. I couldn't be happier: what a great game it is. Surely, it's not a game for the masses, but it clearly has potencial and at the present moment the Mods increase a lot it's play value. I was already enjoying flying and discovering my rockets and it's designs (and crashing them, of course lol), till I first deployed a sattelite in a stable orbit over Kerbin. What an achievement! The sense of gratification when I saw it opening it's antennas was amazing! That bring me to the point: antennas. I've noticed in a lot of videos and websites teaching how to build a probe (including the game's wiki) the guidelines recommending placing more than one. Fore instance, one "major model" and four of the smaller, "stick-looking" ones (sorry, I'm still not fully used to all the names). The websites I read stated that if you use more than one antenna in a probe and activate an experiment (such as the Mysterious Goo or Junior Lab experiment), you could transmit it several times at once (one for each antenna). This would replace the need of five visits to do the same experiment (due to diminishing returns) or the weird solution of assembling a ship with five of the same modules just to perform an experiment. I've tried the "5-antenna" technique on a new probe, but it didn't work. Am I missing something? How exactly is this done? Is there really any benefit of bringing more than one antenna in your ship/probe? Or is that just a matter of aesthetics? Thanks a lot! SmaugBR

[Taki117]

what happens is that it's one experiment per antenna (and some like the goo and science jr arent repeatable) however, that being said, multiple antenna allow for faster transmission overall because multiple transmissions will enter a qeue, so if you have more antennas more data is transmitted at once. also, in the stock game there is no difference between antenna other than transmission rate and power usage when transmitting.

[Pecan]

The data from "an" experiment (singular) can only be transmitted once and each science module can only be used once unless you have a science lab to clean them up after storing or transmitting the data.

You may be getting confused with antennae used for RemoteTech 2 or another mod, where they are used for communications with particular targets, such as 'Mun' and you would usually want each comms satellite to be able to connect to several targets at a time. Other antennae from other mods - SCANSat, Kethane, have their own (usually mapping) purposes but are quite different parts.

[Eric S]

Am I missing something? How exactly is this done? Is there really any benefit of bringing more than one antenna in your ship/probe? Or is that just a matter of aesthetics? Thanks a lot! SmaugBR

You're not missing anything, the people that are saying to do that to get more science are. When you get a science popup, the amounts of science displayed for that experiment is assuming that no science for the same experiment/biome gets turned in before you turn these results in. If you watch the amount of science you get for transmitting, you'll see that even if they all transmit at the same time through different antenna, only the first one to complete gets full value, the next gets a lot less, the one after that even less, etc.

As for having multiple antenna to queue up reports, this works in theory, but in practice runs into a problem. Yes, if you send a report, it will go to the first antenna it finds that isn't busy, IF the antenna isn't busy at the time you queue the report for transmission. If all antenna are busy, it just dumps the report on the first antenna it finds. So if you queued up 10 reports to get sent out 5 antenna, it would give one report to all 5 antenna, then dump the remaining 5 on the same antenna, giving you an end result of one antenna with 6 reports to transmit and 4 antenna with 1 report.

The only reasons to go with multiple antenna are:

1) If you're using RemoteTech

2) If you're about balancing your center of mass (guilty as charged)

3) Asthetic preference

4) You'll be splitting up the craft at some point

[SmaugBR]

Hmmm... Guys, you are great Thanks a lot for all the advice. I've been considering using RemoteTech, and I'll take this multiple antennae advice into account. Again, thanks a lot for all the help!

[Pecan]

RemoteTech is fun but consider:

RT2 makes things harder - you have NO control of unmanned probes while they are out of communication but can use KOS scriptable autopilot if you're into programming.

Launching your first (few) Kerbin communications satellites can be particularly difficult; best done from a manned (and therefore controllable) ship.

SCANSat won't change the way you have to play, will still give you a reason to use probes and will reveal 'anomalies' throughout the system (which you can then explore).