Stock and JNSQ Ground Station Rebalance

[DRVeyl]

Because RO was the biggest driver for reference material, things have not at all been rebalanced for stock play, or really play in anything other than a Real-scale (10x) system. v2.2 should address this.

Stock should apply a -20dB reduction to all ground stations, to account for the 1/10th scale of essentially everything. This will result in the large dish still being ~7m in diameter. The interesting impact is this will cause some "late-game" situations where stock or mod parts will actually be larger than the ground stations, and you will return to a less realistic, but more gamey, scenario where the player does directly build much of the "ground segment" of the comm network, rather than relying on powerful ground stations to see into most of the solar system and only using relays for addressing LOS issues.

Support other-scaled systems with MM-fu and a tag to set the scale factor. Don't break RSS when doing this.

[thunder175]

As long as this can be enabled or tuned thru a MM patch then I'm all for it as it allows more customization for modders! Right now I'm tuning my additional ground nodes based on the NEN stations even on 6.4x. I'd like to believe that even Kerbal radio engineers would be building antennas of comparable size to our own to meet the link budgets required at certain frequency ranges, since even rescaled the overall math don't change.

453-NENUG R2.pdf

[DRVeyl]

All of this is already patchable via MM.
The difference between 6.4x and 10x isn't so large and you still get decent results even without adjusting the sizes for scale. But the free +20dB from using antennas designed to reach the outer solar system in real-scale seems to produce trivially easy results in a stock 1/10th scale. The math doesn't, and won't, change. But there's some notion of balance to consider, that says 70m dishes isn't really the right idea in stock.

If you look at that NEN guide, the antenna sizes are nearly all sub-15m, with an outlier at White Sands. Their intended operating range is the Earth-Moon region.

Thanks for the guide, btw. For whatever reason, I had not come across the NEN User's Guide, although much of RA uses specs from the DSN User's Guide. Search failure on my part, it seems!

[thunder175]

Acknowledge all. The beauty of MM patching! ;)

I was actually using the 5M dishes for my NKN stations at the moment and getting pretty good results on 6.4x, and they definitely do not provide coverage to the Mun aside from jacking up xmit power of the satellite until the receiver melts. I'm constantly tweaking them but here is my config file for scaled up to 6.4x JNSQ (using SigmaDimensions resize and scale at 2.4x since JNSQ is already scaled up 2.67x from stock when using Kerbin as reference; 600km -> 1600km --> 3840km).

For majority of the ground station locations I'm using the locations as defined in JNSQ's KerbalKonstrcuts patch folder. Probably going to add some more low power stations as gap fillers here and there.

JNSQ.txt

[Grimmas]

I wrote the PR before I saw this, looks like I wasted some effort, this looks much more complete.

[SaberCF]

Hope you can also rebalance RA for OPM planet pack!
The farthest planet Plock in OPM which is origin to Pluto is significantly farther than Eeloo in the stock system, the ground stations perform good right now for the OPM in the farther planets.

[Capkirk123]

I just opened a PR in the new home of RA (KSP-RO#32) that should provide a slightly more balanced stock/stockalike system experience. Feedback would be appreciated.