Extra comm system functionalities

[keithmcg]

Hey folks, loving RT to bits. That said, after jiggling network links for a while, I've certainly wished for a few things...

1. The ability to declare a satellite dish or antenna a 'relay'. This acts as a dedicated connection, but one that shifts the 'current target' rules so that I can put an omni on my lil' rover, and then have 'current target' satellites point up the relay chain to the comms sat in orbit that can actually reach, without manually switching the dish links every single time I want to swap between missions, for example.
2. the ability to put dish or antenna into 'standby' mode - using minimal power, but still technically active, waiting for another dish to be linked to it when needed. When in standby mode, the only thing it can do (once linked as normal) is wake up the satellite as a whole; this being how you put a satellite to sleep for a long time of dormancy, or keep a dish waiting until it was needed, just in case you lost signal on that omni before you switched it on in time. ;-) To balance, this might take time to activate, and have a cost in charge - perhaps it's a mitt or two of data; a transmission packet in reverse as it were? Would certainly give bandwidth something to do other than science at last!
3. I confess I'm actually not to too sure on this one, but it feels odd that the navigation computer can do more than the probe core claims it can when you're steering it yourself - that is, you can command a proborobodyne OCTO with no features beyond SAS to do a complete maneuver node burn when you couldn't 'manually' ask it to, and half the time the darn thing can do a better job than you would at the dV burn too. That said, I also get that trying to do it manually would just be too painful with transmission lag... But the current way feels a bit of a cheat, too.

[Iamtk421]

As an alternative to option two, or perhaps as its own feature, it'd be nice if it was possible to set the flight computer to activate an antenna without the antenna being deactivated to start with. This then means you can set the computer to activate comms in say 1 day, then disable all communications, to save power.

As an example, I have a Scansat Altimetry probe orbiting Mun, but only have the basic solar panels available, which without lots of them don't produce enough power to idle even one DTS-M1 comm dish. As it stands I have to edit the save file to change the deactivate command to activate in order to re-enable comms. I guess I could do this without save editing if I had two capable dishes on the satellite, but that seems like overkill.