search

mockingbirdnest / Skopos

Σκοπός: KSP contracts that specify goals, and leave mission design to the player.
MIT License
3 stars 1 forks source link

RA/Skopos will not use antennas in parallel #23

Open Capkirk123 opened 2 months ago

Capkirk123 commented 2 months ago

As discussed in Discord.

As a consequence of relying on RA's commnet to choose links, only one link can be formed between any given vessel and ground station. If the bandwidth and/or power of that link is saturated, a second antenna on the same satellite cannot step in to pick up the slack, only the antenna with the "best" connection will be considered.

Spot beams can sort of work, since only some antennas can form a link with some stations, it forces RA to distribute links between them. The presence of a global antenna can still cause issues, as RA still seems to prefer to use the global antenna for the rx half of the link, even if the spot beam should provide the "better" connection.

Capkirk123 commented 1 week ago

Alright, thinking a little more about this, there should be some finesse here. We probably don't want to allow connections to stack forever, stopping someone from getting a higher bitrate by just stacking identical antennas is why RA did this in the first place, and is something we probably still want to do.

However, we definitely want antennas of different bands to function in parallel (combined C/K-band uplinks are fairly common irl).

I believe the only issue is that RA is completely unaware of bandwidth saturation, since this is not something that matters in normal RA. The only changes to link calculations required are

  1. Select the link with the highest available bandwidth, not highest net bandwidth
  2. Allow one link per ground station per band.
eggrobin commented 1 week ago

I think all the necessary finessing is already handled by the spectrum and data rate consumption logic; the problem is that RA is only giving us the best link between two nodes, not all of them. And the solution to that is tricky, because it means that we can no longer piggyback off of commnet.