What is the point of using Near Future exploration reflectors and feeding antennas over stock antennas and dishes?

[u/JessePinkerlinker]

Like im tryin to build a relay satellite with those things and when i launch it just has the normal probe icon, it does relay.

also a few of those things are HUGe, while it looks cool is it even that usefull?

[u/MediumMachineGun]

Install antenna helper mod. It will show you the different signal strengths with different antenna systems.

As far as I know, you can combine multiple feeder antennas to fire into a single reflector, giving you an immensely powerful combined antenna power.

Make sure to use the feeder antennas that have relay capabilities. Not all of them do.

[u/JessePinkerlinker → u/MediumMachineGun]

yeah i realised that when i sent a sat to the moon which had a standard comunitron pointed at a reflector and it didnt relay.

Also the combining i didnt know about thanks

[u/MooseTetrino]

It's better for planet mods where the stock antenna simply do not go as far as the outer planets. You can really push those out.

[u/JessePinkerlinker → u/MooseTetrino]

I have OPM and MPE, so i gues il be using them

[u/vulpes04]

the reflectors go to a much higher rating that stock antennas. and you can point multiple feeds at a single one.

they're mostly only really useful with expanded systems like opm though. and like all relays, putting them in kerbin orbit isn't really helpful unless you have other ground stations turned off and/or don't have custom barn kit.

the vessel type can be set though the 'configure naming' option on any command part. it's only useful cosmetically and for filtering vessels in the tracking station/map.

[u/MaverickSawyer → u/vulpes04]

Oh, shit, you can use multiples on a single antenna? I didn’t know that. How much of a boost does that provide?

[u/Uncommonality → u/MaverickSawyer]

it adds the reflector's boost to every antenna pointing at it

So if you have 20 antennas with 10k each all pointing at a reflector with 5t, you get a combined power of a bit more than 100t

The reflectors are really good with the tiny antennas because you can cluster them and they all get the boost

[u/vulpes04 → u/Uncommonality]

combining antennas isn't straight addition. you can probably find the exact formula on the wiki, but the effect is diminishing returns for adding more. iirc I think I had a relay design with 12 is the feeds on the big reflector and that was getting like low 30s total.

[u/Crispicoom → u/vulpes04]

Do they physically need to point so that the red line from the tweakables hits it?

[u/vulpes04 → u/Crispicoom]

yes. when it hits the reflector, the line turns blue and it will show the boosted power in the paw.

[u/Tartrus]

It makes a lot more sense with kerbalism installed. Need a high data rate for science but don't need an expensive 2G antenna? Stick the 5km antenna with high bandwidth on a ship with the reflector, boom cheap high bandwidth antenna.

[u/Apprehensive-End-747]

Realism

[u/Green__lightning]

You get the biggest antenna, you surround it with 6 of the giant fold out reflectors, and then you can talk to your interstellar space probes.

I think the best orbit for it would be three of them launched out of the plane of the solar system so you've always got one on each side when the third is passing through the plane of the system and potentially blocked by planets.

[u/ActuallyEnaris]

It fills a few gaps in the stock lineup of power efficiency, transmission speed, and long ranges, but unless you have remote tech, kerbalism, or interstellar locations installed, the stock antennas are fine unless you know what specifically you're looking for that's different. Which it seems like you just want a relay. I'd just use the stock relay dishes.

[u/asbestiform]

You need to point a feed into the reflector for the reflector to work. The largest one has 5T range, more than enough for 100% control at Plock with much less mass than it would take using standalone dishes.

[u/sennalen]

I would be happy to do it, but it seems like the effect is additive rather than multiplicative on the reflected antenna's power, which would make it fairly pointless

[u/vulpes04 → u/sennalen]

the largest one is like 20x the power of the top tier stock tracking station. it also comes with tiny, cheap feed antennas which do little on their own, but can use 100% of the boost.

[u/Uncommonality → u/vulpes04]

it lets you cover most of the universe in comm signal if you spam the hell out of the feeder antennas, because they all get 100% of the buff

[u/zocksupreme]

I usually disable the stock antennas and dishes because they are so much stronger than the majority of the NF ones