FAQ

What would you recommend as a first launch?

Great question! We have a Getting Started Tutorial that can help you get flying in no time.

How do I rescale my parachutes?

Go to the action groups screen, select the parachute, and choose "next/prev size".

Why is it so dark?

Because it's night, and the sun is occluded by Earth. Either warp forward ~8 hrs, or launch something into orbit to get to the sunny side.

I'm on the launchpad, but my electric charge goes down. How do I fix this?

Use a launch clamp. It'll keep your charge fresh until launch.

How do I get those sweet interstages like NathanKell?

1. Build stage
2. Select "interstage fairing adapter" or whatever it's called (next to the other fairing bases)
3. Place its floating node on the node you want to decouple from (the bottom of your engine or, if a cluster, the bottom of the tank)
4. Right-click the base and tweak as desired. Set top diameter to the diameter of your stage, set base diameter to the diameter of the stage you will be building below, set height as desired. If attached to the bottom of the engine, set extra height so the engine is covered
5. Add fairing sides
6. Move the staging order as desired, noting that if you're not using KJR the decoupler built into the base does nothing, the thing will only decouple when all fairings have.

Note that it's the fairings themselves which are holding the upper stage in place. When you decouple them, the joints disappear, and everything separates as intended.

My antenna says it has a range of 200km but I can connect farther than that! Why?

(Thanks to Laie/@Schnobs)

RP-0 uses the so-called "root model" for antenna ranges, and allows stacking of omni antenna ranges. The Remotetech wiki has a chapter on this, but here's the basics in brief: an excellent transmitter/receiver on one end can connect to a puny whip antenna over a distance that vastly exceeds the whip's nominal range. And RO includes a lot of groundstations for Earth, with either 75,000km range (launch sites and Mercury Space Tracking Network stations) or 500,000,000km (Deep Space Network stations).

The actual calculation is:

1. Determine the ranges of the two nodes. If they are communicating by dish, that's merely the maximum dish ranges of the two nodes. If a node is using omni antennae, however, the range is the sum of the omni ranges (so 4x 4,000km omnis = 16,000km).
2. Determine which of the two nodes has a smaller range.
3. Determine the range between the nodes. That is: (the smaller range) + SQRT(range1 * range2), capped at a maximum of 100x the smaller omni range, or 1000x the smaller dish range.

This means that

• In the early game, you can assume that every antenna will have 100x it's nominal range. The Sputnik whip antenna is good for geostationary, and the Communotron-16 (the stock starting antenna) can talk back to earth from the moon. If you lose connection during ascent or in low earth orbit, it's usually not due to a lack of antenna range, but because all ground stations are behind the horizon.

• Two equal antennae will have their ranges doubled when talking to each other, that is, two Communotron-16 can still talk to each other from 8Mm apart. They are entirely suitable to build an early comm network.

For example, a 200km sounding rocket core can talk to a 75,000km ground station (all launch sites and MSTN sites) at a maximum range of:

Min(200 ; 75,000) + Sqrt(200 x 75,000) which becomes

200 + Sqrt(15,000,000)) which becomes

200 + 3,873

So talking to that ground station, it has a maximum range of 4,073km.

However, RO also includes three Deep Space Network stations, with ranges of 500,000,000km. When talking to a 200km probe, the maximum range between them is 20,000km (the formula resolves to 10000200km, but omnis are limited to 100x their nominal range). A Comm16 (4000km nominal) can reach the Moon, ~370,000km from Earth.

Incidentally, the three DSN stations are placed in such a fashion that once you're more than 10-20,000km from Earth and anywhere between +-55° of Earth's equator, you will always be in view of at least one of them. The only times when your Comm16-equipped lunar probe will have no link are (possibly) in low earth orbit, and (certainly) when it is behind the Moon.