End of an Era. o7

@r4v1n6 thank you for the information. If that's the case then I will mark the mod as "obsolete"

The latest game update, Contact lowers the power consumption of Laser Antenna's by 90% (same as this mod) and also lowers power consumption while idle even more. I guess the devs finally realised how crazy it was before.

I've been using this mod for quite some time, but it looks like it's time for it to retire. Thank you for all the years of saner power usage that it gave me.

@Syroth Yo! Did you ever get around to adopting it?

Hi, feel free to use my mods and continue them as you want. Thank you for asking. You can also port them to the other mod hubs, if you wish.

@Hull Breach - Permission to adopt this project, crediting you indefinitely?

It may still work.. but I see in your workshop the newest item you have, holds a comment from you stating you arent as active and your work can be adopted moving forward.

This scratches a long-term itch for me, and I already know others share my 'demand' for this. This makes me interested in prepping things.

I've been playing SE since the week it was released onto steam, and don't plan on stopping soon. I'd look to maintain this indefinitely.

thanks in advance, and thanks for your contributions to our community! cheers and good luck

Works great for me - thanks!

Unless I'm missing something, this mod appears to break all my laser antenna. They can't seem to connect. Uninstalled the mod and everything is working again.

You're welcome!

Thank you for making Laser Antennas viable!
All that work to set up plus mobile grid vs mobile grid shenanigans and oh wait,
even more power inefficient than a directionless signal?!?
Now actually a reason to use plus decent option on small grid.

Definitely needed this mod on my server. The power drain is a joke. Me and a friend set up a test rig on titan so we could connect to our moon bases in orbit of earth to it. 24 batterys, and a solar panel array with 8 panels (using a solar array tracking script with a solar panel output mod to increase power output) and the second we powered up and begun scanning with the antenna every other component on the grid powered down. Bearing in mind the panel mod we use outputs 10kwh per panel with full exposure, it still killed it all. And our moon bases run off one solar array each with 4 panels and 8 batterys each. by the time we made it back to our moon bases they were entirely powered down until we turned off the laser antennas!

As someone who likes playing with large, "astronomical" distances that takes hours to travel I appreciate I can now actually use my satellites to communicate over those distances!

yes, updating is real horror !!!

You're welcome. Let me know if the mod should stop working any day (SE updates sometimes break my modified blocks)

thanks for this mod, it makes interplanetary lasers affordable.

I thought the power consumption was silly vs range anyway. Even at 10Mw and 10% (its the future) efficiency, thats a 1MW beam that would burn a hole through or cut in half any ship passing close by. So makes no sense. Comm lasers are really low powered, the range comes by having a good detector anyway. One feature you could have is a detector overload situation possible that would make you have turn down the power. An IRL feature of these systems is RSSI controlled power output. Output power is determined by receive signal level feedback to automatically adjust the output and save power. So less fiddle with settings.

"that the power consumption doesn't depend on the chosen maximum range but on the acutal distance between the two connected laser antennas"
Correct :)

Yup I will still use it I mean cheaper is cheaper :)

I'm sorry Kane. I Hope the mod is still useful for you.

Thanks, Yeah I was so confused I thought it got worse as time went on :P

(I changed the description. Now it states that the antenna cosumpts ~10MW at 2000km)

Oh cr*p, now I know what the problem is. Seems I just misunderstood the functionality of the antenna.I'm so sorry!

I have two space stations that are connected to a relais-station via laser antennas. They both consumpt ~9.5MW, altought the one antenna is set to infinite and the other one to 2000 (not 2500km). Increasing the range doesn't alter the power consumption, so I thought that there was an upper limit to the power consumption.

BUT

The stations both have the same distance to the connected relais station by chance. So this would mean, that the power consumption doesn't depend on the chosen maximum range but on the acutal distance between the two connected laser antennas or am I wrong (again)?

Oh thanks whip. That's strange. I'll have to check this back. Don't know, why the consumption seems to stop in my game.

"after those 2500km the power consuption stops rising"
I tested it and this does not seem to be the case. I also checked the game code to verify that the math has not changed since the initial implementation of the power curve.

The power draw in vanilla follows this curve and I verified by going out to 10,000 km and checking against this curve: https://i.imgur.com/DoWF2YE.png

Note that the curve is unbounded and will continue to increase at a rate of 10*x^2 beyond 200 km (under 200 km, the formula is 10*x).

Awesome! Thanks for the info.

after those 2500km the power consuption stops rising. So there's no difference anymore between 2500km, 20000km or infinite. I didn't modify this, it's vanilla.

Ohh I see so what is your max range do you consider 10MW? that 2500km?

But the maximum power consumption is reached at ~2500km, I think.

The maximum range is infinite since some recent update. Without modding.

Sorry maximum range?