Laser Antenna - What have you made with it so far what is not doable with normal Antenna?

Hello everyone, I am interested in the new L-Antenna, but I don't feel any benefits from these.

The ONLY benefit I know of is that I would be able to decluster my HUD a bit with the L-Antenna. But the drawbacks are Loss of Sight between the L-Antennas, simpyl by tilting the ship a bit too far. I could ofcourse place multiple L-Antenna on ship/station, but then I have simply more vital parts on the outside hull that could be damaged. For MP i can think that having not a broadcast is a pure benefit, but the chances of loosing the remote signal due to wrong flying is way too high.

So I want to ask you, dear community reader, what have you or will you build with those L-Antenna that a Antenna could not do until now.

 

I may build them but for a laser com the range is too short. i may be making a mod to help that.
The upside to a laser com is that no one can tap the signal without the owner knowing
but space dust will make the signal look like its being hacked
other then that i would use it for long range coms and use a antenna for unmanned ships around the outpost just to keep it somewhat hidden.

but the better turret API on the other hand.

 

I didn't tried this antennas yet, but I think this is more for MP, so the other players can not find you that easy. Also for survival, it consumes much less power and cost cheaper than the normal antenna

 

Small ship laser antennas have a range of 30km instead of the 5km that small ship radio antennas have.

Large ship laser antennas occupy only 1x1x2 blocks, instead of the 1x2x6 blocks that the large ship radio antennas occupy.

I have built and confirmed working a laser->radio relay, which can be used to increase the effective range of a drone using laser antennas to as high as 35km. Plenty of range for most of my usual exploration trips, without the need of a Large ship or Station to be at either location. It also allows control of a remote ship when said ship is more than the small 5km range between a pair of relay radio antennas.

Oh, and if you have a radio antenna on the same grid as a laser antenna, the laser antenna pings on your HUD, so good luck decluttering that ;p

 

well 30km Large to small ship, 20km small to small, As for HUD clutter, hopefully they'll give the option to just show grid name at its center of mass, and have showing individual antennas on HUD as a toggle option on the antennas themselves (broadcast, don't show on friendly HUD but that may have lower priority than other things, at longer ranges you are less likely to lose the signal due to movement, as for obstructions, having multiple paths is better, not just if a signal is lost, but (in MP) to make them hard to trace back to the main base, easy to go on after intentionally breaking a path. For combat application, the ships that would focus on housing the laser antennas would be kept away from combat, with the support fleet, in direct combat, the broadcast antennas are far superior, yes, and to be stealthy you would primarily use short range broadcasts, using lasers to communicate with various fleets/subfleets and home base. They make longer range coms easier (while large to large is 10km less than max with standard antennas, they still use considerably less power so even in sp there's an advantage there), due to the angle limit, they will never be great at short distance, or where you are liable to make sharp turns frequently, or in high traffic zones, but past those local areas, where it's better to use the old antennas, there are practical advantages to the lasers

 

In my findings, large laser antennas use somewhere around 550 kW of power when linked to another laser antenna. A normal large antenna set to its max range uses somewhere of 260 kW. While the laser antennas are cool and they are a bit stealthy and don't clog up your HUD, to run 1 laser antenna that is linked to another laser antenna, requires at least 5 solar panels to run it (6 if the panels aren't directly facing the sun). That's the same amount of solar panels needed to run 1 gravity generator indefinitely. Not worth it in my opinion. But I play mainly on SSP. For SMP, I can see the laser antennas being more useful, as some of the posts above mentioned. You'll just have to be mindful on how power consuming they are.

 

Ok so it uses more power, (and more computer components..) so in SP they are currently impractical, unless they add remote scripting into the equation, i mean a direct way of doing it, plus there's the engineering challenges they present..

 

The power requirements look even worse when you consider that the laser ants are node-node connections not wide area broadcast.

 

That's the way I feel. The normal antennas don't require LOS and require less power to run. They also reach 10 km further than the laser antennas. If the laser antennas reached out further, say 80 or even 100 km, then the extra power usage could be worth it. As they stand now, they aren't feasible in SSP.

 

I added an antenna to a ship that otherwise would have looked ridiculous (not to mention been harder to dock!) with a large antenna. Also, they're cheaper in resources than the large ones, so I saved a bit there.

 

t would be cool if we could use this as a target painter as well so we could have all of our turrets aim at the same spot and would be very useful for builds like one of the Homeworld Multi-Gun Corvettes.

 

There are potential PB applications that they open up, in the multigrid communication department

 

oh, laser antennas uses more power? well... I thought it was the inverse :s

 

my server has cleane up antenna spam dramatically.. everyone had their own relay networks... now they changed out the reg antennas for lasers. So much cleaner

 

Yes, normal antennas use less power at their max range of 50 km. However, you weren't too far off with the thought that laser antennas used less power than the regular ones because you probably didn't link the laser antenna to another laser antenna. An unlinked and idle laser antenna uses around 156 kW, I think. But once you link the laser antenna to another one, watch its power input shoot through the roof.

 

I would be useing laser antenna more often, but its range is... just too short. so far I've seen a modder made a stupidly long range antenna. has anyone made one that seems more reasonable? maybe 100 to 200KM?

 

i wonder how much that "stupidly long range" would effectively differ from 200km* in a normal game. I didnt see many servers with more than 100km range for a world, so you could exceed that already. Furthermore, traveling just 100km at the vanilla speed of ~104m/s takes over 16 minutes, 200km takes 32min already.

 

Furthest I've ever been was 200km away from home base, and that felt excessive.

Seems like there are a fair number of players playing with 400 m/s max speed mods so, 200 km/s is < 10 mins.

 

I'm actully thinking that this is a trial for laser based weapons.

 

I've toyed around with a "silent" remote warhead.

 

Doubt it, Laser based weapons are (from a programming standpoint) no different than any other weapon, also they have said that they don't want laser weapons, however the "known receivers" menu seems like the backbone to a multigrid in-game programing addressing system.

 

Well because of the way they are designed I am using mine as a detection grid for the area when someone crosses in front of the beam it breaks it and causes a break.

 

a photoelectric barrier. cute. but way too expensive.

 

my server is modded to allow people to go 800 in small ships and 350 in large. with the introduction of 6.6AU worlds, I wanted to fly long distances and look around with drones. this is something i wanted to do with minecraft, but the world save files get too large and un manageable for the PC.

 

Sadly, the few problems I have with antennas are not fixed with lasers... The only bonus of lasers seems to be they're smaller on the ship. But the LOS limitation removes all remote-mining possibilities and means I have to put my antennas on the outside of everything.
they still clutter my HUD up with information (my biggest annoyance)

Top that off with the one-yo-one-only use, it seems a bit limited. You need to make four or five to connect to a station, satellite, mining drone, scouter and any other remote ships you're working on.
I've not even looked at range and power cost because the drone ships I use can't use the laser-antennas if they want to actually move anywhere.

if a Laser Antenna could transmit power, I would hop on that, make myself a solar farm out somewhere and connect my station to it with happy squee-face... but right now, all I can think to use them for is station-to-station connections and they've got to be on a stalk so the traffic doesn't get in the way. Can't say i'm sold.
I really wanted to be too! the concept is amazing, but it just seems a bit... useless.
I can appreciate the 'stealth on PVP map' idea... but it also acts as a great big arrow once you find one. and you can park your ship in the way and stuff everyone's day up.

Can someone tell me if there's an amazing use for these that i'm not seeing? from the forum-crawling, they seem to have better range, but worse power consumption for it.

 

As for the "big arrow" they seem to act like in your opinion. I challenge you to find a small drone ~30km away from a laser antenna with a size of about 3x3x5 m³ by just looking at the laser antennas output.
Furthermore, while you sure could block the laser, you had to position youself directly in front of it. The farther you are away from the antenna, the harder it becomes. The closer you are, the more likely it is to be shot down from the bases defenses.

I also suggested a 'randomized' movement pattern for laser relays so you can not simply follow the direction a laser antenna is point at, even if you had the perfect orientation (which you will never achieve with just looking at it from a distance through a camera anyway).

 

I like this idea!

 

So, it works like a relay?
Seems an awful lot of work to just link things together. Why not just... go over there? Mining drones are limited by line of sight so you'd be hard-pressed to get in an asteroid unless you're carving the whole thing flat as you go.
you still need to fly them (or your cargo) home, that requires either flying there yourself or having an antenna for a freighter...

It seems a lot of work for not much reward... you need to make self-powered, defended stations (that means re-supplying the ammo etc) just to work remote on a place far off.
I guess i'm not going to find these all that useful other than connecting one station to another and, to be frank, I don't see why i need more than one station.

Thanks for your reply though. That clears things up. The range boost is amazing and well-worth looking into for an ore-sniffer scout, but i can't see much further use being viable

 

All you have to do to kill a drone in combat is break the los of the laser antenna. Just fly behind it or draw it around an asteroid.

 

with the time it will take to reconnect, you can just get near the laser and then shoot it off in the five to ten seconds it takes to reconnect...