Placing com sats in proper orbit

[robpayne1956]

I currently have 2 satelites for communication in orbit of kerbin at 2867-2868 km about to place a third up there and maybe a forth later but what I wanted to know now is what are the proper orbits for thses satelites at the moon and minmus. I am trying to place satelites arount these moons before I go on to explore the rest of the solar system. Also do I need these satelites to go out further in space and still maintain comms with say a probe going to Duna or Jewl or Eve.

[Jupiter3927]

Any orbit where the 2 neighboring satellites can see each other is good enough.
You need to make sure they're not too far apart but that's only a problem if you go too high.
Make sure they share the same orbit to prevent them from drifting.

You need at least 1 relay with an antenna big enough to reach Jool orbiting Kerbin and another relay with the range to reach Kerbin from Jool orbiting Jool to get a connection.
Smaller relays are cheaper and easier to put in space so it's best to keep short-range relays around the planets and have 1 long range relay around each planet.

Also you can use those satellite placement contracts to put relays up.

[robpayne1956]

o I've had the game for about 2 weeks or so during that time I have made many many mistakes and killed many many Kerbins. So many in fact that I don't think they like me any more. So the reason for the question I asked was because I have begun to crash things into Duna mostly for lack of control at the critical moments during aerobraking menuvers because of the lack of coms I was unable till it was too late to gain control of the non kerbined space flight as none of them is willing to take a chance on my bad science. So my thinking was to put satelittes in orbit of the mun and minmust to try to prevent the lack of comms from making me kill probes.

[Jupiter3927]

Try quicksaving with [F5].
You can hold [F9] to revert your flight back to your last quicksave and retry any situation as much as you want.

The most powerful relay won't give you a connection through a planet.
Try doing your capture burn with some crew on board or plan it so it's not on the far side of the planet.

[DemonicSquid]

If you don't want to install the Resonant orbit calculator mod, you can check these on the orbit calculator website (https://meyerweb.com/eric/ksp/resonant-orbits/)

For Kerbin you want to look at the orbital period for a commsat network, which should be the same for all your sats. They should all have line-of-sight to each other, 4 sats have a lower orbit requirement for this than 3 (500km vs 600km IIRC). If you want a geo stationary orbit then the period for that is 6h (which when circular is 2867km for 4 sats IIRC). Orbits don't always need to be circular as long as they have the same period (6h).

For the Mun, a geo stationary orbit is outside the sphere of influence of the mun, so just do a line-of-sight orbit around 250-300km for 3 or 4 sats.

Because it's VERY tricky to get the correct orbit for multiple, equally spaced sats, you may find using the ALT-F12 set orbit the best option to fine-tune the orbits. Remember that you will need to set the Semi-Major Axis rather than the orbit height.

Some other links that may help:

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Orbit#Stationary_orbit_and_synchronous_orbit
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=768790637
https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/55b8xu/tetrahedral_satellite_constellation_for_all_moons/

[robpayne1956]

Thank you Demonicsquid that information is exactly what I was looking for. I have an online friend that plays this game and he suggested I get the MechJeb mod but I saw how that works and I realy didn't want to watch my rockets fly not have them flown other than by a poadobadine octo probe computer as Mechjeb while having some good features it seems to take both ability and fun out of the equation. Maybe after I have played the game and mastered it solo i will try tthis mod however I will take a look at the mod you suggested and see if it will be a fit for me.