fun fact, that would make the transmission slower.
According to wikipedia cat5 cable has a propagation delay of 5.30 ns/m, which works out to about 62% of the speed of light.
While radio waves propagate at the speed of light.
Yeah, the reason ethernet is generally faster compared with wifi is mainly due to interference from physical objects between the device and the transmitter. Not as much an issue when you're issuing commands into the vacuum of space from large, high-powered antennas.
Radio waves always propagate at the speed of light, it's just that the effective speed of light in copper and glass fibre is lower than that in air/vacuum.
This means that if you have long cables at some distance you'll get a lower delay by using low earth orbit satellites like Starlink. Assuming a total distance via satellite of 1000km and the effective speed of light in glass fibre to be 2/3 c, cables over 667km will have a higher delay than the satellite.
I'm obsessed with the idea of a slow-paced FPS game now. Imagine logging in once or twice a day, picking a shot and seeing if whoever it is is still there the next day.
Once I had a board game that was a lot like this. You controlled robots on a board, and had to plan out like 5 operations (turn/step/...) each round. Chaos ensues when you have 4 people hindering (or trying to) each other.
Well NASA is essentially botting. It's not like they need to sit there and give it every input. They tell it what to do and it follows a program. I could bot with that much ping if my bit is running locally on the game's servers. Basically: NASA is full of cheaters.
300ms is the average reaction time in humans. Less than 100ms reaction time would be insane and I'm pretty sure it's something no one has actually achieved.
Lemmy.nz has had some serious problems with federation with World, and a few other instances, because the way federation works, or worked, is an item would be sent, the receiving server would acknowledge receipt, and the next thing would be sent.
Don't let your ping hold you back. I bought one of the COD games a few years ago and my PC would not run it no matter what I did with the settings (I think my processor was the problem). Usually it crashed before I even got into a game but I was actually able to join 2 of them and it was like playing a PowerPoint presentation of COD. The one game I actually able to finish I was still in the middle of the pack for k/d....
They don't use anything for their latency. I've looked into the space network they have, what protocols they use and what they do about the massive delays.... Just a little bit, I don't know it super well or anything, but from my understanding, the "network" they use is more about assurance than delivery speed.
The publicly available version of what they use is called delay tolerant networking, which essentially uses a mesh of nodes that may, or may not be able to communicate to other nodes at any given time. As messages are sent, they are relayed from node to node as connectivity allows until they get to a base station for final delivery. It's a bit like the mail system, but instead of large centralized sorting facilities, you only have local post offices. The message is sent from one office to another until it leapfrogs it's way to the destination. It can wait at one post office indefinitely until a path opens up to the next one.
In the case of delay tolerant networking, it basically sends it along to the next station in the mesh, and that station will confirm the delivery of the information, which is when the sender can remove the message from its buffer.
Ideally, the nodes should have some type of non-volatile memory (like nvram) to store pending deliveries, so nodes don't waste power trying to keep the information in their volatile memory (RAM).
Terrestrialy, we use DTN for tracking stuff like the movement of animals in large and unserviceable areas (where mobile networks like LTE, don't exist), such as deserts and undeveloped forests. As the trackers on the animals come within range of another tracked animal, updates occur, and when either gets near enough to a base station to upload the information, then the updates are sent out to the records systems.
Don't ask me how the logic works to figure out when to push data one way or another. I haven't gotten that deep into the protocol yet.
Anyways, for NASA, the information is sent to satellites, which relays to the rover eventually. In NASA's case, they can directly transmit, from Earth, using microwave arrays, to the satellites in orbit around Mars if we want.
I'm not sure on the specifics of how they have their version of DTN setup, so I'm only speculating at best.
They don't mitigate latency, they simply account for it, and work with that as part of the problem.