I was planning to do some time division multiplexing to transfer complex signals (eg. arbitrary item orders from other planets) on a single channel, but since the channel to the planet is only updated occasionally (seems like every 15 ticks?), the synchronization gets more complicated (and bandwidth is significantly reduced - not a breaking issue with a few platforms, but limits scalability). Is there a reason you manually copy the values over via script, instead of just adding a script-wire-connection between the control tower and the orbiting receiver? You could still connect the receiver to a hidden constant combinator when leaving a location if the "cache received value" option is enabled...

I liked the, send/receive only when in orbit constraint, so I didn't look too far once I had the copy idea.
You are right this looks like a better way to do it. I'll probably convert but I don't have a lot of time to test it at the moment.

On the other hand I will take a pull request if you want to go there.

I started implementing this option, but it's actually not straightforward to do this in a non-breaking way:
- The simplest implementation would connect the all the mission control tower inputs on a surface to each other like radar connections, while previously they were isolated (if you connected 2 red networks to 2 different control towers, they would stay separate); the same is true for the output connections
- If you wanted to isolate them, you'd need to add "diode combinators" (eg. arithmetic "everything + 0 = everything") to both inputs and outputs, but that would cause a 2 tick transmission delay - if you connected receiver combinator input to output, the ground station would receive its inputs with 4 ticks delay

I'm wondering if it would be easier/better to make a fork of this mod that implemented option 1) without any of the UI complexity (with 60 ticks update frequency, you could do cryptographic handshakes to prove the correct planet wants to connect to your space platform), than possibly breaking existing builds of users of this mod...

I see what you mean. I'll give it some thought but that's a pretty big breaking change.

The second option with the hidden diodes wouldn't really be breaking unless one relied on the low frequency (4 ticks RT delay with full bandwidth, instead of "random" 15-30 ticks RT delay with 1/15th bandwidth), it's just a notable difference from "basically full duplex radar connection in space" (there is already another mod that lets orbital radars join the network of radars on the planet, though that doesn't give you separate send/receive channels, and requires you to take orbital connections into account when designing your planetary network) which I initially expected. Though on further reflection, maybe some delay for orbital transmissions would actually make more sense than instantaneous communication, given the distance involved...