Is it possible to tell the game to raise an event (or run a function) on a specific future tick (without using `on_tick` events)?

Use case
I want to have an entity perform an action, then perform that action again later after a (random) number of ticks. Multiple entities will be doing this, so ...

I want to implement an Easter egg which involves launching a cat into space.
(I'm porting this mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/petcat )

There are 2 problems I am having:

It looks like manual-mode items cannot have products. When trying to launch it, the launch button is greyed-out, with the ...

Yes please I would love it if there was a button to add a 'dummy' parameter or variable that I could set while placing the print.

However, I somehow managed to do this before: (This sets a limit on the output inserter based on the amount of item in the logistics network)
test.png
test2.png ...