Roboports and circuit/logistic networks

[Kelderek]

Will roboports be connectable to the circuit and/or logistic networks in 0.13?

Right now these have storage for bots and repair packs and yet neither of those are exposed to the logistic network and you cannot connect red or green wires to the roboport for a circuit network. I think it would be handy to at least have it be part of a circuit network and possibly the logistic network too (as passive provider?).

Adding to circuit network:
-- We could automate adding and removing bots from roboports to control how many are idle in a certain roboport at once. Some of my roboports that are part of a big network end up with too many or too few bots inside them relative to the need in the immediate area. With a circuit network condition I could use smart inserters and chests to add or remove bots to maintain the balance I want.

-- You would have more flexibility to use one large logistic network instead of often needing to split them into multiple smaller networks. An example of this is using bots to repair defenses. I could use a requester chest to add a specific limited number of repair packs to a roboport as well as a specific number of construction bots (using red or green circuit network cables to access the counts inside the roboport). Likewise I could extract any excess bots into an active provider chest so they could be moved to a more central location. This would solve the problem where an outpost with multiple roboports for construction bots used for defense repairs can't see any repair packs stored outside of chests and their current roboport - we wouldn't be forced to use redundant chests for this purpose.

Adding to logistic network:
-- You could use character logistic slots to request more bots be brought to your inventory, any idle bots inside roboports would be available for this. This would be handy whenever I need to setup a new outpost and need to request a bunch of supplies to build it - including new roboports and bots for the outpost to use..

-- You could control how many bots are crafted by assemblers. The logistic network only shows bots inside chests, so there is currently no way to automatically control how many bots get crafted and added to the network. If I "steal" some bots to establish a new outpost, then my assemblers could make new ones to refill the network to the number I specify.

What do you guys think?

[Anduin1357]

Support for this. I seriously cannot for the life of me, find my inactive construction bots that hide all over the 37 or so robo ports all over my base.

[Kelderek]

I hadn't even thought of that, but it is a great point. I was thinking more about replenishing the bots automatically from my assemblers whenever I take bots out of the network to move them to new outposts. But you're right, it can be a pain to find construction bots sometimes and it would be nice to be able to just request them from the network using logistic slots.