Factorio Forums

I've had drastically different experiences with the Orbital drop slots in terms of timing, to the point where it seems like a bug. Sometimes it will take as much as a few minutes for stuff in an orbital drop slot to be sent down. Sometimes it seems like it's able to drop dozens of items super quickly. I've been told that having more cargo bays increases the speed at which things can drop, but there is nothing in the factoriopedia that explains this.

I'm guessing that for some combination of gameplay balance and encouraging automation, there is a cooldown on the orbital drop slots. If so, it would be really great to visually show that cooldown to the player so that I'm not just standing here waiting for something to happen.

Ideas:
1. Simply remove cooldown on orbital drop slots. Maybe this is bad because it incentivizes manual unloading, or could overload the cargo landing pad
2. Visually show the cooldown to the player and add documentation to the factoriopedia.

I've noticed that if you're automating drops from the space platform to a planet (such as ice or carbon) that is regularly sending small amounts, it will slow down Orbital Drop Slot use to an extreme.