Factorio Forums

TL;DR

If you hover over a request on a landing pad, one of the things in the tooltip is a number labelled 'Logistical storage'. This number is actually how many of that item are available for request from orbiting space platforms, and the label should be changed to better reflect that, something like 'Orbital storage' or 'Available in orbit'.

What?

The TL;DR pretty much covers it.

Why?

The current label is misleading. That same label, 'Logistical storage', shows up in various places inside the logistics networks, and there it always means the total number of that item available for request in the network, i.e. in storage, provider, and buffer chests. And this would be a perfectly logical value to display in the context of a landing pad: the pad is a member of the logistics network, where it acts as a passive provider. As such, the fact that that number is actually something else entirely is very confusing.

This also applies to roboports requesting robots. The toooltip says 'logistics storage', but it is not clear if that means 'how many of this type of robot is available in a logistics chest' or 'how many of this type of robot is currently in a roboport or flying around'.

+1 and I would add that it could also include an additional line for how many of those items are stored in the cargo bay's current logistics network. When you hover over a logistics chest, it shows how many items are available in a network. When you hover over the request slot in a blue/green chest, it shows how many of that item are available in the current network (green chests counting their own contents and blue chests not). Since the cargo bay behaves like a large chest, it makes sense that it would behave the same.

So for example, if 3 platforms each have 1k green chips, the cargo bay has 2k green chips inside it, and there's another 5k green chips in yellow chests in the same logistics network as the cargo bay, then the request tooltip could say:
Satisfaction: 2k/xxx
Orbital storage: 3k
Logistics storage: 7k