Rocket silo logistic is just broken

[Tinyboss]

I guess you could read requests from a different silo.

Which means you cant read the contents of the other silo.

Of course. It's a partial workaround. You would not have to use that silo, so the only cost is constructing it.

[mmmPI]

Why cant it simply request what is actually needed rather than filling up every rocket to max capacity of the item?

The max rocket payload for constant combinator is 50, if you have several stacks of them it means you launched several rockets, the game won't send that many for construction only

[mrvn]

I guess you could read requests from a different silo.

Which means you cant read the contents of the other silo.

The silo where you read requests has no content so that isn't an issue. You read requests from silo A and then insert that into silo B where you read content.

[mrvn]

Another thing broken: You can not send Processing unit (blue card), Low Density Structure or Rocket Fuel into space with inserters and circuit logic. Those three things always go into the build slots of the silo. You can send those with automation but then it takes a full rocket and logistic bots.

[mrvn]

I made a more constructive feature request to add Payload Assembly Building for dealing with the logistics aspect of the silo and platforms: viewtopic.php?p=637168#p637168

Maybe this thread could be moved to general discussion or something. It's a list of problems, a rant, and was never a suggestion for a solution. As more problems crystalize maybe other solutions can be spun off into additional suggestions.

[mmmPI]

Another thing broken: You can not send Processing unit (blue card), Low Density Structure or Rocket Fuel into space with inserters and circuit logic. Those three things always go into the build slots of the silo. You can send those with automation but then it takes a full rocket and logistic bots.

This is not broken and is actually quite good design imo, because you get access to requester chests after your first rocket launch, most players have inserters and belts placing blue circuits LD and fuel in their silo and it would contaminate all their further launch if those were inserted as cargo. Unless they do some circuits shenanigans , like for space exploration which constitute a barrer for many players.

[mrvn]

Another thing broken: You can not send Processing unit (blue card), Low Density Structure or Rocket Fuel into space with inserters and circuit logic. Those three things always go into the build slots of the silo. You can send those with automation but then it takes a full rocket and logistic bots.

This is not broken and is actually quite good design imo, because you get access to requester chests after your first rocket launch, most players have inserters and belts placing blue circuits LD and fuel in their silo and it would contaminate all their further launch if those were inserted as cargo. Unless they do some circuits shenanigans , like for space exploration which constitute a barrer for many players.

It's still broken. Just might be unfixable as is.

Some background of why this mattered to me: When you discover a new planet you have to land to place your first roboport. But I hated being stuck on Vulcanus with no way off the planet. So why not ship a rocket silo to the new planet for an immediate way of the planet? The plan was to build 2000 Electromagnetic Science Packs on Fulgora with a minimal factory. Bring everything needed without having to build the tools to build the tools to build the base first.

Well, for starters the rocket silo is too big, can't be send into space. Which kind of makes sense. So instead send the ingredients and build the silo on the planet. The ingredients include the blue circuit boards. And once you have the silo you also need to build a rocket, which means everything needed for the rocket parts. Which overall means 265 (3 stacks, basically perfect) blue circuit boards, 65 (2 instead of 4 stacks) low density structure and 65 (4 instead of 5 stacks) rocket fuel, 100 pipes (1 instead of 2 stacks) and a rocket full of concrete, electric motors and steel each.

And you can only send 3 of those by hand or with the automation turned on. Which is when it send 1000 copper plates and 2000 green circuit boards into orbit among other things it wanted to send. To the wrong platform no less, because you can't choose which platform to fill requests for and all that.

Note: I later realized that recycling and the heavy oil oceans on Fulgora gives you everything for the rocket silo and rocket so you only need to bring some assemblers, chemical plants, an offshore pump, pipes and inserters and you have the silo and rocket in no time. But the concept stands for other planets. Only Fulgora makes it that easy to get off it.

[mmmPI]

Note: I later realized that recycling and the heavy oil oceans on Fulgora gives you everything for the rocket silo and rocket so you only need to bring some assemblers, chemical plants, an offshore pump, pipes and inserters and you have the silo and rocket in no time.

Brilliant ! maybe this dicussion should go to gameplay help after, i'm sure many other players have had to face the same kind of frustration when learning the new mechanic but do not dare to share the embarassing stories.

[Zaflis]

There are a bunch of things that simply don't work with the rocket silo for automating sending items to space.

The only thing that actually sort of works is clicking the automatic requests box. Even that has 3 big flaws:

1) The biggest flaw in this is that it always sends a full rocket of the thing. Sending 50 laser turrets when only 4 are needed is a big waste. There is no way to send exact counts for construction work. Or 10 cargo hub extensions when all you need is 1.

2) If you do not have 1 rocket full of the item available in the logistic network the spaceship hub never requests it. That means you can not produce the items on demand as needed. I do not need 10 cargo hug extensions sitting around in a provider chest.

3) There is no checkmark for the rocket silo to request form buffer chests. But the contents of buffer chests still counts for determining if enough items are available. So the rocket silo will request 50 laser turrets but 40 of them are in a buffer chest. The silo is then stuck with 10 and never gets the remaining 40.


So if the automatic fails lets turn to manually filling the rocket. Oh where do I start:

1) You can read out the requests and the contents. But not at the same time. So you have no idea how much of what is requested is already loaded.

2) All the requests of all the space platforms are merged. You have no idea which platform requests what.

3) There is no way to say to which platform to send the rocket or when to send it. There seems to be some automatic to send the rocket when it is full, but only when it is filled by a single item to capacity. Any mixture seems to prevent launch. Maybe because with a mixture have the content could be for platform A and the rest for platform B.

4) When a rocket is launched the silo still requests the same items. There is no way to detect a rocket in transit, no way to detect a rocket launch and use ones own timer till it lands or something. Why isn't the hub subtracting the rocket content from the request while in transit? That would be just like provider chests subtracking the "picking up" items from their content.

5) There is no option to send items to the trash slots. I want the option to only keep requested items in the rocket silo. That way excess items in the hands of inserters on the last load could be expelled.

So not only do I have to send 10 hub cargo extensions to launch the rocket. I then send 10 more because because it requests another 10 until the rocket has landed. Now the hub has 19 unused cargo extensions.

1) There is a way to send only 4 laser turrets. Make a request on platform for 0..infinite, custom minimum 4. Problem is though that you'll need to make such a request for every item you use in construction, but only those ones that are in very low quantity on planet. It is also allowed to send rockets that are half empty, wether you care about rocket cost or not.

2) See 1). Indeed you don't want such a small amount as only 10 cargo hubs stored on the planet, you need at least 30.

3) Yeah this was already mentioned rocket silo will ask from buffer chests too so it doesn't need a checkmark.
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1) So build a second rocket silo and you can do both actions? It is highly inefficient to have only 1 on the planet, makes platform building incredibly slow. Using rocket silos with circuits is very advanced stuff that 99% of people will never dabble with, myself included probably.

2) Why does that matter? Even more advanced circuitry than 1).

3) Again custom minimum threshold can force a rocket launch half full. All these issues stem from trying to fill rocket silos automatically with more than 1 type of item at the time... Ok, say you have 2 platforms A and B. A needs 100 steel and 100 copper. B needs 100 steel and 100 green circuits.
Now manual mode rocket silo is filling with 100 steel, not full yet, it gets 100 copper in. At this point the game should prevent green circuits from being loaded in because it's not requested to same place. But is the game really this smart? I don't know and i wouldn't risk stuffing my logistics with it.

4) I'm not sure this is true. I just now set my rocket silo to read platform requests, then asked platform to request for 50 electric drills. While animation was happening on silo i checked the circuit info and there was nothing in it.

5) Fair suggestion, but also uses are only the very advanced circuits. I still don't see a need to circuit rocket silos at early-, mid- or even post-endgame.

I also recommend building bigger if rocket deliveries feel too expensive. It doesn't take long time to copy 1 large platform into a new platform from scratch, using only automated bot deliveries with full stacks. Productivity modules in silos, some speed beacons next to, send perhaps combinators manually by hand.

[Sworn]

nah the problem with rockets request is that it is in a between state, it is not quite a normal logistic network, it is connected but doesn't function exactly the same.

Also, we have very limited logic control over it, can't send a rocket with signal, can't talk with the station with signal, can't really automate the minimal custom requests with signals. Can't read the full request that the station have from logic if we don't a full rocket in stock, so you can't really "ask" the factory to build the request with logic only, and send it to the rocket, like make 2 laser torrent and send it, which the logic system does allow, it is just blocked from the rocket silo.

So, this bring then all those "problems" that people would like to solve but they can't quite get it as it just not built in the game.
Which is the weird part as it is built in the game, except it is not applicable to the rocket silo and the landing pad in orbit.

Read orbital request doesn't really read it unless it is already propagated, which make it almost useless for most automations.

[mrvn]

1) There is a way to send only 4 laser turrets. Make a request on platform for 0..infinite, custom minimum 4. Problem is though that you'll need to make such a request for every item you use in construction, but only those ones that are in very low quantity on planet. It is also allowed to send rockets that are half empty, wether you care about rocket cost or not.
...
5) Fair suggestion, but also uses are only the very advanced circuits. I still don't see a need to circuit rocket silos at early-, mid- or even post-endgame.

I also recommend building bigger if rocket deliveries feel too expensive. It doesn't take long time to copy 1 large platform into a new platform from scratch, using only automated bot deliveries with full stacks. Productivity modules in silos, some speed beacons next to, send perhaps combinators manually by hand.

You can't automate this and I have to try what the behavior of the platform then is. Overall the point of sending just 4 laser turrets is only worth it when you can add the 20 belts, 3 chemical plants and 10 inserters to the same rocket. Otherwise the cost of the rocket exceeds most payloads.

It's really not that advanced at all. It should really just be subtracting content from requests and setting that as requests on a requester chest. So one arithmetic combinator. Early game is exactly when you want to send exact counts because you don't have the resources or time to waste although I would say for construction materials you always want exact counts.

As for sending half empty rockets you probably want to only do that after some delay and when 2 rockets are ready or something. It would be horrible inefficient if the game sends a rocket when you place your first solar cell in space and then you have to wait 10 minutes for a second rocket for everything you build seconds later. You definetly don't want a rocket with 4 laser turrets only when there is also a request for other stuff.

[Sworn]

As for sending half empty rockets you probably want to only do that after some delay and when 2 rockets are ready or something. It would be horrible inefficient if the game sends a rocket when you place your first solar cell in space and then you have to wait 10 minutes for a second rocket for everything you build seconds later. You definetly don't want a rocket with 4 laser turrets only when there is also a request for other stuff.

That is the thing right, factorio always allowed one to build in any "efficience" level, regardless of if it is super op, or insanely terrible.
I really don't get why they build the rocket request like this, just make the game inconsistent.

Yes, logistic rocket is simple. You have a rocket worth of X, it will get requested. I think it being too simplistic is exactly why people complain, we lack fine control over it, and that is something logic always allows us to do, but not with the rocket.

[Zaflis]

You can't automate this and I have to try what the behavior of the platform then is. Overall the point of sending just 4 laser turrets is only worth it when you can add the 20 belts, 3 chemical plants and 10 inserters to the same rocket. Otherwise the cost of the rocket exceeds most payloads.

I was specifically talking about automatic requests.

Please try it yourself, when you are making a new request on platform in that same dialog at the bottom is the "custom minimum" section.

As for efficiency, im not sure what it sends per rocket but it might fit some other goods along with the 4 lasers if platform needs?

[Sworn]

You can't automate this and I have to try what the behavior of the platform then is. Overall the point of sending just 4 laser turrets is only worth it when you can add the 20 belts, 3 chemical plants and 10 inserters to the same rocket. Otherwise the cost of the rocket exceeds most payloads.

I was specifically talking about automatic requests.

Please try it yourself, when you are making a new request on platform in that same dialog at the bottom is the "custom minimum" section.

As for efficiency, im not sure what it sends per rocket but it might fit some other goods along with the 4 lasers if platform needs?

Please try it your self as well, make the ""custom minimum" set by logic

[Zaflis]

Please try it your self as well, make the ""custom minimum" set by logic

I have done it several times, i don't need to set rocket silos to non-automatic mode to send only tiny amounts of high quality turrets over.
Just make a request from the planet you are on (Nauvis?), ask for 0 minimum and infinite max items, then set custom minimum send threshold to like 1. Then build that quality turret on platform, it will auto-request 1 from the planet.

By logic you mean setting platform requests by circuit? I never tried something like that and don't think it's possible.

[Sworn]

I have done it several times, i don't need to set rocket silos to non-automatic mode to send only tiny amounts of high quality turrets over.
Just make a request from the planet you are on (Nauvis?), ask for 0 minimum and infinite max items, then set custom minimum send threshold to like 1. Then build that quality turret on platform, it will auto-request 1 from the planet.

where is that being done via logic? That is the thing, it is just not possible, what you are saying is not using logic.

[mrvn]

Please try it your self as well, make the ""custom minimum" set by logic

I have done it several times, i don't need to set rocket silos to non-automatic mode to send only tiny amounts of high quality turrets over.
Just make a request from the planet you are on (Nauvis?), ask for 0 minimum and infinite max items, then set custom minimum send threshold to like 1. Then build that quality turret on platform, it will auto-request 1 from the planet.

By logic you mean setting platform requests by circuit? I never tried something like that and don't think it's possible.

The question is what else it puts in the rocket. I haven't had time to try the custom minimum myself yet but my understanding of that feature was that it then sends a half empty rocket. Not that it combines requests for multiple things to fill a rocket. And for most things the cost of the rocket exceeds the cost of the items. It's the rockets you want to primarily safe.

[Tinyboss]

The question is what else it puts in the rocket. I haven't had time to try the custom minimum myself yet but my understanding of that feature was that it then sends a half empty rocket. Not that it combines requests for multiple things to fill a rocket.

Correct. I spent quite some time trying different things. For example I made requests from a platform using custom minimums for two different items, that added up to exactly one rocket load. Then I used logic to load exactly that many of each item into the silo. The first thing that happened is that it launched as soon as one request could be filled, with a half-empty rocket, no matter how closely I tried to synchronize the inserters to fill both items at the same time.

Then just out of curiosity (it wouldn't be a solution to automating anything), I got the loading done with the platform requests disabled, then I re-enabled them (simultaneously, via a logistics group). The rocket just sat there.

There does not appear to be any means whatsoever of launching a rocket with more than one item type, except manually in the silo UI by clicking the "deliver" button.

[Sworn]

There does not appear to be any means whatsoever of launching a rocket with more than one item type, except manually in the silo UI by clicking the "deliver" button.

Yap, that is quite it, we just lack the fine control over it, a "launch rocket" signal would work, now to which platform should it be sent?
I would say, spaceships probably have an ID just like trains have, if one is trying to launch the rocket with signals, give us the ability to read spaceships ids (if they exists), and it would be solved, with a target station id.

[bullipatty]

There does not appear to be any means whatsoever of launching a rocket with more than one item type, except manually in the silo UI by clicking the "deliver" button.

Yap, that is quite it, we just lack the fine control over it, a "launch rocket" signal would work, now to which platform should it be sent?
I would say, spaceships probably have an ID just like trains have, if one is trying to launch the rocket with signals, give us the ability to read spaceships ids (if they exists), and it would be solved, with a target station id.

from what the map editor exposes, it seems to be a string id, just like of other surfaces have a string id, but yea, that would be nice.