TL;DR
Add a proper logic channel interface to the game.What?
In short, the ability of having a different channel for logic signal, so one could mod or work with different signal channels over the logic network.There isn't a concept of channels in Factorio, people use hacks like having another friendly force or having another surface, having it built in the game would allow us to do so much stuff.
How would that work, would highly depend on how much deep devs want to go.
Basically, we would have on the radar an input number, which is the logic channel. Then all the logic signals will work inside that channel.
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There would not be any changes to current logic though. How would that work, so all logic that we have today would still be exactly the same. We would just have one extra device that would "talk" to that channel. So, a wire connected from a box, that is connected to an inserter, would still works exactly as today.
If I want this mini network to be accessible from a distance, one just hooks it up to a radar, now you have that tiny network broadcast to every radar.
So, similarly if one wants to put that logic inside a channel, would use an encoder/decoder device, which could just be the radar with an input number, or another entity. So now that logic is inside that channel, so any encoder/decoder device that is set to the same channel would be able to read those same values.
I will give an expanding example with space station logic signal.
We can start with something similar to this one: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=120901
where a radar on a ship would be able to read the signal from the planet, and the planet from the ship in orbit. Essentially sharing the logic network.
That would be the easiest way with not much change and no inter ship / planet communication.
If we dive deep, we could have a channel selection on the radar, where the channel is basic something on space, either a planet or a station.
Then one can choose where it is reading from. Without any restriction one could read and write from anywhere to anywhere while keeping each logic network isolated on their own channel.
If we expand on this more, we could then make a dedicated satellite build on planet to talk with the spaceship in orbit of that planet, this satellite build entity would have a channel, aka a different radar, but for outside the planet.
Then we could expand more, to allow spaceship in orbit to talk with another spaceship that are 1 planet away, like from Nauvis to Fulgora or Vulcanos to Navius, but not Vulcanos to Fulgora. So in this scenario, one would need to build a satellite building on the planet, then make a space station that have a proper satellite as well in orbit, keep it in orbit, and then duplicate it to the planet you want to talk to, so to be able to read data from Fulgora planet in Nauvis, one would need to relay Fulgora data to a Fulgora space station, then relay that to a Nauvis space station, and finally relay that to the planet.
That would be in my opinion, a nice way of dealing with interplanetary and ship communication. Sure, it would be more complex.
The main goal is to have some sort of way to talk between ship and planet without have to rely on the space station logistic network request, as that is almost useless, since it does not get send down to the planet, unless the planet have enough for a rocket, which at this points, sending the signal is irrelevant, and also limit to be only rocket items and not raw signal data.
Also have this simpler suggestion viewtopic.php?p=634336#p634336, that was specifically for reading space station requests in full, not truncated based on quantity. But if we have a full logic network to talk, that will solve it as well.
An even deeper idea would evolve in having a different kind of space station, that is not meant to fly to another planet, but instead is meant for satellites (effectively a hidden surface), and we could send up satellites from ground up to this station, and having then act as a real world satellite, like we have now a days, where they relay information between other satellites that can be on different parts of space, and we would need to have a special kind of this satellite attached to a ship if one want to be "online" while in course.
Why?
Because factorio always was a game that allow you to do stuff manually somewhat in an efficient way, but could also do it with logic to either make it even more efficient or to make it smarter, and start or stop factory, control trains routes, and now, would just make sense to be able to control the space station and talk to other planet as well.A simple channel interface would drastically increase our capability in game and modding wise to do all sort of automation and fun stuff that are not quite possible currently due the lack of a proper channel for signals
This doesn't seem necessary? You've got red and green signals, plus quality options to separate signals from each other, that are shared by radar. So that's effectively 10 channels to separate your signals, so that you can use specific icons for specific things that are meaningful to you. Like, I wouldn't want to write down, that [grenade signal] is actual grenade output to be used in military science, but [electric furnace signal] is the requested number of furnaces that I do some math with, or whatever.