[2.0.32] Rocket with custom minimum payload launches early

[Ralfinator]

I am experiencing some odd behavior with "custom minimum payload". My expectation is that if, let's say, 400 items are missing, and the rocket capacity is 500, and the minimum payload is 200, then 400 items get requested and (if available) sent. However, sometimes (not always), rockets launch with fewer items.

The bug reproduces with the attached savefile:
- Open the file, then hit "M"
- Switch to "Transporter V1" (parked at Vulcanus) and observe that 360 calcite are missing
- Switch to Vulcanus, and open the rocket silo to watch the rocket being launched
- You can see the request being created for 360 calcite, and there's a buffer chest with 1k calcite right next to it
- However, once the rocket contains 200 calcite, it just launches! I think this is a bug; the rocket should only launch once it contains 360 calcite.
- A bit later *another* rocket is being sent for the remaining 160 calcite (requesting 200 as that's the minmum size).

This makes "custom minimum payload" basically unusable as tons of rockets will be wasted sending items in small chunks even when a big request could be satisfied all at once.

[Muche]

That's how Custom minimum payload works.
The behaviour you described as expected works in such way when the items are preloaded into a silo with inserters when the space platform arrives onto the planet's orbit.
As robots react to an actual request, they can't preload a silo.

Duplicate of 120622 "Custom minimum payload" treated as absolute value not minimum.

[computeraddict]

If you want to send a whole rocket when possible but send a partial rocket sometimes you can't use automatic requests. You have to load a rocket with that material even in the absence of a request, so that way it'll launch with whatever it can when a request comes in.

[Ralfinator]

Thanks for linking to the prior report! I did make a search, but did not find that one.

Hm, this makes little sense to me as it makes the entire checkbox ("custom minimum payload") rather pointless and also confusingly labeled. I hope this can be reconsidered, as right now it is very hard to avoid massively overfilling a spaceship without wasting rockets for large deliveries. An actual "minimum payload" that worked the way I described above would perfectly fix that.

when the items are preloaded into a silo with inserters when the space platform arrives onto the planet's orbit.

So, now one has to do the entire logistics completely by hand and use circuit conditions to compute how to fill the silo? That seems way too complicated for something as simple as "if items are missing, send up a rocket with exactly min(rocket_capacity, minimum_payload) many items".

[Muche]

You could try making the platform requests smaller, taking the rocket capacity into account.
For example, if the capacity is 500 and you want to have at most 1000 on the platform, make a request for 501.
That way you'll have between 501 and 1000 items up there, launching full rockets only.

[Ralfinator]

Yeah, I tried that. But I'd prefer for the window between what is guaranteed to be in the spaceship and the maximum space used up in the spaceship to not be so huge -- this requires massively overprovisioning the spaceship cargo capacity.

For now I went with using the logistic request "upper bound" feature, which only has the downside of waiting for more-than-necessary of the item to be available on the planet, only to immediately send the surplus down again. Since these are generally mass-produced items that's acceptable. But I'd still prefer if the rocket could be packaged more efficiently.