TL;DR
There should be a way to fill up space platforms while having control over how many "surplus" items are stored, without wasting any rockets and without having to drop overflow back down to the planet.What?
I'll have to describe my understanding of the status quo before describing what I think could be improved.Let's take delivering explosives via spaceship as an example. These have a stack size of 50 and a rocket capacity of 500. If I now set a request for 500 explosives, and the space station has 300 explosives loaded, it will request another 500, ending up with 800. That's 300 surplus items. So far, this is entirely expected. Now, let's say I want to make sure I never have more than 200 surplus items (since I need that space in the space platform for something else). Which options do I have?
Option 1: Set a logistic request upper limit of 700. For the case described above (300 explosives present), that will mean it will still request 500 explosives, and then it will send 100 of them back down to the ground. That has two downsides: (a) it waits until there are actually 500 explosives present on the planet, even though we don't need that many; (b) the planet will have all these unneeded explosives just sitting around afterwards. It also seems, frankly, silly to send up items only to have them immediately be dropped down again.
Option 2: Set the "custom minimum payload" for explosives to 200. That will ensure it can never overshoot by more than 200. However, it also wastes rockets. Here's why: let's say there are 200 explosives present in the space station (and as before, 500 requested). The game will now create a rocket requesting the missing 300 explosives. However, once there are 200 explosives loaded, the rocket launches immediately, without waiting for the remaining 100! (In other words, it seems like there is hidden state, not shown in the UI, attached with a rocket request: even when the UI says the rocket requests 300 items, it may launch already with 200 items.) So now we have 400 explosives in the spaceship, still 100 short of the requested 500. Then, another rocket gets dispatched to deliver another 200. So, we used 2 rockets do send up 400 explosives, when that would fit in a single rocket and anyway we only needed 300 explosives.
I first thought the behavior in option 2 was a bug; also see the discussion here. But it seems this is deliberate. So this is a suggestion to change the behavior of "custom minimum payload" or add a sort of toggle to switch between different behaviors.
Here's what I would ideally like to happen when there are 200 explosives present on the spaceship: the game sees that 300 are missing. It therefore waits until the planet has 300 explosives available, and then creates a rocket that requests 300 explosives, waits until the rocket is full, and launches it.
In general, if a space station requests an amount R for some item, the rocket can fit C, the custom minimum payload is set to P, and there are N (> 0) items missing, what I think should ideally happen is:
1. compute the request size S by clamping N into the range [P, C] (i.e., S := max(P, min(C, N))).
2. wait until there are S items available in the planet's logistic network
3. create a rocket that requests S items
4. wait until the rocket contains S items
5. launch the rocket
With this scheme, there is no longer any "launching early" of rockets, they always wait until the computed request is satisfied. However, the request size is computed by taking into account the custom minimum payload: specifically, the custom minimum payload becomes the minimum request size.
Now, I can imagine one downside with this proposal. Presumably, the reason that rockets currently can launch "early" when a custom minimum payload is set is to deal with the situation where the planet just doesn't have enough of an item. I think in that case the spaceship should just wait, but maybe there are situations where it is desirable to partially satisfy a request (though I have not encountered such a situation). This could be done in the above system in different ways:
- Instead of waiting until S items are available on the planet, just wait until P items are available; then set S as above but instead of C use an upper-bound of min(C,L) where L is the number of items available on the planet. This still does not have any dynamic "launching early"; we just further take into account the logistic network situation when computing the request size.
- Or, alternatively, instead of setting the "launch early" threshold to P as it is now, it could be set to max(P,L), therefore ensuring that we do not launch early when the planet has enough items.
There are always more Explosives to be crafted after all….