Tl;dr
Add a new item that connects to cargo bays, cargo landing pads and platform hubs, called "Cargo hatch".Cargo hatches can have item filters set, extremely similar to a requester chest making the hatch work to "pull" items to itself after a progress bar is filled, one stack at a time.
- factorio_v4BsrFHiCN.png (453.94 KiB) Viewed 504 times
What
When the cargo hatch works on pulling an item stack, it is immediately "teleported" to its inventory, but hidden in the same way an assembling machine would hide items. Once its progress bar completes, the stack appears and can be pulled from the hatch.Cargo hatches increase throughput, however the farther they are from the cargo landing pad, the more latency they have. In practice, this means that if an item has just appeared in the landing pad the hatch will take an extra amount of time to pull it to itself depending on the distance from the landing pad, however, pulling additional stacks that appeared at the same time will then be a constant amount of time.
Essentially, while cargo hatches will immediately pull items to their inventory and hide it as soon as it appears on the landing pad, the "throughput progress bar" only starts after the item has "sat" on the landing pad for a time, which would be the "pull progress bar". However the displayed progress bar would be a combination of both. Confusing stuff, so here's an example:
For example, if hatches have a throughput of 1 stack every second;
And if 2 stacks JUST landed and the hatch takes 10 seconds to pull the item to it due to "travel time", then it will take 11 seconds to pull the first stack, and 1 second after that to pull the second.
If another stack lands 5 seconds after the first 2 stacks (while the hatch is working on pulling the first stack), then it will be taken out 11 seconds after its landing time as well (if the hatch is not busy with other stacks).
Cargo hatches MUST be connected to a cargo bay or cargo landing pad to function.
Items can then be pulled from a cargo hatch via inserter (or with an arrow like burner miners and recyclers), but not inserted.
Multiple downsides to the hatch would exist to make it worse earlier on and to discourage use across very long distances: slow pull rate without modules, high power draw, high crafting cost.
Hatches still need to be directly connected to cargo bays or the cargo landing pad to function.
The higher power draw would make it very inadvisable to use in space, and even then it can only be used for pulling items out.
Additionally, quality would increase the hatch's throughput VERY significantly, perhaps 10x at legendary, making early-game quality hatches much less desirable.
This does mean someone could theoretically design all of their item transportation to use the cargo hatches by inserting any items into the landing pad, however this would take an incredibly large amount of power relative to using trains, bots or belts, would be significantly more expensive, and would have more latency and less throughput than with the other solutions. The hatch is specifically designed to be worse in every aspect, but to be the only solution (aside from bots) to increase throughput of the landing pad from cargo deliveries.
And it would get bonus points for being more optimization friendly than bots.
Why
Current cargo landing pads have limited throughput (although high), and require heavy use of logistic robots to increase it. Late game, this becomes a very uninteresting way to solve the issue as it is very one dimensional.Items cannot be pulled out of cargo bay extensions, and this is a good thing as it would create "instant travelling time", so I am not suggesting that.
However, as a result of this, bots remain the only way to increase cargo landing pad throughput. This is why I propose adding a new item, the cargo hatch as described above.
