Factorio Forums

If the difference between the items requested by a planet and platform contents is small, the platform sends a lot of pods, each with only a couple items. This creates throughput issues on the surface and messes up inactivity conditions on platforms. It is also inconsistent with the rockets having a minimum threshold of items they can send automatically.
My suggestion is to make the drop pod take as much of the resource as it can at once. It may over-satisfy the landing pad, but that will naturally even out. If this is not an option, the landing pad requests can have a "minimum drop amount" slider, similar to what platform requests have.

Example of the issue, my space science platform. It waits for inactivity period on Nauvis and departs to Vulcanus to collect more asteroids. However it sends dozens of drop pods that have about 10 packs each instead of 2000 in one pod that would give Nauvis more time before it needs to request more science.

> the landing pad requests can have a "minimum drop amount" slider, similar to what platform requests have.

I have 800 cargo bays on nauvis at this point and it's still not enough, have to keep most ships in transit because if they sit over nauvis they can prevent prometheum unloading and then things go bad. This should be added ASAP.

They are also becoming a UPS issue, as with more than 1000 cargo pods always in flight the impact is already close to 0.5ms