Factorio Forums

What?

Rocket Silo's control behaviour should support an additional mode: "Read orbital planet requests". It should output unsatisfied space platform requests that are imported from the planet. (Or both platforms and planet.)

Why?

Locally on the planet, one might wish to tell the difference between requests that the planet's silos are allowed to satisfy and request they cannot. For example if a platform requests electronic circuit from other platforms only, then let's not activate the electronic circuit assemblers: After all we would never actually send the circuits to a platform requesting from other platforms only.

Additional considerations

Currently the rocket silo is the only way to read orbital requests and if this new option replaces the current one then there is no way to read platform only requests at all. The space platform hub is not a good candidate for such an option as, being a surface-unique entity it would mean we cannot read both it's contents and the orbital requests at the same time. If we want to read both, we would need to radar transmit it from another entity on another surface that reads them: Either another platform set to reading platform requests, or a rocket silo reading platform requests.