Orbital Transfer - Inter-Platform Logistics

Orbital Transfer - Inter-Platform Logistics

This is an early release and may contain bugs. You are the guinea pig. Please report any issues.

Concept

Want to send items directly from one platform to another? Now you can. Set up Orbital Transfer Requester chests on one platform and set the requested item. Set up Orbital Transfer Provider chests on another platform and load it up with the requested item. Full stacks will be automatically and rapidly transferred between platforms. Chests are limited to one slot and can only transfer one full stack at a time (no partial stacks), but you can have as many chests as you want to increase throughput!

Want to refuel your ships without building the whole production chain on each one? No problem! Barreling of thruster fuel and oxidizer is enabled, with a setting to turn it off if you think it is too cheaty.

Mechanics

Items are actually transferred, not cloned. This means things like spoilage timers aren't reset - no cheating Gleba freshness here! It also means in theory that your items with equipment or other weird specific mechanics should always come through fine. Again, this needs further testing.

Platforms entering and leaving orbit automatically start and stop requesting things from each other. At this time there is no ability to transfer items in open space, only at an actual space location.

I've had a few items running between two platforms in a loop in a test game for a while now and there seem to be no problems, but please let me know if anything disappears. The only time items are intentionally lost is if you destroy a requester chest while items are in transit - you should get a message about this if it happens though.

Debugging Steps

• If performance is bad, try turning off "Render Deliveries" in the map settings.
• Turn on Debug Mode (not deep). Messages should be sent on every creation/destruction of a chest on a platform with how many chests remain. You should also get a message for every platform with logistics chests on it that enters/leaves orbit.
• If you are using the editor mode, create at least one chest naturally via adding the item to the hub and ghost-building it from map view.
• Even if the platform has no engines, try attempting to send it to another planet. You should get the "exiting orbit" message even though the platform doesn't move. Then send it "back" to the original planet. You should get the "entering orbit" message.
• Turn Deep Debug mode and set Tick Rate to 600 (10 seconds) so it isn't TOO spammy. You should see lists of every available and requested item. If something isn't there, try destroying and recreating the chests that are missing.

Future ideas

• Somehow shipping fluids more directly and faster than barrels
• Packing asteroid chunks to transfer faster (10 chunks -> 1 packed chunk or whatever)