Make Factory Capacity GUI Adjustable

[MacThule]

Especially since implementation of cargo it would be very helpful to have either a slider or other means to adjust how many of it connected enhancers a factory is using at any given time.

e.g. an advanced factory is connected to 10,000 enhancers but the owner only wants to craft 10 of an item he rarely needs. he opens the factory and adjusts the slider to 10 before activating production. 10 of the item are produced, but the factory remains connected to 10,000 enhancers and can still potentially produce 10K of an item per tick with a simple adjustment.

Currently we build tiered factories (i.e. a set of x1 factories, a set of x100, and a set of x10,000) to make crafting more economical.

With cargo, now each tiered factory needs cargo attached. The tiered factory system also demands larger blocks of cargo hold due to constant overproduction. Making factory output adjustable within the range of connected enhancers would reduce block demand for an already block intensive complex of systems, thereby improving performance around industrial stations.

*EDIT: Grammar

 

[NeonSturm]

One time, you may want to control the exact number of products (with logic and step-control) and the other time you want to limit the production-cycle-size by weight.

I suggest that factory enhancers also add storage. They could act like storage+enhancers at once, so you only need more storage when you want to store more than 1-2 ticks.

 

[MacThule]

I seriously thought that this would be of interest, so I'm bumping this to see if weekday traffic takes note. Currently we all basically "work-around" the factory output issue by:

• Place & connect 2-10 of each factory (saw my first 10-tier factory the other day; 5 was the most i'd seen before)
  
• Place 2-3x more enhancers than should be necessary, to support those redundant factories
  
• STILL not have precise production numbers and so end up with excess of everything that clogs storage and requires placement of tons of additional cargo mods to hold junk that "maybe someone might use later"

This work-around negatively impacts performance for each station and the entire server. It's not realistic, not fun and detracts from both the flow & quality of play.

Overproduction also wastes materials and forces more real time to be spent re-sourcing raw resources (and occasionally flying loads of it around to several shops to clear cargo space) instead of building, fighting or role-playing.

All of this can be streamlined with a single fix: make factory output adjustable within the range of capacity :-D