I would fair-play factorio with your mod in multiplayer, but I see several problems here:
1) we need to save surfaces for other mods (Space exploration mod?), so in the settings we set the minimum number of surfaces (1)
2) If different sides of the force are placed on the same surface in factories next to each other, it is possible to arrange artillery shelling at each other. Also, some flying drones can goes through black spaces (Companion Drones mod), and attack different forces.

I would like to be able to place different forces on different surfaces while still saving surfaces - use one surface per a force.

I heard you are preparing a new round of evolution of this mod, could you take this option into account in future releases.

Thanks.

You don't need to save surfaces for other mods. You may have read somewhere that there is a hard limit of 255 surfaces in Factorio, but by now this limit no longer exists, or rather it's now several billion.

So to eliminate your void-firing issues, you should set the number of available surfaces to 0 meaning unlimited.

so, why do we still have this configuration option here?

It's a legacy setting by now, there's no immediate need to remove it, and it satisfies people who believe that messing with the setting will somehow improve performance. I guess I do eventually want to remove it though since it's inhibiting some features I want to add someday.

thank you for your time 👍