This really is a very good idea. It always cost a lot of time to connect all those roboports. Thanks for this mod.

But it even would be better if the pole distance also works for diagonally connected roboports.

Hi tt !! XD Great ... Actually, I tried to do this diagonally but the game has a maximum distance of 64 between poles ... I'm still trying to do something in a script to drop a invisible pole between the diagonals .. If I can do it, i release here! Thanks for using ...

Ok, that's a reason :-(. And that is the point where the real work begins... I just looked into your mod and sadly this seems to be a hard limit. But I've not yet looked deeper into mod writing and know nothing about the API.
Placing a pole in between seems to be a good idea. It need not be invisible but what if there already is something at that point? Find an empty space nearby or remove the object (a tree, ...). The user could press the shift key to force to remove the object, like with blueprint placements.

yes, it seems to be a hard limit now: https://wiki.factorio.com/Prototype/ElectricPole

but when and why was that changed ?
at least in factorio 0.13.x, wire reach could be higher (without any limit?) ...

examples:
- big poles could be set to 1000 (although such an insane reach caused a lot of lag while placing the pole, see https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=28095)
maybe that was the reason to introduce the hard limit later ?
- https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Mobile-suit had a wire distance for poles of 224
- all these max distances and areas were made readable for modders in 0.15.10 (but i still don't know about new hard limits)
- there is a mod with large reach on power poles MK2 and MK3: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/op_power causes MK1/2/3 to have strange reaches of 30/60/64 in 0.16 while the older version for 0.15 had 30/60/120. thus i would assume that factorio 0.16 introduced this new hard limit :-(

anyway, i woud like to have a set of several roboports and power poles since it makes organization and setup a lot easier. some of the following combinations are probably not needed and would needlessly fill up the crafting grid, but here are some that i might consider useful for at least some application. probably 2 or 3 of these options might be really useful without overcrowding the menus:
- roboports with supply area 32x32 (fitting exactly to chunks) and power poles with reach 46 (fitting to the diagonal of chunks, or rounded up 48 to also fit vanilla roboports). but if they connect anyway, also larger areas 50x50 from vanilla or 64 for power poles could be used (too bad that 48x48 has a diagonal of 68 and not 64)
- roboports with slightly smaller supply area 31x31 or 30x30 (so that they can be placed IN a chunk WITHOUT connecting; power poles on them still should be larger, eg 48 or even 64)
- roboports with slightly larger supply area than 32x32 (probably not needed)
- roboports with 48x48 (1.5 chunks; that's what we already have in vanilla: 50x50 to always connect even if slightly "slanted") together with 64 reach of power poles (68 not possible because of hard limit)
- roboports with 64x64 (exactly 2x2 chunks) with power poles of also reach 64 (hard limit) so that they at least connect horizontally and vertically.
- construction range should always be at least slightly more than twice the supply range to allow building of roboports from other roboports that barely (or not at all) touch the supply area

and what about the supply area of power poles ?
do the "roboport poles" still have the normal area of 4x4 which would be completely covered by the roboport, or can you make them 6x6 so that it's easy to place a radar or a lamp next to the roboport without need for additional small power poles?

i don't think that automatically placing additional power poles for diagonals would be needed: there would be too many special cases, and if there are new power poles with reach 64 it should be easy to manually click at a random position in a 18x18 area between roboports (areas for power reach would be 45x45, thus overlapping area to place those aux poles would be at least 18x18)

This hard limit really made things more complicated. I liked the ideas and already implanted the 6x6 area. The others roboports really solves the problem, making them in the limit of the poles.

Now i create the Roboport-Pole, with your characteristic. And now the diagonal is working!

Hi DellAquila! Finally I had the time to try the new roboport. It works very well, thanks a lot. I have to replace all my old roboports now (about 1000) and shift some double rails because they matched the old roboport grid so that roboports fitted in between the rails...
Nevertheless many thanks for this really nice and helpful mod.