I suspect it would be challenging to do this, but I feel like leveling Transport drone stack capacity is detrimental as with each level request depots store massive amounts of materials which hogs other production lines.

If said research wouldn't increase how much can be stored at request depots, with adding more trucks we could really increase transfering throughput for a continous flow of materials without hogging all of them in a few depots. But I guess then it would have to be calculated how much stuff trucks should bring otherwise they would still bring in too much or there would be left over materials.

I have the speed research at level 17 but stack capacity is only at two for best effect. If I increase stack capacity and reduce trucks things are really not smooth for two reasons; stuff is slow to arrive over distances and it seems trucks only start going if they can bring multiple stacks at once which takes more and more time with each level into the upgrade.

depending on which item is requested, the current values could be considered to be too low and at the same time too high, eg when drones can only carry 300 ore at max bonus (and fill the requester to a level between 300 and 600, or 10 drones are needed to fill to a level between 3000 and 3300), while at the same time green/red circuits, wires, and science bottles are requested to fill a requester (that has only the minimum of a single drone) to a level between 1200 and 2400 items (by transporting up to 1200 on a single trip). compare this to the required items for a big 1k spm base

two ideas : could it be useful (and easy enough to implement) to ...
1. split the research and have three researches in the future, one for speed, one for carrying capacity, and one for storage capacity ?
2. add one or two options to the requester window to set an additional parameter that limits the capacity (carrying and/or storage) for this single depot to a value between 1 and the current capacity research, similar to the parameter "override stack size" for inserters ?

Yes please for rationing a max amount a drone can take per trip (specified on the supply depot)!

(specified on the supply depot)!

why? a single supply/provider depot can provide items or liquids to many requesters with different requirements (different amounts needed, different distances, etc, eg faraway smelters need lots more iron ore than a nearby concrete factory), and thus the requesters should tell their drones how much to fetch, instead of rationing items in the providers equally for all transports.

in addition, a single provider can also provide several different types of items which would make it difficult to specify which type should have which limits.

My thoughts were typically I'd use this on supply constrained resources where num-requestors > num-supply. As production increases I can increase the rations without the consumers having to react. Essentially I see it as the production capacity that dictates the rationing.

Since the limit is per drone, consumer ratio I handle with num-drones. So if smelting needs 10x the iron, they would have 10x the drones. Maybe this is all nonsense I'm talking!

Agreed the interface with multiple items might get more difficult.

@tubs: yes, for smelters that require Nx300 ore, you can add more drones to increase N, but i currently have the opposite problem ... how do i get a fraction of N for my green/red circuits and my science that ask for Nx1200, thus even a single drone will try to fill the requester with 1200-2400 items, which is clearly too much on a small base that does less than 100 spm. for these "low volume needed, large stacksize" items, i want to have only a single drone with only a small or no bonus.

Yes, some customization is in order.

For small bases I recommend not researching stack size upgrades and just using more trucks if needed. If you go deep into stack size research early on, you can really halt your base for a while until things even out.

With smaller stacks and more trucks you also get a more fluid delivery system, but eventually for huge bases you'll have to switch towards bigger stacks and fewer trucks.

@tubs: yes, for smelters that require Nx300 ore, you can add more drones to increase N, but i currently have the opposite problem ... how do i get a fraction of N for my green/red circuits and my science that ask for Nx1200, thus even a single drone will try to fill the requester with 1200-2400 items, which is clearly too much on a small base that does less than 100 spm. for these "low volume needed, large stacksize" items, i want to have only a single drone with only a small or no bonus.

Ah right, yes, so two controls would be nice:

• maximum count any one drone is allowed to take from a supply (per resource)
• maximum count a requestor can buffer up

Something like that?

yes, tubs, that's what i meant when i wrote somewhere above :

add one or two options to the requester window to set an additional parameter that limits the capacity (carrying and/or storage) for this single depot to a value between 1 and the current capacity research, similar to the parameter "override stack size" for inserters