Love the mod; not having to micromanage inserters on individual turrets is great and the logistics mode is a slick way to allow bots to interact with turrets.

My suggestion deals with the supply range of the chests. In infinite mode it completely removes the logistics of managing military outposts. I don't care that this is slightly overpowered, but that it removes an interesting challenge from the game. That means giving the chests a finite supply range which leads to two scenarios:

Early game (before bots): Still need to get ammo to my outpost and insert it into the chests; at this point I could just insert the ammo into the turret from whatever method I used to transport and the chests aren't helping much.
End game: Logistic chests are great, but now I need to make sure they are in my bot network so my military outposts need roboports and power; if I've got power why not use laser turrets instead?

Proposal: Allow the chests to get ammo from other chests in the supply radius or add an "ammo beacon" that increases the supply area of the chest it is connected too (like how roboports increase construction area). This way I could have a supply chest in my base receiving ammo and could run a string of ammo beacons to my outpost; any turret supported by a beacon would be reloaded from the supply chest back at base. This would alleviate both issues; early game there is a separate logistics puzzle to work out for military outposts, but it uses the dedicated tech available from the loaders. End game it would allow outposts that don't need power, keeping ammo turrets viable vs laser for those types of outposts.

Optional additions:
Different levels of beacons with increasing connection range.

The supply chain starts out inefficient; the supply chest could require more power for each connected beacon. Or to keep it self contained the supply chest could "lose" some of the ammo that is supplied through beacons, say 10% at first but can be alleviated through a research chain.

Power armor equipment that allowed the play to act as a personal beacon; increased equipment levels wold allow the player to resupply personal ammo further and further away from base with the last level possibly being infinite.

Thanks for the great mod.

Hi there! Firstly, thanks for taking the time to post your suggestion.

I have to say you really hit the nail on the head identifying this balance issue. Trying to make the mod feel useful vs keeping it balanced has been a never-ending source of frustration when developing this mod. I've always felt that it was poor design to leave the range balancing as a mod option, but I've never been able to balance it otherwise. I actually have a separate branch in development meant to deal with this issue, but so far it's been mostly fruitless.

Secondly, I LOVE your suggestion. I foresee some problems making them convenient enough to justify using them vs extending the logistics network, but nevertheless I think this is well worth a try. Research to increase range ending in unlimited is another idea I like the sound of. I've toyed with limiting the chest loading speed, requiring drones to send the ammo, and the infamous "cartridges mode" that nobody uses, but this is something I've never considered. Perhaps because I never identified the root of the problem quite so succinctly as you have.

I'll definitely start working on some prototypes and see what I can come up with for the next update. It might take a few tries to get the numbers to a good point, but with proper feedback I think this will be a step in the right direction. As always, thanks for the feedback and suggestions are always welcome. If you have any other thoughts, feel free to post them! In the meantime, I'll let you know directly when I've made some progress on implementation.

what about about having different tiers to enable faster loading? like crafting with t1 inserts would be an upgrade from the burner inserter version, ect..

I like the idea of range extenders too. I currently run the mod with 125 radius as it doesn't feel terribly imbalanced, but its certainly not enough to cover a section of my base that i would deem 'balanced' in the late game (1 whole section of wall).

Another thought i had was having different types of chests for different loading. ammo loading is a seperate type of chest (and radius) from fuel chests. could help with balance since different applications could have different radii

Thanks for posting your suggestion Bearham!

1.) I do like the idea of using different tiers of inserters for faster loading. I've always thought that limiting the loading speed might be a good way to provide balance. That said, this would be take a lot of work to implement (new hidden inserters, lots of conditional code, etc) so it might take a while before I can get it working fully. I'd like to do the range extenders first, but this is something I'll definitely look into in the future!

2.) Different chests for different ammo/fuel types is actually how the mod was originally! At some point I combined the chests into one because I thought it would be easier for new users to understand. That said, I'm fully willing to split them again if it would provide better game balance. Back then, I wasn't as concerned with balance, so this is something I'll definitely consider! I'd like to hear some more user opinions on the subject, because honestly I'm not a very good judge of these things.

As always, feel free to post if you have any more suggestions!

Being as you could setup outpost supply before logistics is possible, having them compete with setting up logistics doesn't seem like a huge issue. And as long as the range of the supply beacon stayed ahead of the range of setting up logistics it would always be a preferable option. I would need less entities between the base and the outpost and I'm not wasting bot time having them deliver ammo. As a balancing concern you could have the beacon's only transport ammo, so fuel would still need to use logistics (could they do fluids too so that you could run flame turrets?) I definitely wouldn't have the beacons need power; just a stand alone entity that connects the supply range of chests.

Loading speed of the chest seems like it would add a really strange layer of awkwardness to setting up, I would need to know how many chests to use per turret to maintain 100% fire rate. This would constantly change as I research shooting speed and chest loading speed and generally be unpleasant. Not to mention I could foresee a new user setting up a chest and since all the turrets are marked as supplied they would be very confused as to why their turrets aren't receiving ammo when they get attacked. Having the range extenders be throughput limited might be a better balance option; it would be explainable in the beacon description and wouldn't require redesigning the outpost constantly.

Finally; having ammo specific chests seems like a good idea if you use infinite range; 1 chest of each type at base doing it's thing. If you use finite range and set the chests up at your outpost this once again means constantly changing outpost design as new ammo's are researched. As it is now I change my supply line (trains, cars, or hopefully ammo beacons) and my outpost upgrades to the new ammo. The other mildly odd interaction this would cause is requiring new chests for modded ammo types. I installed the Light Artillery mod the other day and spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out why my loaders wouldn't work; turned out it counted them as artillery and I hadn't researched that tech yet. This rendered the light artillery basically useless, since by the time I could load them I could just use normal artillery.

I must say that I totally agree with our phylosopher friend.
I think that the fact that it auto load turrets with ammo is better than just extending logistic, actually you would use logistic to load the loader and have the loader distribute the ammo, otherwise you are forced to have multiple chests and inserters AND electricity AND roboports just to keep a mine field deffended.
With your loader, filling the loader up once in a while is good enough.
The size of the cover each tier has, IMO should be nerfed. I personally like practical things but only when they are not OP.