Orbital collector priority

[midnight]

I just noticed that logistic vessels seem to really like prioritizing orbital collectors which is kind of a problem.

Some background: my start planet is orbiting an ice giant, which means the orbital collectors provide unlimited fire ice and hydrogen. I'm like 35h in the game and by now I moved almost everything to the arid planet in my start system (more construction area) except for oil-based industry (plastic, organic crystals) and fire-ice processing. Effectively everything that produces hydrogen as a byproduct is located on my start planet. Because of the close proximity to large amounts of hydrogen, my deuterium production is also located on my start planet.

The problem: I've noticed that the logistics vessels, assigned to the logistic station that manages supply and demand for the production of casimir crystals (on the arid planet), seem to prefer to get the required hydrogen from the orbital collectors. In the meantime almost all production lines on my start planet still sitting on the by-produced hydrogen and because of that, the production of organic crystals, plastic and graphene is stuck.

Yes I know that there is a switch to include or not include orbital collectors. The thing is: I want them included, but only in case the by-produced hydrogen is low. What I want is that the by-produced hydrogen is preferred over the hydrogen from the orbital collectors to make sure the production of fire ice and graphene crystals just works.

How do you solve that kind of problem?

[Arcane]

1. You can set up a tower receiving hydrogen from the orbital collectors on the nearby planet. Demand hydrogen and mark it "use orbital collectors".
2. Put a tower next to it that will supply hydrogen remotely. Connect it with belts so that hydrogen get transfered from first tower to the second tower.
3. All other towers that demand Hydrogen - set them not to use orbital collectors.

After those 3 simple steps you will have a hub that collects Hydrogen from Orbital collectors. This hub will distribute it for other places. And other towers will never try to get Hydrogen from Orbital collectors.
This way your local hydrogen will be used equally with orbital collectors hydrogen. Or you can even locally demand it and just distribute it from one tower.

[midnight]

@Arcane

I'm not sure that this will solve the problem. Now the logistic vessels will select any hydrogen supplier on the (start) planet, based on criteria unknown to me. From the perspective of a logistic vessel: what they see is a number of stations which supply hydrogen, most of them providing by-produced hydrogen and one is an orbital-collector proxy, but to the logistic vessel it's all the same. What is stopping the logistic vessels from "randomly" picking the orbital-collector proxy instead of using any of the other suppliers which need to get rid of the by-produced hydrogen?

It feels like I would have even less control now. Am I missing something?

[Destro Yersul]

I think there's a better way to do it. Make three towers on your Starter planet.

One that remote demands hydrogen, and is allowed to connect to orbital collectors.
One that Locally demands hydrogen.
One that remote supplies hydrogen. This should be your only tower with 'remote supply' enabled.

Connect the local demand tower to the remote supply tower with a belt. Connect the remote demand orbital tower by a belt to the side of the first belt. Belts always prioritise through-traffic, so hydrogen from the orbital collectors will only get allowed into the system if the local supply can't keep up.

You now have exactly one tower supplying all your hydrogen needs. It will get all locally-produced hydrogen sent to it, and it will receive orbital hydrogen to make up any shortfall. If you need to be extra certain not too much orbital gets through, limit the demand on the orbital tower.

[Fury Fairy]

Originally posted by gamer:

Yes I know that there is a switch to include or not include orbital collectors. The thing is: I want them included, but only in case the by-produced hydrogen is low. What I want is that the by-produced hydrogen is preferred over the hydrogen from the orbital collectors to make sure the production of fire ice and graphene crystals just works.

How do you solve that kind of problem?

Easy as pie: 2 ILS in close proximity (close is NOT mandatory), #1 requests from anything BUT OC (setting UNchecked), #2 requests from OC (setting checked).

Then you have outgoing belts from both ILS, but they feed your prod lines like this: belts from #1 (NON-oc) feed prod directly, while belts from #2 connect to belts from #1 via T junction OR via splitter where non-OC input has prio. Either option makes sure belt is filled using stuff from #1 (non-OC) first, and stuff from #2 kicks in ONLY when stuff from #1 is not enough. T junction or splitter is a question of aesthetics / your liking, I prefer Tj. Functionally they're both equal.

And yep, I did not bother reading other replies, hope someone else already provided similar hint. Good luck engineers! =)

[Arcane]

Originally posted by gamer:

@Arcane

I'm not sure that this will solve the problem. Now the logistic vessels will select any hydrogen supplier on the (start) planet, based on criteria unknown to me. From the perspective of a logistic vessel: what they see is a number of stations which supply hydrogen, most of them providing by-produced hydrogen and one is an orbital-collector proxy, but to the logistic vessel it's all the same. What is stopping the logistic vessels from "randomly" picking the orbital-collector proxy instead of using any of the other suppliers which need to get rid of the by-produced hydrogen?

It feels like I would have even less control now. Am I missing something?

Yes now you have 50/50 chance that local hydrogen will be used. Before it was always orbital collectors.

Remember you should local supply and local demand this byproduct hydrogen into this planetary Hydrogen hub. So that vessels never even get there from other planets.
This way a mix of "local" and "orbital" hydrogen will be supplied. Which I called 50/50 earlier.

[Mowglia]

Originally posted by gamer:

I just noticed that logistic vessels seem to really like prioritizing orbital collectors which is kind of a problem.

...

The problem: I've noticed that the logistics vessels, assigned to the logistic station that manages supply and demand for the production of casimir crystals (on the arid planet), seem to prefer to get the required hydrogen from the orbital collectors. In the meantime almost all production lines on my start planet still sitting on the by-produced hydrogen and because of that, the production of organic crystals, plastic and graphene is stuck.

...

How do you solve that kind of problem?

Yes and no! I'll get to this later :p

To solve this issue then set up a thermal power plant (pics somewhere in my screenshots) to power your planet, but if not, do it simply to burn excess fuel. Hydrogen, graphite, refined oil, whatever. Don't mix the fuel types if you're feeding it into chained generators though.

Set up your refineries and graphene production close to the interplanetary logistics station pulling the hydrogen from the orbital collectors. Then run the excess hydrogen from refined oil and graphene, on priority (i.e., by using splitters), down the same sink that all the other hydrogen goes to burn.

It's pretty straightforward and won't fail, unless the power load on your factory is very small compared to your thermal power generation, in which case your factory is almost certainly switched off, and you therefore don't care :)

Ok, this is where things get messed up.

Pathfinding in DSP appears to be significantly borked, at least in the specific situation that I find myself (can't speak for more general instances).

Briefly, I live in a system with two giants; one gas, and one ice. My research planet is around the ice giant, and the rocket factory planet is around the gas giant.

I ringed both giants with 40 orbital collectors each, and set them to Remote Supply.

Initially I discovered a proximity detection issue with vessels collecting hydrogen for the research planet going all the way across the system to the gas giant, lol. So I turned the collectors on the gas giant off, and everything worked ok; they used the (correct) ice giant they are in orbit around.

Then I built the rocket factory around the gas giant and turned those collectors on :/

What happened next was extraordinary, and I never saw it coming...

I assumed, worst possible case scenario, that vessels from both planets would use the gas giant and ignore the ice giant; which I could live with.

Except that's not what happened...

The vessels in orbit around the ice giant (like 20 of them) all go across the system to the gas giant to get hydrogen (which I did suspect would happen). Similarly, the vessels in orbit around the gas giant (20 of them) all go across the system to get their hydrogen from the ice giant, lol.

Yeah, you read that right! When using orbital collectors about 90% of my vessels are deliberately (?) choosing the farthest possible giants to collect from. It's not random. They are going for the farthest one.

What's really bizarre is that the vessels must be aware of the closer sources in both respects, at a basic level, because in both cases a couple of the vessels usually do visit the correct giant and return the hydrogen to the closest planet. The other 90% of my vessels don't though.

So yeah, proximity detection in DSP is at best broken, and might not even exist outside of using the distance sliders.

Personally, I suspect that it does not exist. Last time I investigated this behaviour I was watching one particular orbital collector get hammered for about a minute, despite depleting resources, while there were numerous other nearby (full) collectors that were being ignored.

Pathfinding and proximity detection as we know it doesn't appear to exist in DSP yet, as far as I can tell. It is very difficult to explain this behaviour if proximity detection does exist and is being applied.

Actually it might; I haven't studied the behaviour of drones/buildings yet. But yeah, regarding vessels and planets, it probably doesn't exist.

[ArcanisCz]

On your home planet:
- 1 tower which requests hydrogen from orbital collectors
- 1 tower which supplies hydrogen
- connect your hydrogen production to the suppier tower with belt.
- connect output belt from hydrogen request tower to the incoming belt of the tower which supplies hydrohen from your production with splitter.
- click on splitterand set priority input for the side of your local planet hydrogen production
- profit

[umop-apisdn]

Originally posted by Mowglia:

Pathfinding in DSP appears to be significantly borked, at least in the specific situation that I find myself (can't speak for more general instances).

Briefly, I live in a system with two giants; one gas, and one ice. My research planet is around the ice giant, and the rocket factory planet is around the gas giant.

I ringed both giants with 40 orbital collectors each, and set them to Remote Supply.
...
The vessels in orbit around the ice giant (like 20 of them) all go across the system to the gas giant to get hydrogen (which I did suspect would happen). Similarly, the vessels in orbit around the gas giant (20 of them) all go across the system to get their hydrogen from the ice giant, lol.

Yeah, you read that right! When using orbital collectors about 90% of my vessels are deliberately (?) choosing the farthest possible giants to collect from. It's not random. They are going for the farthest one.
...
Pathfinding and proximity detection as we know it doesn't appear to exist in DSP yet, as far as I can tell. It is very difficult to explain this behaviour if proximity detection does exist and is being applied.

Actually it might; I haven't studied the behaviour of drones/buildings yet. But yeah, regarding vessels and planets, it probably doesn't exist.

This looks like an excellent candidate for creating a bug report; assuming you don't have any mods on that save file, you could zip it up and make it available to the devs as a proof of behavior. There's a sticky for "how to report bugs".

[Bobucles]

Use two logistic towers. The first one ignores orbital collectors, and has priority on injecting hydrogen to the system. The second pulls from anywhere, which will clearly use orbital collectors.

[Mowglia]

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

This looks like an excellent candidate for creating a bug report; assuming you don't have any mods on that save file, you could zip it up and make it available to the devs as a proof of behavior. There's a sticky for "how to report bugs".

I did report this as a bug, maybe about a week ago; used their form.

And yeah, no mods.

Thing is I'm not sure it's actually a bug. If there literally is no proximity detection in this context then it can hardly be expected to work correctly. Or maybe it's something specific to a system with two giants that they overlooked.

I have no idea.

I would speculate that since they only just fixed ships attempting to travel huge distances without warpers, that they might well have only implemented placeholder proximity detection. I would also speculate that since the majority of what they have done so far works exceptionally well, that if not implemented then it's almost certainly on their to-do list at some point.

We will see in due course I guess.

[Knottypine]

Originally posted by gamer:

seem to prefer to get the required hydrogen from the orbital collectors. In the meantime almost all production lines on my start planet still sitting on the by-produced hydrogen and because of that, the production of organic crystals, plastic and graphene is stuck.

Perhaps a suggestion would be to have the max capacity slider only effect demand of a product, while still being able to manually store the max capacity. eg: when capacity drops below your capacity setting, vessels will embark for orbital resources or otherwise. However, it's still able to be filled with max capacity so it can be manually fed by production lines.