automation beacon station

[darknotezero]

It'd be nice to be able to send automation signals between planetoids so that conditions on one planetoid can affect something on another.

I thought about the limitations around this, like teleporting an automation signal like you teleport gases/liquids/solids makes no sense because you'd be limited by one automation signal. Sure, you could send automation ribbon and do some bit-shifting magic, but I feel like that could be more of a homegrown solution to something that can be more 'out of box', like how using the homegrown water/gas/solid filter with automation is better than the prefab filters once you have refined metals and if you can sort out its design.

So my proposed solution? Two new buildings: an automation beacon transmitter and an automation beacon receiver. Both have four automation ports or have a single automation ribbon-only port, one side acts as a send and the other acts as a receive.

I could see two variants of this that could co-exist.

Variant 1: Pre-fab'ed and fixed, made out of netronium like the existing teleporters.

So colonies can take advantage of the automation but only between two specific planetoids and can only make use of four ports.

Variant 2: New "stations" that can be built on colonies.

In order for them to be not OP, there could be restrictions on them. Off the top of my head:

1. Constant power cost in the realm of 480-960

2. Beacon range is limited by distance, but can be boosted by building in empty blocks on the space grid. (see my post about space stations)

For example, say that planetoid A is 3 spaces away from planetoid B and 9 spaces away from planetoid C. Automation beacons on A and B can reach each other, but A and C are out of range, and the way to boost that range is to build a signal "bridge" on a blank space on the starmap that would be in range of both. If the max range of a beacon were to be 3, then two bridges would have to be built to get an automation signal from planetoid A to planetoid C.