Shipping Overhaul/Automation

[impyre]

There are a couple of things I'd *really* like to see for shipping rails.

1. Rail Ejector
   1. Ejects material in a specific direction depending on rotation.
   2. Can be triggered by automation like the gas/liquid shutoff combined with sensors.
   3. If a rail is present in the tile where the material is ejected to: the material is loaded onto that rail, so we can build filters.
   4. If no rail is present in that tile: the material falls to the floor as if dropped, so we can unload materials for other reasons, such as dropping small(see item 5) chunks of ice into a pool automatically.
2. Rail Item Sensor: 
   1. detects item type
   2. can be set with a menu similar to storage selection menu.
   3. All items matching the selection will trigger the sensor on the following tick so it can be combined with the ejector.
3. Rail Temp Sensor: allows for controlled cooling/heating of items; I'm looking at you dirt and refined metals.
4. Rail Weight Sensor: detects the weight of the item in the given tile.
5. Rail Sifter (valve): limits weight of materials passing through to a given maximum; this is very useful for controlled heating/cooling.
6. Item Stacking
   1. If the rail is blocked, similar items stack with the item in the tile ahead
   2. There is a max stacking weight
   3. Temperatures should be averaged by mass and thermal energy
   4. this helps reduce rail congestion

Some of this may be overkill, but I thought I'd mention everything for the sake of completeness. Item stacking isn't a priority for me personally. The sifter/valve would be nice, but I've managed without it so far. The others are pretty big for me. I tried to list them in descending order of impact, according to my own point of view. I know not everyone will agree, but I'm curious if anyone would order them differently. I put the ejector above the sensor because you can make use of the ejector without the sensor, by simply controlling what you put on those rails to begin with.

[cblack]

So, if I understand correctly, the ejector would be able to drop items directly from the rail on to the ground?  That seems like the single most important improvement to rails, as right now, once an item is picked up, there's no way to get it back on to the ground.  This causes major headaches with regolith and is the number one reason I usually restart my games after thousands of cycles; too much regolith in a bad spot that's too hard to deal with.

Also, I'd love to have way to flag material in a conveyor receptacle with the "sweep" flag, so it can go into storage chests with the "sweep only" option set.

[Alfons100]

12 hours ago, cblack said:

So, if I understand correctly, the ejector would be able to drop items directly from the rail on to the ground?  That seems like the single most important improvement to rails, as right now, once an item is picked up, there's no way to get it back on to the ground.  This causes major headaches with regolith and is the number one reason I usually restart my games after thousands of cycles; too much regolith in a bad spot that's too hard to deal with.

Also, I'd love to have way to flag material in a conveyor receptacle with the "sweep" flag, so it can go into storage chests with the "sweep only" option set.

There is the ”Egg-Dropper” exploit you can do thaf makes Sweeper arms drop things on the ground,

[DesktopMan]

Rail ejector would pretty much remove the need for containers though. I'm sure there's a design reason you can't (without weird glitching) put stuff on the floor.

[SharraShimada]

14 hours ago, DesktopMan said:

Rail ejector would pretty much remove the need for containers though. I'm sure there's a design reason you can't (without weird glitching) put stuff on the floor.

Ypu can. The sweeper triggered by automation shut of right after it pickes up the material, causing it to drop off.

[cblack]

17 hours ago, DesktopMan said:

Rail ejector would pretty much remove the need for containers though. I'm sure there's a design reason you can't (without weird glitching) put stuff on the floor.

All it would do is remove the tedium of having to uncheck and recheck the containers for what you're storing in them (to force them to drop their up to 20t of material on the ground).  This really only matters for regolith, as that's the only thing that really accumulates quickly late game.

3 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Ypu can. The sweeper triggered by automation shut of right after it pickes up the material, causing it to drop off.

Ahh, I'll have to try this. But, how does one detect when the sweeper is holding something?

[SharraShimada]

Just set a trigger to 3 seconds. The sweeper will collect, and drop off, due to automation shutdown.