I probably spent way to long on this, as I am not the best with circuit networks (space age is fixing that). This is the third iteration of my launching varying sized requests. I wanted to be able to request any amount of "Farm Fresh Eggs" and to pull from multiple spawners at the same time to launch faster. With an option to add more spawners. I worked hard this iteration to make it more modular and less chaotic wiring. I think I was successful, you be the judge.
Highlights:
- You can request any size 553, 1032, 47, anything.
- It should fail safely. Has several fail safes and checks.
- Kill switch that should clear all chests, inserter hands, and the rocket.
- No wasted eggs (when everything goes correctly.)
- Has ran unattended on a server successfully. (Launching 850 eggs. Min request size of 300)
- You can add as many "Normal Inserter Modules" as you want.
- This can be adapted to work with creating production modules. Or even requesting from a specific module. (Maybe I will do it one day.)
- It only uses the green wire for the larger network.
- A new module just needs 1 wire connected to the main network.
- The main variables are adjustable from the "brain" with constant combinators.
- I attempted to explain and comment in the descriptions of the combinators.
Cons:
- Has minimal testing of multiple requests at once. It worked when I tried a couple times.
- I am newish to circuit networks. It may be done a silly way.
- It's semi complicated as a whole. I tried to break it up into smaller pieces.
- It's not compact
- It uses active providers and requester chest to handle preventing eggs spoiling. Make sure you don't accidently send them all into network storage.
- Factorio splits rocket shipments randomly (at least from what I can tell). Your minimum request might make it so rest of the eggs can't be shipped due to being under the minimum.
- If you set the minimum to 1 it sometimes will ship 12 then 300, etc.. So that doesn't work as a work around.
- I have tried to mitigate this using a delay timer to hold back the inserters from inserting into the rocket. This allows more eggs to be in the chests and a larger rocket load usually goes off.
- Setting the minimum slightly below 1/2 the total request usually works ok.
If I find anything that breaks or weird edge cases I will try to update this blueprint. Overall have fun trying to figure out what the heck I did!