Ooh, I like this thread. I'll do a piggyback if you all don't mind.
So, I've got a simple production chain setup:
Water collector, Solar power plant, Potato farm, Carbon extractor (from the potatoes), Steel Factory, Ore and Coal mine.
In theory, this should be a self-sufficient production chain that outputs steel at the end, plus excess items here and there.
In practice, however, I've suddenly noticed that the throughput is really bad, since I used primarily cargo fighters to transport the goods from/to every station. Each cargo fighter (irregardles of size) seems to only be able to hold one item, and each station can only send out 20 cargo fighters at a time. This means that something like the potato farm which needs more than 100 items supplied every 5 seconds suddenly grinds to a halt because the total of 40 fighters (from request and supply routes) seem to be too slow.
At this point, the dumbest yet most elaborate solution comes to mind- force turrets. I've pushed the first 4 stations to about 3 km from each other (any closer and I'll have a panic attack trying to slow it back down). Now the cargo fighters travel much less distance, but they're still too slow, and the whole sector now drops my framerate down to 9 fps if I look at a bunch of asteroids in the distance where my mine is at. So what I'm up to right now is looking for materials to craft 0.5MN force turrets to push my coal and ore mines away from the low framerate asteroid belts. That is, except you have a better idea of how to solve my throughput problem.
TLDR; Cargo fighters suck at their jobs. Currently pushing production stations together with force turrets to make decent throughput. I'm open for any better ideas.