Sector Storage Station

[Dragon Sin]

Currently setting up logistics between stations is a pain even for someone like me who loves logistics management games (Factorio is one of my most played games on steam, and I love automation mods for Minecraft and other games like Satisfactory). You can either try to set up mostly independent sectors for different semi-complex goods, which leads to extremely laggy sectors due to the massive number of blocks in the stations, or spread production throughout many sectors, which leads to inefficiencies due to the freighters needing to spend minutes to collect goods from a sector, then spend time in hyperspace, then spend minutes to deliver it in the destination sector. Add to that frustration that setting up multiple different pickups/dropoffs for a freighter (e.g., pick up coal from station A and ore from station B, and carbon from station C, and deliver to station D in another sector) you have a recipe for unnecessary tedium unbecoming of such an otherwise fun game. 

There are other frustrations in place with the current system: the difficulty with positioning stations in sectors, the difficulty with towing asteroids if you want to consolidate systems (say, move multiple mines into the same system), the annoyance of overlapping docking lanes between sectors, etc. Altogether the current system is just too much of a pain to be bothered with when the alternative is just "make a bunch of money using noble metal mines, and then buy whatever you want since you'll make billions of monies". 

I propose a rather elegant solution: the sector storage station.

Basically how I think it should work is like this:

• The player can set either hard storage limits or percentage-base limits on any good or combination of goods they want (ideally through some kind list-like interface with sliding bars)
• All stations in the system can send their output to the storage station and retrieve goods from the storage station just as they would if the station were a factory producing/requesting a needed good
• Freighters can still choose to pick up from or deliver to individual stations, or just visit the storage station and grab the desired capacity of possibly many types of goods and drop off those goods however they choose (e.g., pick up 5000 ore, 2000 coal, and 3000 carbon from storage station A, and deliver all to station B in another system, or deliver the ore to station B and the rest to station C, you get the idea)
• Traders cannot interact with this station by default, but can optionally be allowed to trade with the storage station

I think the benefits to this are fairly simple to comprehend. Inside of the system all stations can use their shuttles more effectively, both retrieving and delivering their goods to the storage area as desired. Freight can be shipped more easily, as the freighters only need to make a single stop at each sector, and can travel more optimal routes. Lag is reduced as players can still make efficient production networks without throwing every station in the world in a single sector. To top it off, for all of the players that don't bother with stations and the like, there is now a prime raiding target for those that prefer to pillage, one that will both have lots of resources, and will likely be heavily fortified (due to the station's relative importance). 

All things considered, I think this idea is a great benefit to everyone involved, especially considering that it doesn't need to change anything that already exists.