Science & Industry

Working as intended, train up your planetology skills, read some of the dozens of threads on this while training.

I am a little unsure what exact numbers you are referring to. I believe I understand what you are asking. The PI system can be a little hard to follow at times. The numbers do not always line up, as some numbers do not indicate what they would seem to indicate.

I assume you are talking about the output as indicated by the program summary after it has been installed? If so this can not be explained by the fluctuation between survey numbers and actual outputs after installation.

when you look at the output summary after installing a job it will indicate your actual average extraction rate per hour for that program. But this is not the actual output in real time. Looking at the bar graph you will see the output fluctuates each cycle in a diminishing curve. These individual cycles can range in time from 15 minutes to 4 hours depending on the length of the program. personally I use 1 day 15 minute programs as this is the maximum length program you can do while maintaining 15 minute cycles.

Your average hourly output of the program is the sum of all the cycles divided by the length of the program. Since the cycles start out at a much higher rate, and decline as the program progresses this average is very useful for determining if your extraction output will meet the needs of your factories.

There are several other points where volumes of extracted materials are indicated, but these numbers do not match up, and are not meant to. for example if you check the link it will tell you the load on the link in % and how much is transiting. This number is related to the extraction program but will not match the extraction amount due to the variables by which it is determined. each cycle the extractor pull XX amount of material, this material is instantly sent via the link to storage or a factory. Even if you are running 1 hour cycles this will not match your average output but will indicate your maximum output of any single cycle. Storage facility inputs work in nearly an identical manner.

You stated that you extractor program is indicating an average of 10,089 units per hour but your Silo is only showing received 6,163 a little over half. This is correct. you are just reading it wrong. Based on these numbers I would say your extractors are running on a 30 minute cycle. So every 30 minutes the extractor cycles sending its output to the silo. considering you are looking for 10,089 per hour, 30 minutes cycles should output an average of half that every 30 minutes. The reason it indicates 6,163 rather than 5044 is that this number is not an average but equal to the highest output cycle. If the average would be 5,044 than the peak would be higher, In this case 6,163.

The program must allow for movement of the maximum amount extracted in order to not have any loss of materials. In your case 6,163 unit. This does not mean that every cycle the silo will receive 6,163 units, but only that 6,163 units is the most it may receive in a single cycle. The purpose of this is more for the use of links so the maximum material moved does not exceed the link capacity.

This number can be manually changed when setting up the routing of materials. Yo could manually set that amount to 7,000 or even 10,089 rather than 6,163 but that would not change the amount of material you would actually get, only the capacity of the link reserved for the movement of that material. Similarly if you were having trouble setting up all your routes without exceeding the maximum capacity of the links you could set this number lower, to say 6,000. For example assume that there is only one cycle in the program with over 6,000 units output (usually but not always the first cycle) you have one cycle with an output of 6,163 and all the rest are under 6,000 units. By setting the routing limit to 6,000 that one cycle would lose 163 units to waste but the link capacity and silo values will show that 6,000 maximum. This drops the capacity needed by the link by 163 units. While only affecting the actual output of the single cycle that was over 6,000.

There is little need for this link capacity manipulation now, but in the early days of PI it was a big issue, and was the only way of getting some tight setup to work. It used to be very easy to over load the capacity of a link and need to upgrade it. One of the last PI patches significantly increased the default capacity of the links. You may still see this in some very rich W-space and NULL sec planets where link capacity may become an issue.