Science & Industry

There are two scenarios I can think of where storage facilities might be useful.

1. You are extracting a lot of R0 a long distance from your launchpad, so the upgraded links cost more power/CPU than a storage facility.
2. You have a factory planet producing many types of goods, such that the materials and products won't all fit in a launchpad at the same time. So each production chain should have its own storage.

Unfortunately both these use cases are unrealistic right now. The power/CPU cost of a storage facility is normally a lot more than that of upgraded links to the launchpad, so you save nothing by putting basic processors near the ECUs unless your ECUs are a very, very long way away from your launchpad. And the expedited transfer cooldown timer means you have to use launchpads for separate storage instead, which is a colossal waste of CPU (over 7 times more) and isk (over 8 times more).

In short, at the moment, storage facilities seem to be completely useless.

Is this about right, or has anyone successfully used them?

Could we perhaps get the cost of storage or the cooldown timer reduced? What's the point of the cooldown timer anyway?

Very few planets (unless they are P2/P3/P4 factory worlds) are CPU-capped. Instead, on a P1 harvest world, you're constantly running out of PG.

The Storage Facilities are the exact same PG as the Launchpads, but hold half as much. Yes the CPU requirement of the Launchpad is much higher, but it doesn't matter for PI in the majority of cases. Plus you get the advantages of using the LP as a fast way to import/export to the planet, without having to wait on "expedited transfers".

If PI storage facilities were no more then 300 tf and 200 PG, they'd be worth using. Even then, they'd still need their capacity boosted to about 20-30k m3 in order to make sense over just using LPs.

I would say having Storage Facilities have 25-35k storage and keep their PG/CPU as they are, or possibly lower slightly considers as the above poster pointed out..they do **** all else. Maybe have them upgradable just like with the CC's to soemthing like:

Normal: 5,000 m3
level 1: 10,000 m3
level 2: 15,000 m3
level 3: 20,000 m3
level 4: 25,000 m3
level 5: 30,000 m3

Have the cost go up along with PG/CPU requirements for 'balance' if needed. Or boost them to 10,000 m3 as base and have each rank in CCU's boost it by 2.5k giving, at max 22.5k m3 at rank 5 (20,000 m3 for most that don;t see 5 as being worth it, or for alts).

Just some ideas