MevNav

Ah, now THAT is possible. A little tricky, but possible. The current work-around for the short range of transmitters is to carry data with ships using databanks. You jump in your ship, download the data onto your ship's databank at point A, fly to point B, and then upload the data into point B's databank. This is 100% possible. A bit of a pain in the butt, simply because you have to fly your ship back and forth between the two places, but possible. Edit: Oh, one thing to keep in mind if you do something like this... the character '*' is the wildcard character. This means you're going to want to set up your receiver's event to be something like receiver.receive(data_in, *), and then you can do something like: system.print(message) ... to print the message that it receives. Without this, you can only set up events for specific messages being received on specific channels.

TBH, I have no idea why the container does not have more functions, specifically related to percentage of its max volume filled or what items are currently inside of it. That shouldn't be too game-breaking to include... maybe we'll get that in the future? We MIGHT see some way to transmit data further than 500 meters away in the future, but I wouldn't count on it. Until then, the 500m transmitters seem to be the only way to transfer data between constructs. You could, theoretically, build a relay system that would transfer data from one point to the next to carry data even further... but you would need to have an active program board at every 500 m waypoint. Not very practical.

I have been playing around with the in game Lua features, and this is my observation... I think they don't want Lua to be used to design any game-changing features. Essentially, they don't want players who are Lua coders or have coders in their org to have an unfair advantage against those that don't have the power of programming on their side. They're completely fine with us making pretty screens and displays, little "flavor" features like that, but I have a feeling they are specifically against us doing things like automating factories entirely with Lua, or making fighter drones, or sharing data between constructs over vast distances, so on and so on. Anything that changes the game beyond having a pretty interface to interact with the game is probably out of the question. This is very frustrating for people like me who want to create game-changing features through programming, but I have a feeling that these restrictions are by design, and not just by neglecting to make the functions we want. I could be wrong, but looking at the current state of the game, that's the feeling I'm getting from what we're allowed to do with Lua vs what we're not.