I believe the solution to both of you is that you need a chest that is set up as a default destination. For example assume you have a crating table that that makes 4 sticks out of 2 planks and you have a crafting table that makes a ladder out of 7 sticks. When you request 1 ladder, the ladder crafting pipe requests 7 sticks. However 8 get made. The only destination for sticks is the ladder crafting table, but it only needs 7. One of two things usually happens (and I don’t know why its one or the other). Either the extra stick gets stuck in the ladder crafting table, or it gets dropped.

The solution is to put a chest in that is the default route for everything. Now when a ladder gets requested, there are two destinations for sticks. 7 got to the ladder crafting table and 1 goes to the default destination. If you attach a provider pipe to that chest, then that 1 extra stick can be used on a future request.

Briarknit:

I have had this problem before, and I traced it to 2 things:

1) Requesting too many items at once: when I requested, for example, 20 solar panels, at a certain point an induction furnace would receive 160 iron ingots to turn into refined iron. Those ingots would not all fit in the furnace, so the rest would be expelled from the pipe and just sits there. Thus, only part of the request for panels would be fulfilled, since some of the required refined iron is missing. As a result of this, several crafting tables will be left partially filled, waiting for more refined iron ingots to arrive. This can be solved easily by finding the place where the overflow happened and manually putting the items back into circulation.

2) Creating 2 crafting tables for the same item. I did this accidentally, but what happened was that some of the required items for the item I wanted to craft were sent to 1 table and some to the other, and I was left with 2 crafting tables that didn’t have enough ingredients in them to finish the job. I had to reset one of the tables.

I have never identified a problem with my Logistics Pipes network that did not stem form one of those 2 causes. I was going to experiment with a way to increase the capacity of some machines (by adding chests that hold the overflow, and then piping it back in later) but my computer broke down before I could do so. As it stands, this means that I can’t request more than 8 solar panels at once without asking fro trouble, so I request them in groups of 5 to be safe.

One interesting thing to try might be to set up a factory for those overly complex items, but then use a crafting logistics pipe to activate it. Set the output to whatever the factory setup produces, but instead of including the actual ingredients, inform the crafting pipe that it needs to send a token item to a satellite pipe, where the presence of one (or more) token indicates that a product has been requested but not finished yet.

For example, a diamond block hollow anticover (since you almost certainly won’t ever use it) is sent to a trigger chest when you request a HV solar array. When it arrives, it triggers the production system, which is fed by supplier pipes, rather than directly having it request materials. If any of *those* materials are too complex, they too can use a similar system.

It might be possible to have it disable the supplier pipes until a product is requested, then enable them only long enough to get a single recipe’s worth of materials, disabling them once finished. When all the materials are ready, remove the supplies from the input chests, take one token out of the trigger chest, and reset the input system. If there is at least one token left, it can then automatically start again. The removed token can then sit in a second chest, which (if you want to limit the maximum number of requests at a time) is disconnected from the logistics system, until production is finished, at which point a single token is transferred back to wherever they sit until a product is requested.

This sort of setup would work equally well for a single autocrafting table which produces a recipe that can’t normally be requested (HV solar array), or a large sprawling factory including macerators, alloy furnaces, UU matter production, peat farms, and a coke oven.

The token could also be one of the materials required for the factory, although then you wouldn’t be able to limit the number of items requested at any one time, and you would need the materials for that input before you could make the request (rather than requesting 15 units, and coming back a few days later once your quarry has finally hit diamonds so that the factory can begin).

The most I could ever make with the logistic pipes alone was a LV solar array. Anything above that was too many items.

One of the tricks to get around this is to have multiple logistic pipe networks and tie a couple of them to the same chests.

The main network simply keeps 8 regular solar panels in stock (supplier pipe) in a chest (along with the needed transformers). The second network pulls the panels out of that chest for assembly into the next level array and stocks it in a chest. Use a couple chests/networks to keep X number in stock. As they get made, it goes down the line autocrafting as it goes. You should be able to bounce the arrays back and forth from one network to the next, with each side making the next piece in the link. Eventually, you have the HV solar array you need.