How are Orbital Trade Beacons supposed to work?

[Third_Of_Five]

I know how trade beacons work in-game, but I was wondering, what is the lore behind their functionality? In the game, when you use them to pay for caravans or trade with orbital merchants, the items within range simply disappear. So what is it actually supposed to do? Is it like the transporter from Star Trek, where it like beams items up?

This is just purely out of curiosity.

[BlueWinds]

I'd guess that they're a placeholder mechanic, eventually to be replaced or fleshed out in some fashion.

But to actually answer the question, I tend to imagine them as beacons that guide drop pods from the orbital trader. When stuff disappears, it's because the trader dropped a self-launching drop pod, which loaded stuff then took off again. When dealing with other factions, I assume that the silver is just set aside somewhere, specially marked for payment of the caravan. It disappears immediately for gameplay / ease of development reasons.

[Canute]

The orbital traders ships got homing pods, that mean they can pickup stuff around tradebeacons.

But the payments you can do at the com console don't got any logic, and indeed they get teleported to the faction.
Ok with the caravan call you just could say, the silver get reserved and the caravan could pickup it when it arrive.
But not with the standing improvement.
Maybe a future release with change that. And you need to deliver the silver to an outpost to gain better standing.

[Snafu_RW]

IIRC OTBs have a defined area (now availableto set as stockpile) in which to work. Anything outside that stockpile is ignored for trade purposes; anything within that area (or just outside if roofed) is where your goodies land

OTOH NPC trading caravans can & wil lpick up from anywhere within your home (or map-wide? not sure)

This STM to be a reasonable current solution: the OTB can't scan outside its range whereas ground-pounding caravans can see all within the base map - but have a lot less goods/cash to trade