Awesome, thank you all for the answers
Controller level four is just the point where i'm starting to think about rewriting my scripts so that I can have dedicated miners and dedicated haulers rather than combines so I can see now how a container under the miner's position will help enormously.
I'm gonna have to think a lot more deeply on having a central storage and using its level for economy control, maybe I have too much bias towards lean processes. Does anyone ever search for or conduct hit and run (haul) attacks on outlying or singleton rooms with fat storage? And can you use storage to responsively spawn a burst of defenders? or are spawners too slow for that even with sufficient energy on hand?
thanks again
re: sparr, no worries neighbor I can see from the email alerts that it was a once off border incident rather than intentional attack, thanks for letting me know.