[Taqwus]

If you wanted to reduce the potential effect of multiple shipyards, you could use something like a harmonic series.

For any given project, sort them in order of descending production rate (in case there are non-upgraded Versions). Then the first contributes 100 percent, the second 50 percent, the third 33\frac{1}{3} percent, and so forth -- perhaps while still costing the full rate. Systems integration is NOT easy or cheap...

You can still reach high levels (4 gets you 2x, 11 gets you 3x, 31 gets you 4x, 83 for 5x, 227 for 6x -- so a sphereworld *could* be pretty fast) but there wouldn't normally be that much reason to go beyond 4 shipyards per project for roughly double speed due to the massive inefficiency involved (which is at least partly justified since you can't infinitely parallelize production; there's going to be SOME "critical section" work that can't be shared easily, plus the extra work from putting it all together will add up).

Similar series (X/X+(i-1)), i being the shipyard number starting from 1, X greater than 1) will yield "nicer" results. For instance, with $x=4, you'd only need... 7 shipyards to get quadruple, and 23 would get you octuple if you're rich and crazy enough to put 23 shipyards on a single project.

On multiple queues -- you probably wouldn't need them. One could use just one queue, augmented by another field -- max number of shipyards to devote to it. Then available shipyards get allocated automatically starting at the top of the queue, reallocating as they become available due to finished / cancelled jobs.


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night