In practice, though, what that's more likely to mean is that a smaller number of highly talented high-wage, salaried researchers are working longer hours (such as Revy herself, who is probably working 60-80 hour weeks), rather than a bunch of low-wage workers covering a shift. Unlike plant security or the nuts-and-bolts side of manufacturing, R&D is generally a creative endeavor, and so isn't usually amenable to a fungible man-month model, despite the way this Quest handles RPs behind the scenes.
As someone who has worked QA at a factory, and has a brother who has been working at a pharmaceutical plant for the last five years, I can say definitively that there's a lot of engineering and technical talent that needs to go into the "making our factory work" side, and if you skimp on that you end up paying dearly for it. Designs are all well and good, but you absolutely need talent on-site too, watching all those automated processes and intervening if and when something goes wrong. If all your engineering talent lives in another city and works 9-to-5, then when something breaks at midnight on a Saturday that talent's not going to do you any good at all for the next 8-12 hours, and in the meantime your factory is producing nothing while your engineer gets out of bed, travels to the work site, and spends precious hours re-familiarizing himself with a factory that he hasn't seen in months while everything's shut down and management is calling every ten minutes wondering when they're going to be no longer bleeding $5-10,000 an hour in lost productivity.
Gee, do you think I have personal experience here?
Yeah, I'm not sure this works out, in particular because cost is not scaling linearly with production at the Factory I-II-III levels. To my mind this is an indication that at the lower levels we're seeing less efficient deployment of personnel and assets, which makes sense as economies of scale should apply at the low- to mid-ranges.
I'm sort of coming at it from a different angle, by setting average employee pay at 80k, as you did, but also setting the current personnel-to-equipment expenditure ratio to roughly 50%, and seeing if this gives us a reasonable number of employees per factory. That gives us:
- Factory I: 2,000,000 * 50% / 20,000 = 50 employees: 6 production per employee per quarter
- Factory II: 10,000,000 * 50% / 20,000 = 250 employees: 12 production per employee per quarter
- Factory III: 50,000,000 * 50% / 20,000 = 1,250 employees: 24 production per employee per quarter
- Space Factory I: Factory III * 10 =12,500 employees: 24 production per employee per quarter
- Space Factory II: Space Factory I * 10 =125,000 employees: 24 production per employee per quarter
- Space Factory III: Space Factory II * 10 =1,250,000 employees: 24 production per employee per quarter
Those kinds of numbers make sense to me as our factories are built around super-rapid prototyping and super-agile development, where the employees have to know how to build everything, test everything, and know everything about our products, as they can be called on to radically change what they're being told to build at the drop of a hat, maybe to something that didn't exist except as a twinkle in a researcher's eye as little as a day ago, and be told to implement it on machine tools that they need to purpose-build for the job to do things that were impossible an hour ago. A PI factory must be a Kefka-esque nightmare of 3D printers for all types of materials, industrial-grade Omnitools, biological grow tanks, rapid DNA sequencers, high-energy plasma torches and self-organizing nano-constructors, all paired in the QA side with mass and optical spectrometers, wear analysis equipment, optical and electron microscopes, eezo purity testers, even air sampling equipment. They literally have to be able to build anything; that's a maddeningly complex operation!
Edit:
Just would like to point out that your percentages are off by 4x; upkeep is measured by quarter, not by year. So your numbers actually come out to:
Factory I: 6%
Factory II: 12%
Factory III - Space Factory III: 24%
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