That is a lot of suppositories
Very few actually. Makes me think of something we went over in the Stark Transcendent quest a while ago, the Iron Man suit, while a super advanced piece of machinery, probably doesn't cost Tony more than a few hundred thousand dollars, because he has his own personal factory that can build everything he needs from scratch. Meaning, after the factory was set up, all he needs to pay for is raw materials , and electricity. And given how big the suit is, it CAN"T take all that much raw materials.
But alright, I will make some measurements based off of what we have seen in quest. We have about 200 Engineers (100 from the newest recruitment, and supposing of our starting staff of 190 people, 100 were engineers). They were able to produce 60 Joes in a week, and given how I rather doubt most normal supplies could be used in our Joes, everything was made from scratch. Now, it is not a assumption to say that a production line built to make Joes can do the job faster, but to avoid any assumptions on how much increases efficiency, we just assume Factory Joes are as efficient as humans. Factory Joes won't need super strong armor, so won't need Cydonium, and probably won't even need Neosteel, making the only necessary part for making it are Superconductors, presumably for the brain.
Factory Joes won't need sleep, nor do they need to every STOP working. So assuming the Human Engineers worked for 12 hours a day (8 hours of sleep, and 4 hours for non-working activities), Factory Joes will do twice amount of work in one day. So at a rate of 60 Joes / 200 Engineers * 2, each Factory Joe can make another in 1.6 weeks. 3 months is 13 weeks, or 7.79 doublings. In 3 months, our work force would be 222.86 times bigger than we started.
And this is assuming Robots built for specifically the function of building stuff don't do it any faster than humans. A minor increase in productivity would lead to much greater end results. If they can do stuff twice as fast as a normal person, that would catapult to 49 thousand times more workers than what we started with.
Except for the fact that this is completely and utterly wrong.
The aliens are fully capable of building robots and hydroponics on their own. The issue is building them fast enough. Hence why they said 91% of their pop would die instead of 100% of their pop. Because they CAN build those things, it takes time, and when they do it takes time for those to grow as well.
The same applies to us, we can build robots, we can build hydroponics, we have great growth rate. but it is not nearly the speed you are making it up to be
Aliens are capable of robotics, yet not on nearly the same same scale as we do, as evidenced by the fact they used mostly people when they were invading the planet. Our tech is greater than theirs, we are able to build more, and build it faster. Another tech we got, that they obviously don't, is cryogenics, we can put the aliens into stasis for decades if we must, them not taking up a single resource beyond the price of making the cyrogenic bed.
Except this is WRONG. We were explicitly told that they are not going to be begging for scraps, they are going to displace enough natives to build their own nation.
So they will choose destruction over servitude? Well that's their choice.
