On the base building system, I say it is dodgy and untested because it clearly hasn't been read through, let alone played.
The first example given is the landing field. 400 tons of construction but what are the dimensions? Is it road-construction depth meaning it's 20m by 40m (tiny)? What volume of ship will it support? It says tons but it must mean dtons. Anyway: 40,000 person work hours for 400 tons of construction. Remember that figure for a minute.
More egregiously, the second example given is to bury and connect a couple of pre-existing fuel tanks for fueling a starship. It says 100 tons but lets again be generous and say that it means dtons, instead. 50,000 hours of work for a man with a shovel: 250 days. OK, that's fine: it's a little on the long side but moving all that dirt with a shovel and a wheelbarrow then moving it back is going to take time.
But that's 25% longer to move 100 tons of volume out the way, stick some fuel tanks in and then cover them than to build a landing pad, which is 400 tons: four times the volume moved plus pouring concrete etc (and a lot more if you look at the art for the example!)
That's literally just the first two in the list and they really don't make sense. Others are worse.
And yes, I know what happens on this forum: people try to make up outlandish reasons why digging a hole and filling it back in is harder than moving four times as much material and manually mixing and pouring the cement to fill it (I have had to mix cement in a wheelbarrow a couple of times, when my mixer was bust, and it is brutal work). But you have to work comically hard to make those figures work.
Edit: for those about to do the Bike Shed thing and chime in without having read it: these figures are all the basic ones for one man with a shovel. Machinery is covered as a multiplier.
