Unless were missing some external factor, it truly does seem like population is the meta, and thus scientific outposts are the go to must builds of main ports, due to pops and the fact they actually supply usable amounts for other projects.
Population - in NPC stations - is a critical factor for production, with production generally being proportional to the square root of population.
However, our new colonised stations have production levels sometimes orders of magnitude below that which would be expected from their inferred population - I suspect that an NPC system has a suitable default level of wealth, tech, development, etc. which we need to build up as part of getting the economy going. Both are important.
2k H-fuel from the scientific would normally be expected for a population of maybe a few thousand, not ten thousand, for example. 208 from the industrial (after building a few other upgrades too) is maybe a thousand people rather than 5000.
The implication of this message is that Frontier does not have an economic model or 'playbook' that has been internally studied, hashed-out, and simulated. It is also very apparent that the economic models of the new colonisation systems do not follow the older existing systems. Which means they did NOT previously have an economic model that systems were based on that was satisfactory for future use (ie: player colonisation). They were NOT building on a "foundation" that they often claimed they were building over the years.
Certainly the existing systems don't and couldn't have an underlying economic/dependency model anything resembling this one, having been built up gradually over years of the assets becoming available and at least two major economic rebalances (with Trailblazers itself adding a third for some items). It'd have been overcomplex and unnecessary for the first decade of Elite's existence when all of this was static (+transient BGS effects). And not that Frontier haven't overcomplicated details at time - whatever is going on with outfitting - but not here.
Your first sentence I'm less sure about. I think they did internally hash-out and simulate this one a fair bit: remember that the original statement for Beta was "we're happy with all the principles, we're just looking to balance the quantities" (presumably, expecting people would generally find them a bit on the high side, early colonies would be slow and group-driven, rather than people hauling 10 CGs a week worth of cargo to build their new systems and some activity metrics hitting record levels)
I think they missed two critical things in the internal simulation:
1) They know how all this works, so would never have fallen into the trap of building a colony station where it wouldn't be able to do anything (without meaning to) - the vague line in the Pilot's Handbook they'd a) have read and b) known what it meant. Doubly so for things like knowing what "Wealth +3" actually implies and therefore when you might want to build one.
2) They're not anywhere near as quantitatively-driven as a lot of players are, so "cool, I have an Orbis around an ELW, screenshot!" might have seemed absolutely fine even if it was a permanent Colony economy. (It's not as if Colony economies are
bad as such - they import a huge range of stuff, so are great for selling to - it's just a problem if you wanted it to be something else) Some players are probably quite fine with that too, when it comes down to it. I know I've positioned a few ground bases more for aesthetics than for convenience of landing.
(It might well be that if at any point in the past decade they'd bothered to surface and explain wealth, development level, etc. this all might seem intuitive enough to us by now that
at least those of us who'd read up on it could patiently or otherwise be explaining it to everyone else)
together with refinery hub - will report once its ready (Tuesday maybe)
