So how can the 100000 ton commercial spaceships land on the new planet that has an atmosphere and high gravity to unload colonists and factories?
Shuttles, which Steve is looking at adding.
(As an aside, it should probably be possible to build PDCs that can have at least some of these components, for initial launch and secure storage.)
Or how does the 10000 ton capacity commercial shipyard you build ( which is bound to weight at least 2 times that amount ) get into orbit?
In pieces, obviously. But there's overhead to having to do in-space assembly without support. The shipyard provides that support for the ship.
Actually, I'd almost question the assumption that all of the workers must commute to orbit. I'd expect that a lot of the work happens on the ground, and the resulting pieces are then launched into orbit. We know this can be done (that's how building components in the factories works) and there's no reason to assume they'd insist on doing everything in space.
And why is it so easy to commute millions of shipyard workers but no other orbital infrastructure can be allowed to require workers?
I don't know. Under the current setup, we don't have other orbital infrastructure, except stuff specifically designed for forward basing, where requiring ground-based crew would sort of defeat the purpose.
You can say what you want about most of Steves other game mechanics and how much handwaving is done, but they are for the most part consistent ( this is what I love about them the most and which helps immersion into the story alot too ).
I'm all in favor of consistency, to be sure. And I think we're working towards a new equilibrium on that.
Even if you bring the needs down by weekly shifts and bussing by 2 orders of magnitude we are still talking about 25 million tons of Civilian craft per year for commuting alone, to produce less then 1/50:th as much tons of ships ( assuming 10 day weeks and 100kg "bus" per worker which is extremely low ).
Do you have any idea what the ratio between cars and ship tonnage produced is today? Let's take Electric Boat, because they only produce one kind of ship these days (the Virginia-class submarine). They have 13,000 employees, and produce one 7800-ton ship every two years. If we assume 250 working days a year, that's (rounding shamelessly) 1.2 kg/worker/day. Yes, there's a lot of overhead included in that number. Yes, they build nuclear submarines, which means high standards. Under your numbers, that comes to 1/10th the launched mass, but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that EB's subcontractors could lower that by another factor of 2 or 3. We're in the same ballpark.
Let's try another. The Boeing plant in Renton produces 42 737s each month, and employs about 11,000 people. Neglecting work done in other plants (a lot) each worker produces about (42 A/C*41430 kg)/(21 days*11,000 people) = 7.5 kg/worker/day. I'd suggest taking at least a factor of 5 out of that number, based on how much gets built elsewhere.
No it doesn't. I'm trying to compare the amount of work/effort needed to transport the finished Military ship once into orbit, and the millions of workers constantly.
Yes. That's a good point, except that we're clearly in a setting where launch costs for personnel and small units of cargo are very cheap compared to today. (Small refers to the size of each unit, not the total volume). We can easily put all the pieces of the military ship in orbit. The problem is that a finished one is too big to fit in our laser launcher, and thus has to be put together up there.