Late game Promethium ship design

[michal.don]

Hello, I also asked this at the Factorio discord, but I'd like to get as many good answers as possible, so posting here as well:

I am enetring the late game and scaling all the planetary science production right now. Currently, I have one Promethium ship running, just to get some Research productivity going, but it's a slow one, not getting that much science done. Eventually, I'm going to have to design a new one, or rather a new fleet of them. I'd appreciate some insight from somebody who built a late game Promethium ship, mainly regarding the bottlenecks and the core design issues.

My thoughts on that are as follow. As a rough first estimate, let's consider a ship that produces a full stacked turbobelt of Promethium science (240/s), on average. Let's consider a round trip time of half an hour. And let's consider that half of that time the ship would be able to craft the science. As far as machines go, two legendary cryoplants (8 lege prod 3s) with two beacons should suffice. Each would consume 200 promethium chunks a second (tough, but probably doable? ), 16 quantum procs a second (no problem) and 160 biter eggs a second (probably not that much of an issue as well).

Let's assume that I load the ship with eggs in Nauvis orbit, fly out, begin crafting beyond the Edge, turn around when the eggs are about half way depleted, stop at Aquilo, resuply the quantum processors, and fly to Nauvis to deliver the science.

If my numbers are correct, for this rate, and using this method, I would need 144 000 biter eggs (288 rocket launches) and 14 400 quantum processors (72 rocket launches) per trip, that would yield 432 000 science packs.

Are these numbers realistic? Am I missing something, are my estimations completely wrong in some regard (for example, is the 30 minute trip unrealistic for this number of science packs? Am I overestimating the portion of the flight when I'll be able to craft the science?) Are these numbers even realistic for one ship, or should I aim for more ships for this science rate?

Any insights much appreciated,
Michal