On the scaling up front, without going in to detail so you can figure it out yourself, the game does somewhat scale with you (allowing you to gather more raw resources, giving easier access to resources further away etc.) but part of the game is revisiting and rebuilding older factories as you progress. But there's also an element of you probably don't need to scale as much as you may think. 50 to 1,000 sounds like a lot more, which is a total, but just because the total is 20x doesn't necessarily means production needs to be 20x. For the space elevator parts I like to think in the parts/hour; 1,000 at 2/min is almost 9 hours but given all the unlocks, new parts, infrastructure and production lines required in tiers 3 & 4 I'd bet all I own you'd spend more than 9 hours doing it all so will have the 1,000 plates from it just running in the background. Don't get me wrong, you absolutely should scale up production just don't feel like you need to go OTT on production.