If you are buying the materials needed to make the beam, you are correct. If you grind for the materials to make the beam, it is cheaper to make the beam. It all depends on how much time you want to put in.
You can get common R&D Doffs (required for level 15 special items) from the the Request R&D assistance recruitment doff assignment you get from your factions Personnel officer. The Xindi Dropboxes are supposed to have Very Rare R&D Doffs drop on occasion. You can search in exchange for the doffs BY NAME. No other way…
More like, 10 minutes to reset, 10 minutes to install new codebase to the RC, 60 minutes because the user database needs to rebuild accross the cluster, 10 mins to verify stability, 10 minutes for the launcher to download the patch.
Ok, lets list the possible things that have gone wrong...(Yes I'm just pulling this out of my backside) Upgrade was a complete success, but in their eagerness to get the game back up they failed to give the cluster enough time to finish replicating data between the servers. Account migration failed to convert all accounts…
Unfortunately, just throwing a few additional servers wouldn't cut it. Most likely cause more problems trying to get them integrated with the existing cluster then just trying to deal with the usual launch issues. The only way to stop these problems from happening would be to duplicate the existing cluster and switch to it…