As much I enjoy the quote from Contact about "Why build one when you can build two at twice the price?", and my wife and I have used it with each other as appro

As much I enjoy the quote from Contact about "Why build one when you can build two at twice the price?", and my wife and I have used it with each other as appropriate in some amusingly bizarre situations over the years, it did always bother me a bit that it wasn't true, because building a second one would be cheaper than the first. You only have to decipher the blueprints once, and anything you have to build a thing to build the thing to build the thing, which that structure probably had quite a bit of, you generally can get a second copy of the final output much more cheaply. Not a lot of construction systems involve the total, absolute destruction of everything you used to build the first one. (Although that can certainly be part of a construction process for sufficiently interesting things.)