Terraforming Venus

[Rynn]

It's not so much an either/or situation. A colony ship could arrive and go into orbit around the gas giant. They launch their stock of "industry seeds" (a package of bots, an assembler and tools like power lines, solar panels etc) and general bots to appropriate sites with the order to grow. Then they wait a while (given that most of them will be in stasis it's not much of an issue) until there's now two assemblers with bot crews. At that point they can just order one of the crews to begin terraforming the Venus like planet, whilst the other works on building a hab. Both keep replicating with breaks to build more infrastructure, bots etcetera. The hab will be finished first but all the while the other crew will be building shipyards to send out tech around the system and start the terraforming.

Total cost: the time it takes that original assembler crew to replicate because rather than use the second in the hab building process it gets set on something else.