Regarding the bonus question: underclocking. You'll unlock that in the MAM eventually, and that'll let you scale diwnstream machines back to match the upstream, instead of only being able to scale the upstream up to match the downstream.

Trying to make production lines all balance to run a single end machine at 100% is a nice goal, but it falls apart pretty quickly early-game. Some products are just REALLY slow, and you might not feel comfortable early game with scaling up your upstream production THAT much.

Me personally, I don't recommend trying to build "permanent" factories until about the time you get Mk.4 belts.

You probably won't need much for the first phases.

Make sure you are putting outputs into containers, it's better to have a big stock of items than a higher rate. If you need to wait for parts, go out exploring, you'll find the containers half full before you know it. You never know, you might find something to help you out, or something for the MAM.

In general build small plants to produce building resources, then use separate ones for the project parts. A 4/min setup for smart plates only needs ~100 ore a minute, (less than two normals.) That will give you the initial 50 in a short time, and probably the phase 2 amount by the time you have figured out a decent sized coal plant.

As you get on you'll hopefully find more efficient recipes or other ways to increase your production capability.