Well, if your are not using your social production, then a part of it is spent for the military production. But when you suddenly start building anything on the planet, all social industry will be used for producing your buildings intead of ships. Which looks like you would get more social production.

If this is not what you mean, i guess this it is caused by your high research spending. the game first calculates your research and industry. which leads to your learning centers to have alot more output than the factories. when you focus something, all the output is redistrubeted(yes, the game uses some of your research and military production to boost social). which means that your money you spend for research is used for social production. and since that spending is so high, you will spend more money overall when building learning centers. which means more output which leads to more social production by using research money for social production.

... using scientists as construction workers..

You can indeed, and it works suprisingly well, especially with NLCs.

I usually play with labs used for production in my games.

See, the NLC gives 22 research and the Industrial Sector only gives 18 manufacturing. So setting research at 100% and focusing actually gives you better numbers in both research and production than setting research at 75% and (either) production at 25%, plus it doesn't gimp any unusual planets you might have in the same fashion as the traditional monkeying with percentage sliders would. When you un-focus, if ever, you end up with phenomenal research costs/results. And when you've got the entire tech but want to win militarily, it's rather easy to convert all those NLC's to Industrial Sectors and crank it up.

Putting your military or social sliders at 1% instead of 0% will allow you to receive production bonuses in those areas, though it will also hurt your research a little. If you have research at 100% and military at 0% as Drath, for example, you'll get 25% of your planet's base research as production when you focus. If you change it to 99% research and 1% military, you'll lose like 10 research points on your production planets but the focused 25% of your research will then be modified by your racial bonus, which is a good thing.


There are problems with this system, however:
1) All that research is EXPENSIVE. You need a great economy.

2) One planet can't build ships while it's constructing itself, so your military will be lacking until your planets are done, thus lending this strategy to a game where you plan to avoid early wars. Also, the colony rush can be troublesome if you're not used to this tactic.

3) You can't suddenly decide you need massive production, again lending this to games where one uses a lot of caution.

I found myself using 1%/1%/98% a lot just to allow ships to build on focused worlds (if 0% military then ships won't build at all it seems, even if production is there). It would be interesting to use a lot of research bonuses and also use the increase for production too. I find it easier to upgrade my labs than to get the manufacturing tech and upgrade the factories, maybe because I am converting it most of the time anyway. My production always seems higher with labs than factories even when I have bonuses in all areas that are about equal. Go figure.