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Xeknos wrote:

It's not necessarily additive - this is only true if the lesser advanced nations know something that the most technological advanced nation does not. It be fairer to compare to to, say, research treaties in games like Stellaris, where everyone gains a general bonus to research speed, plus a bonus in research speed toward technologies that other nations already know. More minds researching will generally mean faster progress, in theory.

The end result could be simplified as being a fractional additive - whether the exact mechanism is through additional funding by which the most advanced country could conduct more research, or delegation of some responsibilities to enable more optimum use of higher-level resources for research.

I think an example of a decent (and arbitrary) way to calculate this would be to have the most advanced country as the baseline, then categorize any additional partner nations into a number of categories according to their relative advancement. Example categories: A, B, C, and D, whereas a category A country is a near-peer and adds 10% of the baseline value, a category B having at least 75% science and adds 5%, a category C having at least 50% science and adds 2%, and a category D having less than 50% and adding 1%.

The categories wouldn't scale linearly either because more advanced nations would be more likely to have more to contribute, via supporting functions such as funds & industry, if not through direct scientific advancement.

But imho the real way that R&D partnerships work is that there is less of an impact on the rate of progress, but rather a sharing of the burden of costs. Which would mean that this whole space program partnership would simply mean that whoever has the highest value is the rate of progress, and everyone below that essentially gets a free upgrade to that level. In return the less advanced nations share some of the costs, so that the most advanced nation benefits in not having to pay as much for its R&D.