What? Your CPU shouldn't have to have such a tight timeframe to calculate anything considering most of the game world is 100% predictable. You can buffer the operations ahead of time and pull them out of memory when called for, in fact one of the most common reasons for low utilization and low frames is limited memory or slow access time to memory.

It shouldn't matter to your CPU how many ships are flying about when most of what they're doing is going from point A to point B, with some collision detection in-between (not even that last bit out of sector). Your computer should already know how they'll get there and where they land the moment you load up the game, why shouldn't it?

They even abstract away the out-of sector battles, you can tell they're nowhere near close to fully simulated. Why shouldn't they already be resolved internally before they actually happen?

If the player, directly or indirectly, pulls one of those ships out of its predicted routine then sure, you're now calculating that very specific part of the game "on the fly" but when you're just sitting there AFK at the station dock, there is absolutely no reason to have low frames and low utilization. Not to mention that calculations don't need to be solved to give you an estimated time-frame of how long it'll take to solve them... basically, no excuses except poor predictive optimization.

Now if you make 100.000 bottlecap mines explode under Dogmeat in F3, sure, your CPU is probably going to give up since it couldn't possibly plan for THAT ahead of time, but I'll bet my own ass that it's still sitting at 99.9999% before it explodes, because it has more than enough time to run at least one operation, there's just too many of them. It's going to fail on one of them, and that's the point where your game will freeze/crash, but it's a tiny fraction of the total amount of calculations it has done for this one frame.