Whoops. Find STR_ALIEN_HABITAT in the Piratez.rul, under Research, add # in front of the line. This will take care of the crash (I forgot to add assets). Reload to before you started researching the disk, and you should get access to any remaining datadisk researches (if there are any left).
As for the dynamite & other batch production:
The number of resources vs. number of produced is actually irrelevant. What it is important, is time, convenience and some sort of realism. Sure, nothing is perfect, but batch production disallows to finish a single instance of an item within a blink; you need to start for example 10 items and wait 10x longer.
Making dynamite, ammo etc. takes time, requires usage of machines, so it'd be impractical to produce them one item at a time. Molotovs and Bombs are an exception: they're not manufactured on any machines, they're hand-made, so you can give each runt some resources, order them to make this stuff and they will. That's why they can be manufactured apiece and thus so quickly. On the other side of the spectrum, with guns and armor, the pirate enterprise simply doesn't have required assembly lines, so they have to be hand-made one item at the time as well.