  We investigate the space-time picture of string evolution and hadron
production in a fully string-based model for high energy collisions involving
heavy ions. We find that although the density strings is quite large at the
time of hadronization in a central heavy ion collision, the initial overlap
between them right after the collisions is not necessarily large. We also find
that when including string--string interactions using the so-called shoving
model, the density of strings is decreased which should dampen the rapid
increase in string tension in the rope hadronization with multiplicity that we
found in a previous paper.
