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bondo, from my experience with a 6 year pursuit of a patent, if you filed your application before the others then yours will be the first issued, assuming it passes the test for "novelty". It's a difficult process to say the least and another threshold to a granted patent is "not obvious to someone educated in the art". Either of those two criteria can really give you headaches in actually having a patent granted.
The applications are processed according to filing date, so if you are the first with an original idea, you could proceed to production using Patent Pending until you actually have a patent number assigned.
regards
Mech
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