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Chapter 84 - The Administrator[]
Tharkad system
Lyran Commonwealth
3150
The view was...unexpected. There are reports from intelligence, of course. The sheer scale of what was outside wasn't really communicated. The Tharkad Naval Shipyard was an outright shock.
Estimates relied on modeling pre-war shipyards like Titan and Luna. Those yards had null-gee assembly structures. Big, permanent ones with extensive reliance on ground facilities to provide the logistical anchor for ship construction.
This was standard. It was how retreating Republic forces at Dieron had destroyed the Dieron shipyard before the Dracs could take it intact.
This was not that.
As RAF Luxor-Class Heavy Cruiser followed the designated flight path to their designated position, Tucker could see nothing, yet everything. 'nothing' because there were no enormous hangars or shirtsleeves assembly modules.
Instead, it was skeleton-structures, a fraction of the cost of a yard like Titan. Surrounded by modular clusters of smaller size, laid out in parallel, a three dimensional pattern in the orbit of the system's lone Gas-giant.
The facility was the size of a planetary continent. Telescopes showed hints of the procedures being used. The 'buildings' were inflated for pressurized work in the gantries.
Solar collectors reflected pinpricks a thousand times, feeding power. Vacuum smelting operations using sunlight because it only takes a thin film to make a reflective surface.
"You could destroy it with machine guns." Tucker Harwell noted, "Destroy everything we see, and they'd have it back up in a few days at most."
"Can't destroy the ships being built with machineguns." Stone said.
"No...but the facility? Decommissioning it looks like an exercise in futility, to be honest." the younger man said, "It's not that it's sophisticated, it's that it isn't. I know what they did developing it."
"What did they do?"
"They decided not to bother trying to emulate Titan Yards, instead of a facility at the bottom of a gravity well, with an atmosphere, moving materials from surface mining, they just went straight to null-gee manufacturing. asteroid and comet mining to provide raw materials, processing those raw materials in space instead of going down to a surface with them, the forming presses are probably single-use and use explosives for force, alloys are probably worked and formed using magnetic fields like an Endosteel facility...only they're not bothering to wrap it in an armored layer-just letting vacuum's natural insulating properties work, and maybe a layer of something like mylar to filter the local radiation and reflect heat back in."
"That explains how they got production for the raw hardware done so quickly. Where did they get the expertise?" Stone asked.
"That's a damn good question, Sir. I see a lot of belter techniques at work out there, just...Sol's belt communities were never that extensive with theirs. but the choices we're seeing outside? It explains why there are so many Lyran yards turning out their new ships so quickly. They aren't bothering with surface facilities...Christ, that array covers an area at least the lateral size of North America."
"Tell me how you think they're doing it?"
"Some of those arrays out there are building more shipyards, replacement parts and supplies for the yard itself." Tucker said, "Exponential growth. One yard produces two yards, they're located in systems, those yards produce two more. The big expense is survey work and hiring the right people. Build two yards at each yard to prove out the equipment, locate them either in a different part of the system or nearby, build two more and send them to another location. eventually you get massive parallel production when you turn the factories to building other products. Since everything is building to the same design spec, your tolerances might be a little loose, but you can turn out large numbers of whatever you're making at multiple locations in a short time-your main bottleneck ends up being manpower, because part of the reason for central yards like Titan or Galax, is the reliance on Star League Era automation. Those are Belter style yards, heavy on the manpower, light on automation, which in turn means..."
"The usual methods for sabotage won't work-there's no central computer core to compromise. No single vital structure to bombard. It doesn't have to be fortified by walls, because even without resisting an attack. As such an attack could run an enemy out of ammunition and still leave significant portions of the facility not only intact, but in operation." Stone said, "We know of how many of these?"
"Boojum, Duran, Buena, a few others, no more than twenty and no less than twelve total." Tucker asserted.
"The metis suppression all over again...only over interstellar distances." Stone shook his head. "I think that might even explain where they got some of the expertise."
"Not all of it though."