Darius is an odd case in the Honorverse
This was a planet (that may or may not have needed significant terraforming but it is in a fairly secure location and the MA had a lot of money to buy wnhat it needed to start building what they wanted. It's a 1st tier inhabited planet now with no indication of any needs for domes and apparently enough equipment to continue to build what the MA believes it need. We have to presume significant orbital and other in-system manufacturing including shipyards, materials extraction and a workforce capable of being trained to whatever needs to be done. Ok, much of this is the Darius non-Alpha or Beta and Game lines and the information and education/training they are given has to fit within the parameters of the Alignment to keep the non-star lines from becoming restive.
The materials and work force are now home grown from both the type of genetic cloning and development built on what they learned and created on Mesa. Houdini showed that a very large number of the trained and experienced higher end of the Alignment came from Houdini--on purpose- along with whatever portions of the Star Lines are being expanded in size and abilities from their existing population on Darius.
Remember that along with money (massive gobs of money) extracted from Mesa and from all the tentacles the Alignment had in the SL and other places, they were also able to buy or steal a great deal of modern (in any particular time frame) along with the plans and specs to build what they found inconvient outside of Mesa to get the equipment and tech from the SL and companies like Technodyne. Then they build the equipment and the facilities to do that in plus the fabrications sites off planet.
The Alignment still has all those contacts and many access points to keep funneling any useful tech to Darius. I'm sure they are still accumulating funds outside of Darius and using them to continue to acquire -if not working plants- the information to build them and the specialized gear.
Darius is not exporting goods. They are probably all of what they need at home and it's an internal economy geared to meeting the Alighment plans. That includes the "not-slave" Darius workforce. Need more Prolong-- build the facilities to make it and train up the employment base to do it in an organized time plan. Is there a new version of Prolong....buy some and license the manufacture at some shill planet location and making copies of what you need for formulas, chemicals, new types of equipment to Darius. Heck, you could even have some Star Line "local" people fully trained in the external location and then spirt them away in a mini-Houdini operation when the experienced people die in varioius accidents.
Daruis is -given Houdini- the concentration point of essentialy all of the Alignment R&D operations which were extracted from Mesa. We have not (yet) been told if this was going on in a lot of other places but consider if they got some low level people in Erwhon's shipyards building the Manti-lite equipment and floated that information out to contacts even if they remain in place. To this point we have NOT seen a result of that but is may be a work in progress and the people that would be used might just ultimately expendable dead ends of caught.
Also based on Houdini information we seem to have been given, all of the research on the Spider Drive is probably at Darius and everybody who was working on that and the Streak Drive are either at Darius or dead on Mesa.
That the Alighment also has another location "Site B" up and running out one of those so fas undisclosed wormholes you can get to from the Darius network and is ramping up another high tech, and building locaton for research, fabrication and new workforce to expand beyond the present capasity of Darius.
Just keep throwing out possibilities
