munroburton & kzt wrote:Umm, it was noted way back in Book 3 that space on the stations was extremely expensive. And given that work on the stations supposedly requires that you live on the station, which means you are paying exorbitant wages to your techs who work at the plant can afford to live there, well, yes , I can think of reason$ not to do that. Even before the entire industrial plant of the entire planet (and all of the workers families) got blown up in 2 seconds.
SWM wrote:With Honorverse technology, they can build a factory in orbit just as fast as they can on the ground. There is no advantage to building them on the ground. They could build them on the ground, but why would they bother, as David Weber said in that paragraph I quoted. He should know--it's his universe.
Start from the basic principle that it takes energy to move mass around. The cheapest movement possible is in zero gravity and a vacuum, where there is no environmental acceleration to the mass and no atmospheric resistance.
In the Honorverse, components end up massing thousands of tons. Even a modern destroyer outmasses an Iowa-class BB by almost two to one. That's a
huge amount of mass to refine, ship from the asteroid belt to orbit to ground, manufactured, then shipped back in space and assembled. In the past 20 years, Manticore has built over four hundred vessels massing at least seven million tonnes. That's nearly three billion tonnes.
It must be much easier on the planetary atmosphere to keep all that energy and mass in orbit. Except when it comes crashing down, of course...
Space can't be that expensive aboard stations if millions of people lived in orbit. In any case, the employer probably makes some effort to provide the accommodation. It's probably cheaper to buy the Hephaestus equivalent of an apartment block than it is to pay all your employees enough for them to rent spaceside accommodation. Besides, those employees are likely to have permanent residences on the surfaces.
No one is saying it is better to build a space ship on a planet. One is saying that after all you space platforms have been blown up or shot down it is easy to build a factory on a planet surface. I have built a steel manufacturing factory. It took about a month, overhead crane, no grav plating for use, 1500 tons of rebar. In the yard. A massive shear line. Bending thingy. Racks to hold all the cut rebar. All the computer hook ups. Rest of the facilities etc... Putting up the chain link fence and the privacy screening. Of course before all of that there was the site prep. Etc... The shearline had to have the concrete base poured. Set, laid, shimed, and hammer drilled into place. Has to be flat, poured concrete inst flat. And yes when your installing a shearline for rebar and your hammer drilling the concrete and you hit a piece if rebar you cursethedamn stuff too. Irony of ironies.
I then spent the rest of the summer cutting steaming hot rebar rods to size and bending to form. Then loading the trucks with the various sizes and shapes of steel, doing paperwork orders and the like.
Of course it could take 6 times longer, and 10 times as many people. But we were not unionised.
