HungryKing wrote:Actually Weber has stated that by and large the Honorverse is a nanotech manufacturing setting, it is just that they do not grow large things with it, traditionally. The outer hull, even for civilian vessels, is usually coated with a layer of some species of doped silcon carbide, which probably doesn't require nanotech for the civilian version. The primary framing members are all made from battle steel, which is a nanotech product as for the rest of the hull, it is probably whatever is cheap and meets the engineering requirements. We know the primary composition of a Solarian tramp freighter is steel though.
As for rivets, that was Masada. Grayson used arc welding, the 'modern' technique is 'chem catalyst' which might nanotech or a product thereof.
Grayson used whatever worked for them within the limits of their tech base. When
Fearless first arrived at Grayson with her convoy:
The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 5 wrote:Grayson looked oddly patchy in the visual display as Fearless and her brood settled into their parking orbit, and Honor had been amazed on the trip in-system by the scale of Grayson’s spaceborne industry. For a technically backward system, Yeltsin’s Star boasted an amazing number of bulk carriers and processing ships. None of them appeared hyper capable, and the largest massed barely a million tons, but they were everywhere, and some of the orbital structures circling Grayson itself were at least a third the size of Hephaestus or Vulcan back home. No doubt the scale of the orbital construction projects also explained the plethora of energy sources and drive signatures plying between Grayson and the local asteroid belt, but the sheer numbers of them still came as a shock.
Fearless cut her wedge as Chief Killian signaled “done with engines” and station-keeping thrusters took over, and Honor frowned over her displays while a corner of her mind monitored the flow of communications between the planetary authorities and Admiral Courvosier’s staff on the heavy cruiser’s flag bridge. Everything she saw only seemed to underscore the strange—to Manticoran eyes, at least—dichotomy between the almost incredible energy of Grayson’s activities and the crudity with which they were carried out.
Old-fashioned electric arc and laser welders glared and sputtered, despite the wastefulness of such primitive, energy-intensive techniques compared to modern chem-catalyst welders. Hard-suited construction crews heaved massive frame members around, overcoming mass and momentum by brute muscle power without the tractor/counter-grav exo-suits Manticoran workers would have used as a matter of course, and it took her a while to realize (and even longer to accept) that some of them were using rivet guns. The local orbital power receptors were huge and clumsy and looked none too efficient, and her sensors said at least half the structures out there were using fission power plants! Fission plants weren’t just old-fashioned; they were dangerous technical antiques, and their presence baffled her. The original Church of Humanity’s colony ship had used fusion power, so why were the colonists’ descendants using fission power nine hundred years later?
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.
