War of Honor, Chapter 26 wrote:Sidemore wasn't in the same league as Grayson, but Honor was honest enough to admit that that was at least partly because Sidemore had never been as important to Manticore as Grayson was. The Star Kingdom had pulled out all the stops to build Grayson into the industrial powerhouse it had become, and for all the crudity of its pre-Alliance tech base, Grayson had been aggressively dragging itself up by its own bootstraps for well over sixty years before Manticore ever arrived in its neighborhood.
-snip-
Which was also true for Sidemore. But Grayson had been seen as essential to Manticoran security; Sidemore had simply been a convenience. And so Sidemore hadn't received the same loan guarantees, or been the subject of the same investment incentives and tax breaks, or been the site of major shipyards, as Grayson had been. Which, in its way, made what the Sidemorians had achieved even more impressive, despite how modest it appeared in the shadow of Grayson's accomplishments.
Honor was delighted to see the unmistakable signs of a planet whose industrialization process had taken on a self-sustaining life of its own. There were freighters building in Sidemore orbit these days, not just the light warships of the Sidemore Navy, and the planetary president had already conducted Honor on a proud tour of the planet's new orbital resource extraction facilities and smelters. Those facilities had grown almost entirely out of the RMN's need for them to support the orbital repair yard it had built here to service its ships on Sidemore Station, but they'd become self-perpetuating since then. The Marsh System wasn't going to be posing any threats to the Manticoran balance of payments with Silesia any time soon, but Honor was delighted to see how shrewdly and successfully the planet was exploiting its new industrial power by expanding into the Silesian trade. Unless something very unfortunate happened—like a war which brought the Andermani navy rampaging through the system—Sidemore would be able to sustain its new prosperity and expand upon it even if Manticore withdrew from the region.
Bolded the key bits, but Sidemore/Marsh received at best a similar 'repair' yard as Hancock, but the presence of orbital smelters and the like (which I still believe Hancock also had), permits full-up construction of freighters. And if you can build a freighter, you can build a similar sized warship, the warship just has more parts and redundancy inside compared to the freighter.
Now the fate of Hancock, as long as its facilities weren't totally trashed, like Grendlesbane's were, than it should still exist and be capable of enabling ships to base from it, and even (slowly) constructing new ones. Mass production like what was done at the major yards of Hephaestus, Blackbird, Grendlesbane, etc are beyond Hancock's abilities but if supplied with enough workers it could be turned into another superyard within a few years.