With Sairune's engineers, crews, pilots, tradesmen of industry, and other resourceful folks at last arriving to set to work, production once again leapt forward. Actually not much time had passed, this was just a very eventful period wherein lots got accomplished, so in spite of their speedy arrival it seemed to take long just when viewed by contrast with how much had already happened.
There was so much work to do it was a welcome achievement to have them arrive.
Sairune had a reputation for beauty, yet secondary to function. Alderaan, by contrast, held the view of their being equally important, and had by that just a little edge over Sairune in getting contracts for elite-level establishments like upper crust resorts and spas. Naboo had a reputation for beauty perhaps unrivaled, but viewed it as far more important than utility. A Naboo design could use hideously inefficient handcrafting methods just to get something to look nice, and their projects often didn't grant performance equal to their cost. That, more than any scholarly discussion over which of those arts forms was more appealing, held Naboo out of most practical markets. The intensely rich, yes, adored Naboo's artforms, whether in spaceship parts or planetary city sculpting. But cost-conscious hotel, cruise liner, or resort owners often saw the benefits of the much cheaper and more functional Alderaan or Sairune artisans.
There was something of a friendly rivalry going on between the three chief art and cultural center planets, but they kept ugliness out of it - pun intended.
Since the Flamberge and Starhaven classes were both brought to production by children of Alderaan, newly arrived Sairune teams wanted to put forth something equally impressive, and they started with the Dragon Turtles. Making them colored so the outer surface actually looked like turtle shell was just the beginning of a long list of arrangements they made. The second Deepdock was given into their control and they went forward at all speed with their first chance to contribute on bringing those starships to function, and done right.
They also wanted to make sure their friendly rivals didn't corner the market on resort ships for the Jedi's growing armada, so began producing Starhavens of their own in short order. But for right now Dragon Turtles held top priority in the refit production queue. When the first Dragon Turtle was done they put it to work refitting a Flamberge.
That soft of thing started to grow explosively.
The production rate of Dragon Turtles was slow at first as they got used to the arrangements laid down by Ranma, but then refits sped up quickly. As each Dragon Turtle appeared, it was given duties aiding further in construction: asteroid mining, refining, first stage machining, stripping out Dreadnoughts, or assembly of Flamberges, using labor droids to aid in every stage of the process.
Suddenly, demand for factory parts zoomed up as that was the only step a Turtle couldn't handle (too much specialized machinery already in demand) and the Alderaanian engineers saw how effective this was and switched their Deepdock over to Dragon Turtle production. At first, Flamberge production stopped, then restarted in small scale that gained pace until they had larger scale production overall.
It could be seen as a geometric progression. The larger production modules (Deepdocks) made smaller production modules (Dragon Turtles) that made some of the desired product (ex.: Flamberge). As time went by, the Flamberge production gained on a huge scale since there were more production modules.
One problem remained manpower, even though they used droids at almost all stages of the refit/production there were still only so many qualified bosses. Still, it was less of a limit than operational capacities of advanced factories. So instead the limiting factor became how fast they could make the high-end parts and modules to install on the Flamberges.
So, reluctantly, they began to reintroduce other aspects of starship construction to lighten the load on their still-limited manufacturing plants. As part of that, they started adding bay modules to their first Deepdock, bringing it up to the colossal scale of the second. Then they finished the former Imperial projects of the second, because parts for those were easy to be had from their stolen stockpiles, and it seemed nice to give Mancuso the extra ships for training purposes.
Actually, now he had a substantial fleet for both sides of his mock naval battles. Or should that be all three? As the TF equipment was serving as aggressor fleets to both Imperial style and Rebel ship commanders.
As those projects got out of the way, both Deepdocks gradually shifted to doing Trade Fed refits almost exclusively, producing Starhavens and Dragon Turtles. The latter of which were able to handle all tasks of lesser scale, from Flamberges to Empire refits, and only the twin Deepdocks were big enough to handle the TF refits. And, since both major TF designs had the advantage of no small stock of parts already available for them, they could whip them out quickly - and did so.
This was good, as their greater independence from outside support gave them some small amount of protection from the shock when Bail sent Amidala's children - and the message to avoid further contact with Alderaan as much as possible.
His activities in the Senate had finally brought him under close observation.
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(Posted Thu, 20 May 2004 00:56)
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