Gonna be talking about some stuff In the first few episodes so if you're not at episode 7 yet, go read the books and come back.
I don't remember when the Aurora got their first set of fabricators but I remember that it was said that the Corinarians were trying to build XL fabricators to build entire ships. We never heard anything about it beyond that, I'm just curios what happened with that.
Also, a side note, what happened to the Yamaros hull? I know it was stripped to fit the aurora with more weapons and systems, but a hull is a hull, could it be tucked away in a asteroid in Darvano? I know that's where it was last.
The Corinarians used the Yamaros & an asteroid in they're system to make a shuttle refurbishment facility, upgrading shuttles to have jump capability.
As for KL Fabricators: Fabricators, as described in FS, create components. Those components then need to be manually assembled. Basically you need a shipyard and you need design plans, you need the construction broken down to stages of construction (Skeleton, Hull, Components). Even larger Fabricators can only do so much, in fact they may be inefficient as they would need longer more gagly tool arms to work at greater distances which my cause problems for heat transfer warping the constructs due to the time needed to build in large scale.
Construction of an entire ship takes time and planning. its resource and labour heavy. Machines can be created to do this work like you see in automotive industry but for something as large as a space ship that becomes very impractical. What we are seeing happen with the cobras will not happen with anything any larger. What will happen instead, is several construction bays will rotate their toolset and skilled workers between various hulls in different stages of construction. The opposite of moving the car though a factory - moving the factory over a number of hulls. In FS we ignore this manufacturing guideline for allowing construction workers to up-skill and work on the same hull until completion. (wasteful, but probably leading to better job satisfaction.)
Really by the time we get to building ships in space we should be using robots to do it. and whatever about hands on construction, the scale of these projects will require a lot of automation... trust in your fellow man and Robotics programming and/or A.I.
Ryk does not got into detail about the fabricators, which is actually a good thing. A swarm of small mobile fabricators would be more useful. They could be automatically fed by other robots bringing needed raw materials to the fabricators working together to create a much larger object.
