How Long does it Take...

[C.E. Evans]

Pretty much what Timo said in his last post. Even in the 24th-Century, some things still take time.

 

[Deks]

But let's look at history. Shipbuilding today isn't markedly faster than shipbuilding yesterday, in at least two senses.

First, it takes about the same time to build a capital ship today as it did five hundred years ago. Sure, our building machinery has improved, but the job has also increased in both scale and complexity. There still remain crucial items that take years of lead time until they can reach the assembly yard; it used to be timber, now it is items like raw steel, or preassembled nuclear powerplants.

Second, today's finest machinery couldn't build a capital ship from 500 years ago any faster than it was built back then. The factors holding back construction weren't the obvious-seeming things like manpower or performance of cranes or transportation of raw materials. The factors would be seasoning and settling of wood, bending of planks, letting gravity shape the hull before buoyancy reshapes it. Those could not be appreciably hastened.

Starship construction might be affected by either or both types of difficulty. The starship simply could be million times more difficult to build than an aircraft carrier, negating the advances that have made dockyards ten thousand times better. And there could be items that cannot be replicated on the spot, but have to be manufactured in processes that cannot be hastened, or made of raw materials that have to be obtained from afar and processed and simply aren't plentiful enough to be kept on stock so that only very few construction runs can arrange for a timely flow of material.

Timo Saloniemi

In my opinion, most of the issues you mentioned are irrelevant given the fact that SF has automated shipyards and machinery that does most of the work for them as far as star-ship construction is concerned.
No doubt that there are certain materials that cannot be replicated ... but the manufacturing process would still be a lot faster for them given the time-frame/technology involved.

When you look at things from a certain perspective:
SF has more than advanced technology allowing for artificial intelligence/machinery to do the construction work for them instead of using human labor for it (which can be inefficient and slow down the construction time as it's the case in contemporary times).
Granted, someone would have to monitor the whole thing, and while there will be some human labor involved, most of the work would be done by machines/computers ... biological individuals will mostly supervise the construction process.

So again, SF has a vast advantage compared to us in automated machinery (used on a far larger scale) and technology that doesn't require direct human interaction ... merely supervision/maintenance and making sure the programming is functioning right ... which again provides a vast advantage in construction times and manuf. process.