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Efficiency of scale. Since we were working on a limited budget, we pretty much had to develop some of these technologies on our own and customized directly to our purposes. We also wanted to bring enough of a tech base with us that would allow us to harvest native materials no matter where in the solar system we ended up.

Don't tell Bob, but some of the interconnecting support members are a quasi-superconducting and can handle enormous amounts of energy if necessary.

"Been reading about Pern, have you?"

I haven't read anything about Pern in thirty years. I've forgotten almost everything, except ... they had dragons, and threads. -- So do we.

The presumption about making things ourselves is that we had our Flying Castle at the time, with its kilns, storage tanks, forges, and freshly refined ore from the original excavations. We had just finished up our trip to Scotland and Ireland for some, uh, supplies.

Then we picked up our very unfinished and rough form Thrust Ring, taking it as "supercargo" to Hawaii, (by way of the North Pole, naturally.)

In preparation for our impending space journeys, we sheltered off Kauai for quite some time, drawing materials directly from the ocean waters. Primarily we were interested in U(know-what), but in the process, we also got a lot of other ocean-suspended materials of various atomic weights.

Some we used for rocket exhaust chambers, nozzles, and so forth. The proper material for its appropriate function. But gold and silver just took up a lot of mass and space without having much utility. We used most of it for barter.

Of course, making our own wire, metal parts, transparent panels for our canopy and so forth kept us busy. And of course we had to manufacture everything for the many Gas-Cooled Nuclear Reactor/Rocket Engines. I think we may have lowered the overall salinity value of the waters off Kauai by a point or two with all the stuff we pulled out of the ocean.

Eventually, we flew for the last time with our hot-air balloons and jet engines to Eniwetok for our final materials and to link up with the other Habitats, which had been constructed to our specifications in certain unnamed Asian ports. (And there went most of our ocean gold!)

We built and installed the linking articulated support arms and ran the piping, electrical and signal conduits, tubular elavator runs, sensor arrays, and so forth.

That's why everything took so long. From our decision to go into space until we blasted off just after Christmas of '05, it took almost a year for everything to come together.