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why not transport your TL 15 nano factory components via STL - ships in the OTU can achieve 0.8 to 0.9c (Imperium, Dark Nebula) to transport critical components through normal space.
Or take the blueprints for building the infrastructure/machinery locally.
If you take the blueprints for a house and don't have a hammer or a saw, your effort is going to be somewhat handicapped. That's basically what I'm looking at. Any Trav world is a leg up in that the research has already been done - they're not going blind into the great unknown. However, they
are in a "having to build the tools to build the tools to build the tools" situation. A concerted effort could accomplish it in a reasonable time, but it would cost a chunk of credits. The Imperium could afford it out of petty cash, but they don't consider it their responsibility. A megacorp, even a smallish one, could fund it easily if it were in their interests to do so - many local governments are leery of being dependent on a megacorp to that degree, so it's most likely to be proprietary and limited where they do that, not something that affects the planet's tech level as a whole. Most decent-size planetary governments could do it if they set their minds to it, as could a consortium of major planetary corporations, but getting a government to commit to any , and corporations are much like cats.
I'm not ruling out the slowboat method, but I'm not buying 0.8c. Space is not so vacuumy when you're traversing 240 million meters every second. You're encountering hydrogen and helium atoms, sometimes grains of dust - and you're encountering them at 0.8c. At those speeds the individual atoms have the force of cosmic rays, and the overall intensity is several orders of magnitude more powerful than space at a standstill. The occasional grain of dust is like a needlepoint of superheated plasma lancing through your ship; does not sound like it would be healthy for the components along its path.
Further, the interstellar region varies from densities under a molecule per cubic centimeter to as dense as 10
6 molecules per cubic centimeter (still 1/10
13 the density of air). If you should encounter a dense patch, you're encountering impact energies on the order of 11,500 joules
per square centimeter per second. By comparison 14 thousand joules will melt a 7 cubic centimeter block of iron. Another way to view it is like having 30 kilograms of TNT go off per square meter of hull every second. In short, unless you're very, very good at mapping and avoiding such patches, or at getting rid of the excess heat when you hit one, the bow of your ship melts.
Adventure 5 describes a 2000 year flight to reach the Island Clusters, and that suggested a speed no better than about 0.1c. I'm not clear what they were doing for fuel on that route - possibly the ship was mostly fuel, but that's not our issue at the moment. Top safe speed might be as much as 0.2c. 16 to 32 years for your investment to arrive may be doable or not depending on your view of things.
Great rationalisation for limiting the prevalence of robots, but this bit may be going too far. After how many hundreds of years of contact, there's been no slip-up, espionage, or greed-driven betrayal by a human that has seen sufficient material fall into the hands of 3I corps for them to replicate the process?
From the Hivers? The master manipulators? TL15? I'd have to say no. There's a couple of sectors between the Hivers and the Imperium, either Solomani space or a scattering of minor states, so contact tends to be pretty indirect. As I said, the Imperial gov't itself hasn't shown notable interest in tackling the issue, which leaves it to the corporate players, and I don't believe the corporate players with the motive to try have clandestine reach that extends through a couple of sectors of minor states and into Hiver space. And, if the Hivers are motivated to keep that a trade secret then I doubt there'd be any humans, greedy or otherwise, who'd be in possession of knowledge to betray. You'd have better luck dressing up in a horse costume and trying to spy on the K'Kree.
