Setting the whole issue of K'kree shipboard micro-ecology and waste-processing technologies

aside for a moment, a more serious question:
How did these guys ever get to be a serious starfaring power? Given their extraordinarily restrictive claustrophobia, it ought to be all but impossible for them to get a decent warship aloft. They're too paranoid and/or arrogant to delegate shipboard tasks to sophisticated warbots, or to non-claustrophobic slave-races, too. This might not be a problem if they had no spacefaring enemies, but that's just not the case. As I see it, only the disorganization of the Vargr and the cautious pacifism of the Hivers keep the K'kree from being handed defeat after crushing, humiliating defeat. The outcome of any
Trillion Credit Squadron campaign in which one side is obliged to build its ships as the K'kree do, and the other is not, seems pretty certain. Do the K'kree just have absurdly large naval budgets, churning out great fleets of easily defeated warships? I honestly don't get it. Their inability to build decent tanks, and their fondness for sticking together in huge groups as infantry, probably makes them cannon-fodder on the ground, too.
As I see it, the K'kree would make great villains for, say, a Tech Level 3 planet (in which they could play a role akin to that of the nomadic horsemen of central Asia, only without the horses), but for technological warfare, the unrestrained savagery of "militant herbivores" doesn't seem like very much of an advantage.