Considering Red's fights seem to fairly often involve her picking the bones of her victims for battleplate and other interesting materials, I'm not sure how much more benefit she'd get from having (non-Von-Neumann, as I think we've established beyond reasonable doubt that she can't do VN) mining and refining operations scattered around.



Now this is a guess but based on how many staff are involved at Compact shipyards despite their undoubtedly very high level of automation, it seems starship materials are rather hard to make so with Red being incapable of making any full-blown AI it's possible that the kinds of supermaterials the Angelverse uses aren't possible for simple expert systems to manage mining and refining of. Of course if I'm wrong (I can't remember how much stuff The Lost have built themselves, if anything) we are left wondering what 'stage' of production automated systems are and aren't capable of working up to. I would venture full blown starship / major subsystem (drives, weaponry, etc) assembly is beyond the reach of simple automatons, but what about more basic/common stuff like battleplate, bulkheads, shield generators (?), cooling system components, etc etc. If not them, then the alloys and composites they're assembled from. If not them, then it would obviously not be worth bothering.



Any "she can do [things] but can't do [other things] for [technical reasons] and [limitations]" line of reasoning fairly rapidly becomes a horrible little rabbit hole of "what about"s and speculation and hole picking.



The option that I think is more likely is that Red's perfectly capable of building systems which are themselves capable of building a good range of her components, but she chooses not to. Almost everything she has is generations ahead of The Compact and if they were to stumble into a small plant somewhere that was manufacturing Reset Shield emitters or Ukonvasara shells or even just her impossibly hard armour composites there would be problems. It's not difficult to put safeguards in place against capture and reverse engineering, but is it possible to make the safeguards perfect? I feel like the safer bet is to acknowledge that sooner or later The Compact would get into one such system somewhere and Red would lose an awful lot of her edge, so it's best just not to bother.