[Suicide Junkie]

Ed Kolis said:

Really? What I like to do is put the spaceyard components on the plate and cable bases themselves - you can find room if you use Master Computers, which I've inevitably researched by that point in the game. Then I only need one spaceyard ship to get the thing started, and construction proceeds exponentially! (Just remember to build the gravity field generator Last, because it's the most expensive, so you don't want to be paying maintenance on it the whole time! )

Why not mothball the stuff until you've done all the retrofits and repaired all the new components? You'd need some serious resource storage in your empire, but then you wouldn't pay for any maintenance during the build operation.