Now this is a simple question, Is replicating Clantech for IS factions more about knowledge than machinery? Or is it a bit of both? This is something that got me curious about manufacturers win the IS post tukkayid onwards.
Okay...
Problem 1: Industrial Tooling. You can turn out on manual machining equipment dating from the 1930s individual products equal to, or even more precise, than you can from a six-axis CNC today. It's just going to take a hell of a lot longer, with more quality issues, demanding a lot more work-hours, workers, and raw materials.
but, you can do it...once.
This is the kind of scaling issues we're talking about. Kerensky looted the very BEST industrial equipment in the Inner Sphere for Exodus, took with him the contents of technical libraries without leaving a copy behind, and likely shanghaie'd more than that one DCMS officer, in order to make the stuff work.
What got left behind, then got the shit bombed out of it and the experts and knowledgeable people murdered by Comstar ROM and three centuries of unrestricted no-rules civil war.
what does this mean? it means that the bulk of your industrial equipment in the Inner Sphere prior to 3048, is what was too low output, low priority, or low quality to use a Nuke on, or the stuff that was simple and robust enough to go for decades between maintenance cycles.
Meaning brute force and primitive is more likely than delicate and precise.
savvy where I'm going here?
It means they're trying to replicate 21st century designs on 1930s equipment...as their day-to-day. Insert designs meant for 22nd century equipment and your 1930s hardware isn't going to be that useful without a massive tooling update, in the inner sphere. Massive tooling updates require things like educated workforces, and the bulk of education for the last 300 years in the Inner Sphere has been "training soldiers to feed into to the meat grinder", as opposed to teaching kids the three dimensional geometry and calculus, or Algebraic thinking, that lets some of them figure out how to rebuild/remake/reinvent the necessary equipment to mass-produce that stuff.
thus, as the canon says, they can build it...in a lab, in tiny quantities. Because the skilled workers aren't there to do more, and the skill base isn't there anymore, and the pressure to turn out SOMETHING that goes 'bang' when you fire it? that's there right now.