Assembly forge

An assembly forge is the primary type of industrial manufacturing facilities operated by the Covenant, and are still used by its many successor-states.

Specifications
The first assembly forges were created by the Sangheili long before the War of Beginnings. First used to build small objects, such as infantry weapons and armor, the forges' scale and capabilities gradually increased, and by the Ages of Strife and the War of Many Banners, they could be used to construct entire warships. While modern assembly forges are far more capable than these early devices, their basic construction is still largely similar, as only incremental progress has occurred in the core technologies involved since the Covenant's High Antiquity.

Assembly forges are subdivided into two sections, a 'dry' factory complex that handles all conventional assembly processes and tightly-controlled fabrication of exotic materials, and a 'wet' section that can be flooded with a liquid catalyst. This solution has a number of uses, such as providing a medium for the construction machinery to swim through, absorbing soluble materials for easy use, and filtering out combustible or corrosive gases and fluids that would otherwise lead to damage and blockages. The walls are lined with various instruments, such as load-bearing armatures, mobile platforms for specialized machinery, and pores that release various models of nanomachines. Much of the forge has dynamic gravitic field control systems, allowing the precision maneuvering of components and optimal blending of alloys. The entire facility is usually directed by a sophisticated (by Covenant standards) swarm intelligence, that diligently follows the plans for whatever design patterns are loaded up. A mental link is also established to the forge operator via a neurohelmet, allowing for directed control over its various functions. Despite all forges following a similar layout, even during the Covenant's Consolidation Era, standardization was never practiced, as many of them were built in the distant past and used ancient code with half-understood quick fixes.

Although they are extremely flexible pieces of technology, they have their limits. Not all assembly forges can produce items with the same level of precision, and many critical components have to be built by hand or imported from niche suppliers. This is why Covenant technology has such a stark contrast between the crude internals and the elegant exterior that the forge builds around existing parts. Another problem lies in the AI. While now far less capable than those used before the advent of the Covenant, they still have the capacity for learning. This means that they can develop quirks and even personalities, where design patterns are mutated in subtle ways. Most of these changes are easily fixed, but in extreme scenarios it can result in products having vastly-different proportions and design to the master copy, and some AIs have been known to go feral or cease up entirely. The only way to fix this is to reset or recondition the forge, partially because the Covenant's engineers no longer understand their archaic programming structure by the time of the Human-Covenant War.

One of the first signs of an assembly forge swarm intelligence developing past its "expiration date" is the appearance of uncontrolled mutations, externally visible as "organic" features not included in the original design pattern: various protrusions and "growths" on the laminar cladding such as crests, fins, bulges, and ridges. As the forge mind degrades further, these imperfections become more and more common, irregular and tumor-like. While these are regarded as early warning signs, forges are typically operated until the mutations make the resulting vehicles or weapons useless, at which point the forge mind tends to be impossible to rein in. This is because resets are costly and do not always work, leading to the forge's deactivation. The Covenant ministries were notably strict about the quality of their materiel, so product lines showing conspicuous mutated features were typically rejected from mainline use. While much of this concern was aesthetic, it is also known that degraded patterns often have functional flaws and material defects. The more complex the pattern, the more compromising these flaws tended to be. Still, forge operators typically want to use the forge as long as possible. The manufacture of large and complex materiel such as ships is rarely attempted in degrading assembly forges, however, as failure to output a functional product will mean a massive waste of raw materials and resources. Mutated patterns were still often sold to various secondary organizations, such as clans, guilds and mercenary groups. Since the end of the Covenant War, humanity has also been exposed to the gamut of these mutated patterns in service of various factions.

Strangely, the original pre-Covenant models have one critical advantage over their later descendants, and that is they have much finer control and tighter tolerance. Part of the reason Covenant architecture is so curved is because this evens out any flaws during the construction process. This is partially why Sangheili pre-Covenant structures and ships can be both far more stylistic, and have much more angular and pragmatic designs.

Classifications
The assembly forges are roughly divided into three main tiers, mainly assigned based on their rough capabilities and size.
 * Anointed Fabricaries: This is a special classification granted to forges that are authorized to produce specific types of entrusted technology. By the end of the Covenant, the Ministry of Tranquility had oversight over most of these forges.
 * Primary assembly forges: The most well-equipped of all assembly forges available, these gigantic machines are specialized for the production of large-scale structures and starships, typically those that exceed kilometers in length and have a mass of millions, if not billions of tons. They tend to be so large that entire habitats the size of planetoids are built around them, and they are directly owned and operated by branches of the state, such as the Ministry of Fabrication.
 * Secondary assembly forges: These are smaller enough that they can be built and operated on a planet, and are also the largest that can be commercially-owned and operated. They are normally tasked with fabricating civilian ships and structures, though they may take on the odd Ministry order for Attack Ships and small warships. Interesting, some appear to be older primary assembly forges that were at some point sold into private hands.
 * Tertiary assembly forges: These are compact devices that produce a wide range of smaller equipment, including clothing, infantry weapons, and military vehicles such as tanks and strikecraft. They are small enough to be massed on starships, with procurators often having substantial numbers of them. Because of their small size, many tend to be highly specialized.

Crew
Even though the forges are heavily automated, there's so much to know that they simply can't function without a clan numbering in the high hundreds to the low thousands to embody the institutional knowledge needed to run the place. They were largely run by insular acolytes that were usually trained from birth for this purpose, living in settlements that have sprung up around the forge. These tend to be dominated by Sangheili clans who have defined their lineages by their architects, shipwrights, and even product designers, though a number have been operated by Yanme'e hives, and their queens have become quite influential thanks to this.

Like some other types of Covenant industrial equipment and vehicles, assembly forges are operated via a specialized mind-machine interface. Due to the Covenant's laws on AI and machine learning, an organic operator must always directly oversee the process even as they cannot entirely control the swarm intelligence's actions. It is said that some of the personality and characteristics of each operator bleeds into the swarm mind, and vice versa. Acclimating to the these interfaces takes years of training, and mastering them may take a lifetime; even then, only some individuals are strong-willed enough to commune with the "forge minds", each of which is unique and has its own quirks the operator must learn; ill-suited individuals can easily be traumatized or driven mad by the experience. Mutated forge minds tend to be increasingly feral and difficult to control, and risk consuming even operators with decades of experience.

The opportunity for outsiders to man an assembly forge is extraordinarily rare, and is extremely competitive. One has to be either a one-in-a-billion genius with the right political connections, or lucky enough to marry into the tribe of acolytes who operate the forge, and your children will get to work on the machinery.