Bioship Growth Process

The UAC will not construct bioships in a similar manner as mechanical HF starships. Instead, they are 'grown' in a fashion similar to an organism (because bioships are ultimately organic). 

However, very few bioships have any reproductive organs or anything similar. As such, they must be artificially grown from Harkas bioship constructors. They an begin in a number of ways, such as the bioship's genome being inserted into eggs of other space creatures, and being fed antimatter as it hatches and grows. The genome can also be inserted into an animal, or technically also a harkas but this would destroy their sentience, so this is never done in practice. The method of taking live creatures is less common as they would need to recycle their large digestive tracts, their key energy source, in order to grow an antimatter annihilation organ (also see: Earlier Bioships). This is usually done by carefully inducing their growth to create the antimatter annihilation organ first to provide an energy source to dismantle most of their organs. Even with this process in place, many creatures still die in the bioship creation process in various hard to predict situations. 

It will take a very long time to fully grow a bioship due to their sheer size. It can take 20 years to grow the correct organs and then another 15 years to grow to full size depending on class/species of bioship. However, this can be done on a wide scale and in parallel, not unlike mechanical ships. Another strategy is to use replicator nanobots to build the bioship atom by atom, which is faster but requires a lot of matter plasma of biologial material. This largely inorganic way to build a bioship is not often done by harkas.