You can’t standardize manufacturing of multi billion dollar facilities. Economies of scale just don’t work that way. Even residential housing has the same problem. There’s too much variation in on-site construction.

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bluGill 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Single family homes are very much standardized. You get doors in one of 6 widths (IIRC), and they are all the same height (closet doors are a different height, but otherwise standard). You get windows in a few dozen sizes. You get your wall studs in one of two lengths. And so on.

There is a lot of variation of layout possible within the constraints of the standard. However the vast majority of the hard work is done in a factory to standard sizes, and the onsite work is just final assembly to easy to change specs, so there would be no advantage to a standard.

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bathtub365 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

New suburb housing developments in North America typically use a handful of floorplans that are customized very slightly across many homes specifically so they don’t need hundreds of unique designs

	▲	AngryData 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Also the majority of changes someone might want with stud frame construction are simple and require 10 seconds of drawing to show the framer. The whole point of stud frame construction is that you can do basically whatever you want because it is overbuilt and all the connections and joints simple.
	▲	oofbey 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Right. So why don’t we see residential construction costs fall with this standardization? Because wright’s law / economies of scale don’t work when you are doing all the assembly on site.

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MengerSponge 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You absolutely can. Read up on the French nuclear reactor fleet!

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...

There are minor variances locally, but you can make enough components common to benefit massively from economies of scale.