cthia wrote:How small? Where did they live when they first arrived? From where did the specialization come? Where did they grow their food? Etc. Where did they get their fuel for the ships and many parts? They were taking a chance to bank on too small a colony, but okay. Perhaps small risks big rewards.
It could be very small.
As Brigade explained above, they'd need a serious exploration arm. To me, this is actually the most difficult part. They couldn't count on finding a system that was accessible by wormhole and yet far from everything else that it wouldn't be discovered by the regular expansion of the human Settled Galaxy. So finding the Felix Wormhole Junction and Darius at the end of one end must have been a complete lucky strike. That in turn must mean they had a couple of other secondary candidates that were not accessible by way of wormhole, or at least as close. They might also have other wormholes.
But once they had Darius, they didn't need much. Colony ships had been launched for 1800 years. Starting a colony is a very well-known process. And unlike what we've been told in the books, the first thing you do is not land on the planet and dismantle your ship (only anti-technology nuts would do that, q.v. Grayson and Nuncio -- "The Founding Idiots"). Instead, you build orbital industries and cloudscoops. You just need a bit of seed industrial machinery, which fits into the cargo holds of a single freighter. That solves your fuel problem.
Food is not an issue for a mechanised agriculture and Mesa doesn't even need the mechanised part (slaves). If rising from the gravity well weren't so cheap, you'd do it in orbit too and make sure you have a self-sustaining production before you land (in fact, given how many plagues and natural disasters we've heard of in the Honorverse, this should have been the rule). But since it's cheap and habitable life-compatible planets are abundant, you can just land the agricultural machinery and labourers bit by bit as production expands. Or before, if you don't care if your labourers live or die. And labour force is not an issue... it's not like there are independent auditors checking Manpower's books to see where the slaves were shipped to.
The rest is just a matter of time. You build the tools to builds the tools to build the industry. You dedicate the first few generations of industry to making more industry, before you start pumping out your actual products. The MAlign was not in a rush, since the critical path to their work wasn't Darius, it was the genetic enhancements they wanted to achieve.
Or for a parallel: a single, sub-light colony ship arrived in the Manticore system in 1416 PD. Having received technology updates but facing one plague that decimated the population and the Free Brotherhood, by 1545 PD it was building its first light-cruiser. And by 1590 PD it had revolutionised battlecruisers and was building battleships. This is about the same length of time Darius has been settled, without Darius' advantage of a wormhole from the start.