About industry...
The younger races seem to have pretty slow industries. When they lose something, patching the "economic hull breach" will take time. After the Earth-Minbari war, it took Earth ten years before they were confident enough to exapand. Even the Minbari built the White Star fleet in secrecy because a preventive strike from the Shadows would have crippled them.
Now with the First Ones, the situation is quite opposite.
The best example of <font color=yellow>extreme </font color=yellow>industrial capacity would be the Shadows. Efficiency is among the basic principles of their civilisation. Because of their thousand-year periods of rest, their periods of wakefulness pass with incredible speed.
They build faster, destroy faster, learn faster, adpapt faster and recover faster. From complete withdrawal at the end of the previous cycle, they quickly build up their forces to a frightening extent.
It is partly related to using organic technology. You do not see Shadows welding pieces of metal or tightening bolts. They write the program, the tech grows on its own. Some spoilers from the Centauri trilogy...
<font class="small">Spoiler:</font>
<table bgcolor="#000000" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2" border="0"><tr bgcolor="#000000"><td bgcolor="#000000" id="spoiler"><font color="#000000">When the Drakh manipulate minister Durla to organize an archaeological dig on a remote world, Centauri activities wake up a Shadow jump gate deep inside the planet. The gate powers up, destroying the Centauri settlement. Drakh vessels arrive and enter the gate, soon followed by a technomage ship carrying Kane, Gwynn, Finian and none other than Vir Cotto.
It appears that the gate has created a shortcut in hyperspace, propelling them to a deep-range Shadow base. Neatly concealed by null fields, the base is about the size of a small planet. It is called X'ha'dam, a tribute to a world which we already know. The base is defenseless, meant to be protected by its owners. But there is nobody there. The Shadows are gone and their base awaits orders.
While technomages search for a way to destroy it, the Drakh activate the construction of an unfinished planetkiller. It appears that Shadow technology requires no user's manual to operate. You tell it what you want. It does what you want. In a mere 15 minutes, one planetkiller is ready and leaves. Immediately, the construction of another begins. It becomes apparent that building the second planetkiller will take no longer.
While the planetkiller builds itself, a Drakh only supervises the process. Quite fortunately for the younger races, Vir Cotto whacks the Drakh with a devious high-tech weapon. You guessed correctly: he whacks the Drakh with a stone. /ubbthreads/images/icons/grin.gif
By that time, the planetkiller is complete enough to accept commands. Without much worrying, Vir tells it to fire on X'ha'dam. A choice which makes better informed people very concerned with one question: getting the hell out of there.</font></td></tr></table>