Hi,
All construction is done with cargo of type “products”. I use fleets with the cargo limits “Product Transport” to distribute those products around a system to bases that cannot manufacture their own.
To build products I tend to use bases in asteroid belts or planets with all of the basic resources present (using “General Manufacturing” limits). They will process raw into materials/chemicals and onto components and finally products. The only import such bases need is K filaments from the filament belts found around main sequence stars. I construct a processing station in that belt with limits “K Filament Extraction”, and use a point-point transport to take refined K filaments to the manufacturing base with limits “K Filament Transport”.
I think this is covered on https://diaspora-exastris.com/your-first-system/
finding the construction requirements can be a bit fiddly. For the hull you have to open up a fleet member view for something that can be expanded (a static base) and hover over the “Build more modules” tool (first brick tool you see). That should bring up a table of requirements for the hull itself.
For the modules if you hover over the name (Cargo,Dock,Shipyard etc) then that should bring up a tooltip with the modules required for those.
For factories on the industry tab, hovering over the “type” will show what that factory needs to build a new module, hovering over “specialization” will show manufacturing input requirements. Everything tends to feed down through intermediate goods towards products/supplies.
In theory you could separate the different kinds of manufacturing and be shipping around materials or components, but it’s not something i’ve done and there are no built-in cargo limits for that.
After developing a system a bit you might find a main manufacturing base to be a bit short on a key input such as precious metals, which you might find in better quantities on rocky planets orbiting closer to the star that themselves lack volatile resources (chemicals/water), so it could be beneficial to extract & refine something like precious metals on that hot planet and ship those out in a similar manner to shipping refined K filaments.
Hope that helps