If you've spent any time looking at American starforts, or perused the Starforts I've Visited section of this site, you have seen a lot of bricks. Millions upon millions of the things. Individually, the humble brick ain't much, but when added to tens of thousands of their identical mates, you get a starfort. American starforts were nearly all of brick construction, because bricks were plentiful, cheap to manufacture, easy to work with and, it was thought, less likely to send deadly shards into defenders when struck by an attacker's artillery, shipborne or otherwise, than was stone. Surely the fact that bricks age so magnificently couldn't have been part of the calculus, but there it is.