615: Chapter 615 Ladder Charging

Once the miniature space transport ship was produced, the transportation link between the Space Station and the near-sun orbit was established.

The next problem was to accelerate the production speed of light crystal panels at the ground base.

At the same time, a large ground-to-space ship needed to be manufactured to transport these light crystal panels to the Space Station.

"Xiao Lin, set up an independent area at the Wulan Gumu base and construct a ground-to-space ship production bay."

"Understood."

"Estimate how quickly a ground-to-space ship can be produced if the production bay is built at full capacity."

"Commander, what type of power engine will the ground-to-space ship use?"

"A crystals."

"Understood. What type of thruster will be used?" Xiao Lin continued to ask.

Various ground transport vessels and warships all used anti-gravity engines.

These engines could not be driven in space.

"Combine an anti-gravity engine with a particle thruster," Oriental Chen said.

On the ground, anti-gravity engines were powerful, but in space, particle thrusters were needed for additional propulsion. Since the ground-to-space ship would not leave Blue Star's orbit, there was no need to use a warp drive.

"Understood, evaluating now."

"Commander, if built at full capacity, it will take a minimum of 10 days," Xiao Lin quickly reported the result.

"Does this 10 days include the production time of the ground-to-space ship?" Oriental Chen asked.

"It includes the production time for one ground-to-space ship," Xiao Lin explained.

"Good, start as soon as possible."

"Understood, Commander."

"Recalculate how many light crystal panels are needed to build a charging station in near-sun orbit that can simultaneously charge 10,000 zhen crystals?"

"Understood, Commander, calculating now."

"A total of 300 trillion pieces are needed," Xiao Lin quickly gave the result.

The light crystal panels have a hexagonal structure, and every 30 billion pieces can be assembled into a hexagonal light-absorbing unit with a side length of 1 kilometer. Each unit can charge one zhen crystal, so to charge 10,000 zhen crystals simultaneously, 300 trillion pieces are needed.

This was only a small light-absorbing unit, and it would take 275 years for one zhen crystal to be fully charged!

This was only an average, on the premise that these 10,000 light-absorbing units were independently charged.

But in actual operation, this certainly couldn't be done, otherwise, by the time one zhen crystal was full, it would be too late. And we also didn't need to wait for all zhen crystals to be full before using them.

Therefore, these 10,000 light-absorbing units were used in combination, employing a tiered charging method.

What is tiered charging?

Simply put, these zhen crystals were not charged in parallel, but were divided into several levels. After charging began, the energy absorbed by the zhen crystals would be transported to the core, prioritizing the charging of the first-stage zhen crystals. After the first-stage zhen crystals were fully charged, the second-stage charging would begin.

For example, after these 10,000 zhen crystals form a charging array, you can set the number of zhen crystals for the first stage of charging to 1, the second stage to 6, the third stage to 12, and so on. Then, after the charging station starts, all light-absorbing units will transmit the absorbed light energy to the zhen crystals. And these zhen crystals will transmit energy to the zhen crystal prioritized for charging in the first stage. After this zhen crystal is full, it will begin to charge the 6 zhen crystals in the second stage.

The advantage of doing this is that it can gather the energy of all light-absorbing units to complete the charging of zhen crystals as quickly as possible, thereby improving charging efficiency.

If these 10,000 light-absorbing units charged one zhen crystal simultaneously, it would only take 10 days to fill it, which was acceptable.

Of course, another factor to consider here was the distance between Blue Star and the sun. It also took time for the ship to travel back and forth to replace zhen crystals, and the length of this time depended on the ship's speed.

"At the current production speed, how long will it take to complete the production of 300 trillion light crystal panels?" Oriental Chen asked.

The ideal result was that the ground-to-space ship would be completed at the same time as the light crystal panels, so that it could depart immediately and transport these light crystal panels to the Space Station.

Each light crystal panel was not large, all were hexagons with a side length of 10 centimeters.

Therefore, the production cycle of a single light crystal panel was very short.

"It will take 3 years," Xiao Lin replied.

"No, that's too long, continue to expand the production line and compress the production cycle to within 10 days," Oriental Chen shook his head.

He hadn't paid attention to the production efficiency of light crystal panels before because he wasn't sure when they would be needed, so slow production was fine.

Now that they were urgently needed, production had to be expanded.

The production lines were all fully automated, with no human involvement. Therefore, in the absence of raw materials, production efficiency could theoretically be infinitely increased.

Currently, only one production bay was in operation, and it would take 3 years to complete production. If it was to be shortened to 10 days, the production scale would have to be expanded 110 times.

In other words, 109 more production bays would need to be added.