147: Chapter 147 Metal bleeds, so you have to let it stop bleeding on its own!

10:00 AM.

Pangu Laboratory, B2 Level, Explosion-proof Control Room.

Su Che stared at the blue and white panel in his mind.

Sixty thousand points in rewards, thirty-five thousand for the ticket; ninety-four thousand minus thirty-five thousand, leaving fifty-nine thousand.

"Redeem."

[Ding! Consumed 35,000 skill points. Successfully redeemed: Material Self-repair Activation Technology, Structural Damage Monitoring Technology, and Autonomous Completion Molding Technology.]

[Current accumulated skill points for the host: 59,000 points.]

The three sets of technologies flooded into his consciousness space simultaneously.

Material Self-repair Activation—pre-embedding micro-encapsulated repair agents within the alloy lattice. When external force damage causes cracks to spread, the micro-capsules rupture, releasing active repair agents that spontaneously polymerize and cross-link at the crack interface, generating a new lattice with strength identical to the base material.

Structural Damage Monitoring—linking distributed fiber optic sensor networks with piezoelectric ceramic arrays to scan over a billion stress nodes across the entire ship body in real-time, with micron-level precision.

Autonomous Completion Molding—when the damaged area exceeds the passive repair limit of the micro-capsules, secondary active repair is initiated: the repair agent storage units inside the mothership transport liquid repair alloy through a capillary network to the damaged area, where it is deposited layer by layer under the guidance of an electromagnetic field to restore the original structural shape.

Su Che opened his eyes.

The entire logical chain was very clear.

Micro-capsules handle minor injuries, storage units handle major injuries; one passive, one active, covering the full scale of damage from shrapnel scratches to structural penetrations.

But the difficulty was also very clear.

The repair agent.

That stuff wasn't ordinary glue; it had to maintain liquid fluidity in a vacuum environment, be able to solidify stably within a temperature range of minus 270 degrees to plus 1,500 degrees upon encountering a crack, and the solidified strength could not be less than 95% of the base material.

There was no such thing on Earth.

Su Che walked out of the control room.

In the testing area, Academician Li Zhengyang was directing several researchers to gather and bundle the detection cables on the linkage tooling, while Wen Bo sat on an overturned alloy box, using a pen to calculate something on the back of an A4 sheet of paper.

"Academician Wen." Su Che walked up to him.

Wen Bo looked up, his reading glasses sliding down to the tip of his nose.

"Self-repair."

Su Che squatted down, took the pen from Wen Bo's hand, and drew a simple cross-sectional diagram on the blank space of the A4 paper.

"Inside the mothership's skeleton and armor, we need to embed a set of 'vascular system.' If it gets pierced, it won't need human repair; it will stop the bleeding, grow flesh, and scab over by itself."

Wen Bo pushed his reading glasses back up and stared at the diagram.

"What kind of repair medium?" Wen Bo asked.

"It hasn't been decided yet." Su Che handed the pen back to him. "The core technology was just obtained, and the formula for the repair agent needs to be redeemed separately. But the general direction is clear; we need a liquid metal-based composite repair agent that maintains activity across extreme temperature ranges."

Wen Bo put down the pen, supported himself on his knees, and stood up.

"Extreme temperature ranges?" Wen Bo muttered. "Minus 270 degrees is the temperature of deep space on the shaded side, and 1,500 degrees is the instantaneous peak value at the impact point of a high-energy weapon."

"Correct."

"This temperature span is nearly two thousand degrees; no single-phase metal can maintain both liquid fluidity and solidification strength in this range." Wen Bo's speaking speed increased. "It would either brittle fracture at low temperatures or vaporize at high temperatures."

Su Che stood up straight.

"That's why I need you." Su Che looked at Wen Bo. "I will handle the formula; the process plan and material adaptation will be left to the materials team, and you will be in charge."

Wen Bo folded the A4 paper and tucked it into his chest pocket.

"Deal."

...

Lin Waner poked half of her head in from the side door of the hall.

"It's time for lunch."

Su Che glanced at the clock hanging above the console; it was 11:50.

The five-day sprint on the force field duct had exhausted everyone; Academician Li Zhengyang's propulsion team had been working continuously for nearly half a month, and several young researchers were staggering as they walked.

"Half a day off this afternoon." Su Che said to the people in the hall. "Go back to sleep after eating; gather at 8:00 AM tomorrow morning."

No one moved.

Su Che picked up the walkie-talkie on the console.

"Did you hear me? That's an order."

Academician Li Zhengyang was the first to react, tightening the lid of his thermos.

"Go, go, go, don't just stand there, hurry up and go to sleep." Academician Li Zhengyang waved his hand, shooing people away.

The researchers walked out in twos and threes.

Su Che followed Lin Waner to the break area, where a dozen insulated lunch boxes were placed on the dining cart, distributed by the housekeeper according to the headcount.

Su Che opened one; white rice with scrambled eggs with tomatoes and stir-fried seasonal vegetables.

"No pork ribs today?" Su Che asked.

"The kitchen said you've been eating pork ribs for a week straight, and if you keep eating them, your blood lipids will exceed the limit." Lin Waner sat opposite him, opening her own portion. "I asked them to make tomato and egg soup; it's in the insulated bucket."

Su Che shoveled a few mouthfuls of rice.

The scrambled eggs with tomatoes tasted good, sweet and sour, and the eggs were cooked tenderly.

"You go get some rest this afternoon too." Su Che said to Lin Waner.

"What about you?"

"I still have some things to look at."

Lin Waner put down her chopsticks.

"When was the last time you slept for more than 8 hours continuously?"

Su Che thought for a moment.

"I forgot."

Lin Waner didn't speak again; she ladled out a bowl of tomato and egg soup and placed it by Su Che's hand.

Lunch ended.

Most of the people on the B2 level dispersed, leaving only Su Che sitting alone in front of the console.

The hall quieted down, with only the low-frequency humming of the air conditioning system.

Su Che closed his eyes.

In his consciousness space, the three core modules of the self-repair technology hovered before him.

He dismantled each technical node and matched them item by item against the structural diagram of the 100,000-ton class mothership.

The skeleton used aluminum-lithium based composite alloy, and the armor used carbon nanotube reinforced substrate. The lattice structures of the two materials were completely different; the repair agent had to be compatible with both substrates simultaneously.

What was more troublesome were the micro-capsules. The repair agents had to be pre-embedded inside the alloy lattice, which meant the shell material of the micro-capsules had to grow eutectically with the base material; otherwise, it would form inclusion defects, which would instead weaken the structural strength.

Su Che opened his eyes and pulled over the keyboard.

He created a new computational model on the terminal, input the lattice parameters of the skeleton alloy and the molecular structure of the armor substrate, and let the Yiren AI Core perform an exhaustive compatibility search.

Fifteen minutes later, the core returned the results.

[Compatibility exhaustive search complete. Candidate systems for the repair agent meeting the dual-substrate eutectic conditions: 3 types.]

[Candidate 1: Gallium-based low melting point alloy + silicon carbide whisker toughening system—high-temperature limit 1,100 ℃, not meeting the standard.]

[Candidate 2: Indium-tin-silver ternary eutectic + graphene coating system—low-temperature brittle transition temperature -180 ℃, not meeting the standard.]

[Candidate 3: Unknown system—requires the introduction of "Adaptive Phase-change Memory Alloy" as the core carrier; this material has not yet been synthesized in reality.]

Su Che stared at the third option.

Adaptive Phase-change Memory Alloy.

A type of metal that can automatically switch its crystal structure according to the ambient temperature; maintaining toughness at low temperatures, maintaining strength at high temperatures, and maintaining liquid fluidity in the intermediate state.

Shape memory alloys on Earth can only switch between two phases, whereas this thing requires stepless phase change across a continuous temperature spectrum.

In his mind, the blue and white panel lit up.

[System Prompt: Detected that the host has redeemed the core technology; supporting auxiliary technologies/blueprints/plans have not yet been redeemed.]

[Includes: Self-repair module design (redemption points: 3,000), damage detection sensor layout (redemption points: 2,000), repair material formula (redemption points: 2,000).]

[Total redemption points: 7,000.]

[Current accumulated skill points for the host: 59,000 points. Redeem?]

Repair material formula.

It was right inside.

"Redeem."

[Ding! Consumed 7,000 skill points.]

[Current accumulated skill points for the host: 52,000 points.]

The three blueprints and plans flooded into his consciousness space.

Su Che turned directly to the repair material formula.

The core carrier of the formula was clearly written as Adaptive Phase-change Memory Alloy.

Composition system: Titanium-nickel-hafnium ternary substrate, doped with nano-scale gadolinium-samarium rare earth particles, with an outer coating of 0.3-micron thick boron nitride anti-oxidation film.

Preparation method: In an ultra-high vacuum environment, after melting the ternary substrate into a uniform liquid phase, perform gradient solidification at a rate of 0.1 degrees per minute, while applying an alternating magnetic field to induce the directional alignment of the rare earth particles.

Su Che read the formula from beginning to end.

All the raw materials were available on Earth. Titanium, nickel, hafnium, gadolinium, samarium, and boron nitride could all be found in the Military Science Commission's stockpile.

The difficulty was the process.

Gradient solidification at 0.1 degrees per minute, plus synchronous coupling of an alternating magnetic field. The entire solidification process needed to last for over seventy-two hours, during which the temperature fluctuation could not exceed 0.05 degrees.

This job, only one person could do it.

Su Che dialed Wen Bo's number on the encrypted terminal.

It rang eight times before it was answered.

"Academician Wen, are you asleep?"

"Just laid down." Wen Bo's voice was slurred.

"Tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM, bring the entire materials team to the B2 level. The formula for the repair agent is out; before you come, check if your institute has any vacuum melting equipment capable of achieving a gradient solidification precision of 0.1 degrees per minute."

There was silence on the other end of the line for three seconds.

"0.1 degrees per minute?" Wen Bo's voice was clear now. "Seventy-two hours continuously?"

"Correct."

"No." Wen Bo answered concisely. "The whole country of Longguo doesn't have it; the one with the highest precision is in our Materials Institute, at 0.5 degrees per minute, a five-fold difference."

Su Che leaned back in his chair.

The equipment wasn't precise enough.

The formula was there, the materials were there, the process parameters were there.

It was stuck on a furnace.

"Then we'll modify the furnace." Su Che tapped the table. "Ship that one of yours to Pangu Quantum Computer, and I'll modify it."

The call ended.

Su Che saved the repair material formula into the encrypted partition, stood up, and walked to the center of the hall.

The Anti-gravity base under his feet still retained the residual heat from this morning's test.

One week.

He mentally arranged the work sequence.

The first two days to modify the furnace, the third day to start melting the repair agent, the seventy-two-hour solidification cycle to the sixth day, and the seventh day to do the final structural embedding and joint debugging.

The time was perfectly tight.

Qin Lan walked in from outside the door, holding a transfer order in her hand.

"Advisor Su, the vacuum melting equipment from the Materials Institute is expected to arrive at 3:00 AM tomorrow morning."

Su Che took the transfer order and glanced at it.

It was a good piece of equipment, just not precise enough.

Modifying furnaces was something he had actually done before.

Back then at the National Defense University, he had used military-grade melting equipment to heavily modify civilian kitchenware, and later he did the thing with modifying a drone to crash into a building, which was why he was expelled.

After this modification, the 100,000-ton behemoth would have the ability to lick its own wounds in deep space.