271: Chapter 271 The Mothership's Maiden Voyage Shocks the Entire Audience; A Million-Ton Phoenix Appears!
Time kept moving forward.
Two and a half months later.
Su Family Village Interstellar Development Zone, Nantianmen Fleet R&D project team.
Soren Kesh stood before a massive cylindrical device, inside which countless deep purple crystal arrays were flickering.
Lieutenant General Peng Zhenbang stood beside him, watching the data fed back on the holographic screen.
"The dark matter detector, it's finished?"
"It's finished." Soren Kesh pointed to a curve on the screen.
"It can already stably capture the dark matter background fluctuations at the edge of the Solar System, and the sensitivity is only two or three grades lower than the models currently in service with Kairos."
In another laboratory, Wen Bo and Academician Zhang Weide were making final adjustments to a disk-shaped device over fifty meters in diameter.
The surface of the device was covered in a pitch-black material that didn't reflect even a sliver of light.
Academician Zhang Weide entered the final command into the console.
The energy indicator light in the center of the disk-shaped device turned from red to green.
"Dark matter defense shield system, energy field conversion module started successfully, operating stably."
Wen Bo let out a long breath. "If this thing were installed on the luan bird, the conventional main guns of a Level 3 Civilization would have to blast it for ages."
Lieutenant General Peng Zhenbang walked over from the detector side and took a look.
"The second phase of the three major projects has finally been completed."
...
Genesis, bridge.
Su Che sat in the captain's seat, with a massive holographic star map in front of him.
He turned his head to look at the five people at the console behind him.
"Can the ship be launched?"
Zhou Chuyue stood up and gave a crisp salute.
"Reporting, Chief Engineer Su, the five of us were already skilled in piloting various types of aircraft. Over these past two and a half months, we have fully mastered all the navigation systems of the mothership and are ready to set sail at any time."
"Good."
Su Che tapped his hand on the armrest.
"All ship personnel, take your stations."
He stood up, his voice echoing throughout the bridge.
"Target: Asteroid Belt, Dyson Cloud project construction zone."
"Set sail!"
Lu Zheng sat in the pilot's seat, his hands steady on the control stick, and pushed it forward.
The massive hull of the Genesis began its voyage in space for the first time.
It did not use space jumping.
In conventional cruise mode, a faint layer of blue energy ripples appeared in the airspace behind the ship, propelled by the unlocked high-order fusion plasma field.
This giant ship, stretching over a dozen kilometers, sailed steadily toward the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
In the bridge, everyone was standing.
Commander-in-Chief Wang Xueshan, Zhang Zhiyue, and Li Chengwen, these old generals, watched the blue planet gradually receding outside the porthole; the corners of Li Chengwen's eyes grew wet.
Commander-in-Chief Wang Xueshan patted his shoulder, his voice raspy.
"Why are you crying? In my lifetime, seeing this scene today, it was worth it!"
Scientists like Ye Zhiqiu, Su Wanxing, and Friedman stared intently at the various data points, with Friedman even muttering to himself.
"Gott... this is the symphony of physics."
Lin Waner and Jiang Yingxue stood behind Su Che, watching the light point representing the Genesis on the star map move further and further away from Earth.
From the far side of the Moon to the asteroid belt, conventional cruising would take several hours.
When the Genesis arrived at the designated coordinates, everyone was shocked by the scene before them.
Against the pitch-black cosmic background, connected interstellar industrial facilities spread quietly across the asteroid orbit.
That was the space raw material processing hub for the Dyson Cloud project.
On the outermost perimeter, hundreds of automated dismantling platforms, each the size of a football field, were capturing nearby asteroids using invisible gravitational fields.
The asteroids were dragged into the center of the platforms and crushed into the most basic material streams under the powerful gravitational tearing.
These material streams were precisely divided into three flows and injected into different pipelines.
The other end of the pipelines connected to atomic reconstruction factories floating in orbit.
Inside the factories, robotic arms and energy fields worked in coordination to batch-synthesize the purified raw materials into sheets of metallic-lustered light-collecting superconducting sails and precision energy conversion units.
Further away, a magnificent electromagnetic catapult launch port had already begun to take shape.
The massive circular track looked like a giant steel dragon coiled in the void, and workers piloting engineering vessels were welding the final energy conduction nodes for the track.
The entire construction zone stretched for tens of thousands of kilometers.
Countless robots, engineering vessels, and transport ships shuttled back and forth, like a tireless giant beehive, transforming barren asteroids into the cornerstone for human civilization to march toward the peak of Level 2.
In the bridge, there was complete silence.
Everyone was stunned into silence by this epic industrial tapestry.
"This is... our human power." Commander-in-Chief Wang Xueshan looked out the window, his voice trembling slightly.
Su Che looked at this interstellar construction site that he had planned with his own hands, and a surge of pride welled up in his heart.
When he was developing the Second Generation Luan Bird deep space in-situ resource replenishment system, he had only seen the mark here in the main god ai's star map data.
Now, he was personally sitting on a late-stage Level 3 Civilization interstellar mothership, inspecting the Dyson Cloud.
He turned around and ordered Lu Zheng, "Return to base, orbit on the far side of the Moon."
The Genesis turned around and flew toward Earth.
On the return journey, when that familiar gray planet appeared outside the porthole, Su Che stood up.
"I'm going to the Moon base's Dry Dock to take a look."
He didn't take anyone with him and headed alone to the ship-borne planetary landing and scientific research equipment storage area.
After putting on a Level 3 Civilization-grade spacesuit, Su Che walked into the dedicated dock bay for ship-borne engineering and service vessels.
He skillfully boarded a small planetary landing craft and started the engines.
The landing craft slid out of the dock bay in the belly of the Genesis, traced an arc, and flew toward the brightly lit area of the Moon.
A moment later, the landing gear of the landing craft touched the lunar surface steadily, kicking up a fine layer of dust.
Su Che pushed open the cabin door, walked down the gangway, and looked up.
Not far away, beside the Moon base, was the massive silhouette of the Dry Dock.
Under the starlight, it looked like a dormant ancient beast.
Su Che's feet stepped onto the fine lunar dust.
Ahead, the shadow of the Dry Dock obscured half the sky.
This dormant beast was even more oppressive than when viewed from above in the landing craft.
Talia Knox, Zhou Dehai, and Academician Chen Shian were already waiting in front of the dock gate.
The three of them were wearing heavy spacesuits, and beneath their helmet visors were expressions mixed with exhaustion and extreme excitement.
"Chief Engineer Su." Talia's voice came through the public channel, accompanied by a slight static crackle.
Su Che raised his hand to signal there was no need for formalities and walked forward.
The closer he got, the more the gargantuan object lying quietly in the Dry Dock revealed its breathtaking silhouette.
3,850 meters long, 840 meters wide, and 160 meters high.
The total spatial volume was 517 million cubic meters.
These were once cold numbers on a blueprint. When it became a physical reality looming before his eyes, any language seemed pale and powerless.
Su Che stopped and looked up.
The armored curve of the bow pointed directly into deep space like an unsheathed blade, and the lines on both sides of the hull were smooth and full of power, extending to the end of his field of vision.
"The main structure is basically complete, and the final sectional welding of the outer shell is being pushed forward urgently." Zhou Dehai pointed into the distance.
Several large construction robots hovered in the vacuum, the sparks of their high-energy welding torches blooming silently.
Su Che's gaze slid down the hull and landed on the massive keel truss supporting the ship's body.
"One million tons." He spoke, his tone calm. "At this size, to control the mass to only one million tons, you all have implemented my plan very thoroughly."
The Second Generation Luan Bird was 1,100 meters long with a volume of over 27 million cubic meters and weighed 100,000 tons.
This ship had a total volume nearly twenty times larger, yet the mass had only increased by ten times.
"Follow me." Talia led the way.
The group took the dock's lifting platform and arrived at a height level with the middle of the hull.
The platform came to a steady stop.
Su Che reached out and touched the cold outer shell of the hull.
The sensors in his spacesuit gloves faithfully fed back the delicate metallic texture.
"The armor is only thirty centimeters thick."
Academician Chen Shian brought up a structural diagram on the side and projected it onto Su Che's visor.
"The surface layer is a single-crystal wear-resistant layer, the middle is a ceramic energy-absorbing layer, and the inner layer is a force field substrate."
He pointed to the layered structure on the diagram.
"The second-generation ship had three-meter-thick solid armor, relying on hardness to resist."
"For the third-generation ship, following your design philosophy, the main protection is left to the global shield, and the physical armor only serves as a fail-safe, which saves a massive amount of structural dead weight."
Su Che looked at the internal skeleton structure.
Through the areas not yet sealed, the skeletons, shimmering with a dark golden luster, presented an extremely complex microscopic hollow grid shape.
"The main load-bearing skeleton uses neutron lattice carbon-titanium single crystal."
Zhou Dehai took over the conversation. "With the technical guidance provided by Soren Kesh, we achieved mass production on the Zhulong production line; the strength is twenty-two times that of the second-generation skeleton, and the density is only one-fourth."
"Materials alone are not enough."
Talia pointed to the energy pipeline interfaces reserved between the skeletons.
"The real core is the global structural force field. We followed the 'Third-generation Interstellar Nantianmen Fleet Plan' you provided exactly and laid out an energy force field network throughout the entire ship."
Talia's tone carried heartfelt admiration.
"It forms an invisible energy skeleton that bears seventy percent of the structural stress of the hull, while the physical skeleton only bears the remaining thirty percent. This completely subverts the physical law that the larger the hull, the higher the structural dead weight."
Su Che nodded.
The blueprints provided by the system were one thing, but seeing this group of top-tier brains turn them into reality with his own eyes felt completely different.
"Let's go inside and take a look."
The group entered the interior of the hull through the reserved maintenance passage.
First level, heavy carrier-based hangar.
The internal engineering lights turned on one by one; with a ceiling height of thirty-two meters, this was an extremely vast and huge space.
The fully automatic dispatch tracks on the ground had been laid out, looking like a dense metal spider web.
"Eighty parking spots for White Emperor III are reserved here." Talia checked the data pad. "The supporting rapid ammunition replenishment interfaces and lifting platforms are almost finished."
Su Che walked a distance in the empty hangar, and the image of eighty dual-mode White Emperor fighters standing ready here appeared in his mind.
They went down level by level.
Second level, general-purpose hangar, with docking interfaces reserved for a swarm of 2,400 Xuan Nu III drones.
Third level, crew living quarters, with some modular cabins already built.
Fourth level, command center, tightly wrapped by layers of armor and force field nodes.
They walked all the way to the eighth level at the very bottom.