Chapter 81: Atomic Bomb
Tom was confident that once he massively deployed Venus-class Battleships, his fleet’s combat power would skyrocket.
At that time, the large Venus-class Battleships and the smaller Mercury-class Battleships, two different types of warships, would complement each other; the Venus-class Battleships would handle tough targets and provide long-range fire support, while the Mercury-class Battleships would deal with smaller targets, responsible for harassment and entanglement, making tactics more diverse and flexible.
If he had Venus-class Battleships when confronting the Blueprint Civilization’s vanguard fleet, that battle would certainly not have been so risky, so passive, and would not have required various schemes to defeat the enemy.
"Considering my current industrial and technological level, the number of Clones, logistics and supply capabilities, communication capabilities, and operational range, hmm... at this stage, it’s best for my fleet to maintain a total of 1,000 warships.
Among them, 800 are Mercury-class Battleships, 50 are Venus-class Battleships, and the remaining 150 are logistics and supply ships."
Having made his decision, Tom immediately threw himself into the actual manufacturing.
The massive spaceship assembly plant had already been completed, and the various component factories for building spaceships had also begun operation.
Thus, under the busy work of numerous Clones, the production of new warships began to proceed rapidly.
As the new spaceships began to be manufactured, all the warships Tom previously owned—including those Mercury-class Battleships equipped with new engines—seemed somewhat redundant.
Because in the process of developing the Venus-class Battleship, Tom had accumulated enough technology to completely innovate and upgrade the Mercury-class Battleships, creating more advanced and more powerful Mercury-class Battleships.
They became useless.
But Tom did not intend to melt them down and recycle resources.
They had other uses.
At this moment, Tom was pondering another question.
"Since industrial categories like transportation, planting, animal husbandry, metallurgy, chemical industry, power grids, and power plants can all have an AI to handle low-level work, and have achieved significant efficiency improvements, then, can the same be applied to combat?
Can I also entrust the highly real-time demanding spaceship operations to AI? For example, upon detecting an incoming bullet swarm, the spaceship can automatically activate its engines to evade.
This way, the problem of my inability to real-time command Clones located at distant locations due to communication delays between me and the Clones will also be solved."
The scope of an interstellar battlefield is bound to be enormous. And the more advanced the technology, the larger the battlefield. Before mastering Stellar Communication Technology, Tom had to consider the issue of commanding distant warships.
After some thought, Tom finally made a decision.
"I don’t know if this path will work. After all, interstellar combat is quite different from daily industrial production.
However, what’s the harm in trying? Even if it proves infeasible, it’s just a small loss of resources, a drop in the bucket."
To be cautious, Tom did not directly add intelligent control modules to the new spaceships, but instead began the modification work on those retired old Mercury-class Battleships.
A large number of sensors and controllers were installed into these old warships. From this moment on, all data generated by their every operation would be collected by Tom.
A new supercomputing base was under construction and would soon be operational. The combat AI was also being programmed and would soon enter the supercomputer to begin training and feeding, initiating self-iteration and optimization.
By then, the data collected from these old Mercury-class Battleships would become the food to nurture the combat AI’s growth.
To generate enough data to feed the AI, these old Mercury-class Battleships were not idle; instead, they became even busier.
Tom manipulated them to a location hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Loshen Star, where they engaged in chaotic battles and Fight.
Artillery boomed incessantly day and night. One after another, massive cargo ships departed from Loshen Star, fully loaded with bullets, shells, interstellar missiles, fuel, food, emergency supplies, and more, arriving at the battlefield. Like being thrown into a bottomless pit, these supplies were handed over to the combat ships participating in the exercise, then transformed into balls of fire and scattered debris in space, disappearing without a trace.
Watching the supplies being transported by each spaceship, even Tom felt a pang of heartache.
"This is simply burning money! No, money doesn’t burn this fast!"
Although it wasn’t war, even a live-fire exercise consumed an incredibly large amount of resources.
Bullets alone consumed hundreds of millions of rounds a day!
Fuel consumed tens of thousands of tons a day!
interstellar missiles consumed hundreds of units a day!
If he couldn’t get supplies from God-Enemy Star, he probably wouldn’t be able to sustain the exercise for long.
However, despite the high consumption, it had to be done. His highly anticipated combat AI was waiting for the data generated during these exercises to be fed.
While simultaneously manipulating Clones for the manufacturing of new spaceships, the exercises of old spaceships, basic production on God-Enemy Star, the large-scale industrial system on Loshen Star, and numerous technology research and development projects, Tom was still not satisfied. He further allocated a portion of Clones and dedicated research power to another endeavor.
Tom attached great importance to this research task.
Because he clearly knew that the success or failure of this research would have a profound impact on his entire scientific system, and even affect his entire industrial layout, relating to his future destiny!
It was only when all prerequisite conditions were met that Tom dared to initiate this research. Before, Tom wouldn’t even have considered it.
This research was the atomic bomb!
After a long period of relying on chemical energy to drive his entire operation, Tom finally decided to attempt more advanced and efficient means of energy acquisition!
Nuclear energy!
Atomic bomb technology can be considered the beginning of all nuclear energy technology.
To manufacture an atomic bomb and successfully detonate it, Tom would inevitably have to master all processes from initial uranium ore exploration to subsequent separation, purification, enrichment, calculation, and so on, and fundamentally grasp the basic physical principles of utilizing nuclear energy.
Only by mastering uncontrolled nuclear fission technology like the atomic bomb could Tom embark on subsequent research into controllable nuclear fission technology.
The tangible entity corresponding to controllable nuclear fission technology is nuclear power plants.
Once nuclear power plants are built, one can then consider the technology for miniaturizing nuclear fission reactors, and then subsequent secondary pressurized propulsion technology, and even High-Speed Ion Propulsion Technology, which the human world has not yet mastered, truly breaking free from the limitations of chemical fuels and genuinely entering the Star Ocean.
Now, the gate to the Star Ocean appeared before Tom. Aside from using a nuclear bomb to blast it open, Tom had no other choice.