NOVEL NEXT Chapter 208: You Are Here
Besides manned battleships, there was also the production of unmanned battleships.
Unmanned battleships were produced in various models simultaneously, classified according to their tactical roles, with the ultimate goal still being to accumulate as many as possible in a short period.
Third was the production of clones.
Tom planned to accumulate the number of clones to over 20 billion within the next two hundred years! Only with such a large number of clones could the operation and losses of the massive number of Mercury-class battleships be sustained.
Fourth, and most crucially, was the manufacturing of hydrogen bombs!
Previously, in the Altair System and the previous stopover system, Tom had manufactured a large number of hydrogen bombs to create traps. The hydrogen bomb trap in the Altair System was successful, causing huge losses to the Mechanical Disaster Fleet.
The previous stopover system was unsuccessful, obviously because the Mechanical Disaster Fleet was already prepared.
Now, setting up a **large number of hydrogen bombs in this star system again, the Mechanical Disaster Fleet would almost certainly not fall for it.
But it didn't matter; Tom had his own plans.
This time, Tom wanted to produce even more hydrogen bombs, at least over 50 billion, and besides the most conventional small-yield hydrogen bombs, Tom also planned to manufacture many large-yield hydrogen bombs.
Theoretically, the yield of a hydrogen bomb can be infinitely large.
After all, stars like the Sun and Pegasus V342 can essentially be considered large hydrogen bombs.
But theory and engineering are sometimes different. Limited by engineering difficulty and cost, Tom ultimately set the yield of a single large-yield hydrogen bomb at 1 billion tons of TNT.
Such a hydrogen bomb would require about 50 tons of deuterium-tritium gas for fusion alone. Coupled with the accompanying small atomic bomb bomb and a series of other devices, the total mass of one hydrogen bomb would directly reach about 200 tons, almost equivalent to a Mercury-class battleship.
Tom planned to produce over 10 billion such large hydrogen bombs, with a total mass of about 2 trillion tons.
It's worth noting that when Tom left the solar system to begin the migration, his fleet's total mass was only a little over 400 billion tons.
Now, just one sub-task within the hydrogen bomb construction project, the construction of large hydrogen bombs, had a total mass five times that of the original solar system migration fleet.
Even the migration fleet when leaving Altair had a total mass of less than 10 trillion tons.
This 10 trillion tons of mass supported Tom's thousand-year escape, the continuous scientific research during the escape, repeated experiments, and the survival needs of billions of clones and Bluetoth.
However, these hydrogen bombs were the core of Tom's next plan. Even if the construction task was so enormous, it had to be completed.
Fortunately, Tom's industrial capabilities had once again greatly improved compared to before.
This was not only due to the increase in the maximum consciousness connection count but also the improvement in supercomputing performance.
During the escape of over a thousand years, Tom never stopped scientific research. Various scientific and technological fields, including quantum-electric supercomputing technology, made significant progress. The quantum-electric supercomputer Tom built this time had higher computing power, better compatibility with intelligent AI, and more powerful performance.
Roughly estimated, a new generation of quantum-electric supercomputers of the same scale had an overall performance at least 2.5 times higher than the quantum-electric supercomputers used during the escape.
With these new supercomputers, how much would the performance of Hestia AI improve, and how much would Tom's industrial strength increase?
Moreover, the construction period this time was also longer.
No matter how fast the Mechanical Disaster was, Tom estimated he would have at least about 200 years.
After confirming these four production tasks, under the operation of over a billion clones, with the support of a large number of supercomputers, and under the direct control of Hestia AI, large-scale production immediately began.
In the smallest gas giant planet, Tom deployed a total of over 5 million "Jupiter aircraft," and this number was rapidly increasing.
The smallest gas giant planet was chosen as the deuterium collection site because it had the lowest gravity and the most moderate environment. Although it was still much, much harsher than Jupiter in the solar system, it was at least within the acceptable range for Jupiter aircraft.
A single Jupiter aircraft could collect about 4 tons of deuterium per day. With 5 million aircraft, after accounting for losses, that was 19.5 million tons per day, or about 7 billion tons per year.
Including other energy and materials, the mass that needed to be transported from the gas giant to other planets easily exceeded a trillion tons annually.
Calculating that a heavy transport ship could transport 10 million tons of materials per trip, just the materials produced from the gas giant would require 100,000 heavy transport ship sorties!
But this only accounted for a small portion of the materials Tom needed to transport.
Various primary minerals—iron ore, tin ore, titanium ore, aluminum ore—as well as various components, chemical products, and so on, constituted the bulk of the transport.
Thus, in the vast space, under the gaze of the bright Pegasus V342, and surrounded by countless asteroids, a transport fleet composed of tens of thousands of heavy transport ships toiled ceaselessly along the space routes, never stopping.
Construction on the planets was even busier.
Super-giant fusion power plants continuously supplied surging electricity, a level of power unimaginable to the Human Civilization or even the Bluetoth Civilization of the past, supporting the frantic operation of one factory after another.
With the supply of components from numerous factories, a hydrogen bomb production line could produce two medium and small hydrogen bombs with a yield of 10 million tons of TNT per hour on average.
Hydrogen bombs were not small items; they were genuine large high-tech industrial products.
A large factory with a footprint of hundreds of thousands of square meters had only one production line.
And Tom built a full 15,000 such large factories!
The factories used to produce Mercury-class battleships were even larger.
A single factory occupied dozens of square kilometers, about tens of millions of square meters.
Such a factory could produce 50 of the latest model Mercury-class battleships per day, applying all the technology Tom had accumulated over the past two thousand years, with a technical level truly reaching the peak of Electroweak Civilization.
And Tom built hundreds of such factories.
There were countless other types of factories: those producing clones, unmanned battleships, unmanned combat equipment, and so on.
Each of these terminal factories, in turn, was connected upstream to anywhere from dozens to tens of thousands of other factories.
These almost countless factories, under Tom's unified control, engaged in what could only be described as frantic production.
This situation continued for over 190 years without a moment's pause.
Until now, a dim star once again appeared in the vast sky.