Chapter 406 The Disappearing Afterglow
Chen Ming did not pay too much attention to the affairs of the empire in the future.
He's done everything he's supposed to do.
What he should focus on is always his own affairs.
He can remember all the scattered things he is doing or arranging for others to do.
Check in from time to time and see the progress.
As time goes by.
Chen Ming has more and more people available to him.
Gradually, the only projects he really needed to keep an eye on were his own capital ship design projects.
The progress of this capital ship project has also come to an end as half a year has passed.
Previously, Chen Ming spent half a year planning and deciding the type of main control system of the spacecraft, and then spent several months deciding the direction of the spacecraft's energy source, engine, armor and weapons.
He will naturally decide all these things in the past six months.
When first considered, the energy source of a capital ship is always an anti-matter engine. Compared with any technology of the same era, this thing is a dimensionality reduction blow.
As long as it can be paired with an auxiliary biomass engine to ensure that the spacecraft will not run out of energy at any time, it can almost perfectly meet Chen Ming's needs.
but.
What was finally decided to install was a composite engine made experimentally by Chen Ming himself, which combined the effects of an antimatter engine and a biomass engine.
Once you master the mechanical and biological fusion technology, you have to put it to use.
The final test result of such a composite engine is indeed very good.
But when Chen Ming took out the engine belt, many researchers in the project team responsible for the engine were worried about the stability and adaptability of this semi-mechanical and semi-biological technology.
Chen Ming actually had a similar idea at the beginning.
But after he copied several composite engines and tested them on different models and levels of spacecraft.
No one has this problem anymore.
The spacecraft's composite engine is equipped with the latest battery technology based on energy crystallization technology.
This battery technology uses more than just the energy crystals created by Chen Ming himself.
Since he shared some biotechnology including energy crystallization technology with An Wuping some time ago, almost all technologies have gone through several iterations.
Energy crystallization technology has just been developed, and there are many prospects for development.
The empire is so big, there are always people who can see this and develop energy crystallization technology in a very short period of time.
Nowadays, the energy crystal worms that produce energy crystals have been extracted and fused with genes of species that are rare in the empire. The crystals produced are greatly improved compared to the previous energy storage limit and energy storage efficiency, and the energy self-dissipates. Efficiency has been extremely reduced again.
After further battery encapsulation, the energy dissipation efficiency of crystalline batteries is almost close to zero.
It has very good performance in terms of long-term endurance of the spacecraft and short-term high energy usage.
Even in the process of capital ship design, energy crystallization technology had several iterations.
The engines and supporting equipment that had been installed on the spacecraft had to be removed several times, which was a bit of a waste of time.
But the time is definitely worth wasting.
The ship's engines are of course also equipped with additional functional engine accessories.
This includes the hyperspace channel engine and the jump engine, as well as the hyperspace channel jump engine that has also been iterated several times.
However, the spacecraft is not equipped with a phase engine.
The reason is also very simple.
The capital ship, built from the corpse of the phase beast leader, possesses that power itself.
It just so happens that the empire's psychic technology has been developing rapidly in recent times.
There is Chen Ming who relies on psychic research and interpretation of various relics such as purgatory cores and synchrotron cores obtained from the Shining Civilization, as well as psychic theories exchanged by the Empire from the survivors.
The empire has the first way to start researching various psychic things.
In the front, we just need to follow Chen Ming's original idea of researching the core of purgatory. Later, there will be people who will integrate these technologies and research other things into results.
The Empire has plenty of ways to replicate these psychic creations.
Although the effect may not be as good as the original product of Shining Civilization, this is only the first step taken by the empire.
And these methods, after special research, can be completely transformed into power for regulating the phase power of the phase monster.
Although the phase power of the phase beast is not a psychic power, this special power is similar in nature to psychic power.
It is precisely because of the special advantages brought by the structure of the spacecraft that Chen Ming's large-scale model of the battleship can basically be determined at present.
Phase battleship.
The specific name has not been decided yet. Chen Ming just has some ideas. It will depend on his mood when the time comes.
The capital ship not only had an engine, but its armor was also improved during this time.
The innermost layer of the spacecraft's composite armor is made from phase beast scales that were partially modified by the insect queen from the corpse of the phase beast leader.
These scales not only have a protective effect, but they are also the basis for the phase beast to use phase power to a certain extent.
So it cannot be replaced.
And if it is just used as armor lining, there is really no better material.
The armor outside the innermost layer is covered with the most common biological material Chen Ming currently has on hand, Zerg carapace, with an additional buffer layer inside.
Although Zerg carapace is a very common material, Zerg carapace itself has a very powerful effect.
Moreover, the Zerg carapace placed in the armor is a new type of Zerg armor that was specially strengthened by the Zerg Queen specifically for the capital ship and cannot be used effectively on mid- and lower-level spaceships.
The name is still the same, but the difference in intensity is vastly different.
The outer armor is still metal armor like other spacecraft.
The outermost layer of the spacecraft armor is coated with a layer of artificial astral phagocytosis fluid. After solidification, this layer of astral phagocytosis fluid can also be regarded as a layer of astral phagocytosis armor.
This layer of astral armor does not exist to allow capital ships to enter stars, but for other purposes.
Because the material ratio of the artificial astral liquid has also undergone some changes in the past six months.
The original effect of the astral fluid was simply to prevent the high heat and radiation of the star.
But someone in the empire saw an opportunity, and by changing the ratio, the actual direction of the Astral Devouring Body Fluid changed.
The liquid that originally prevents the energy effects of heat and radiation can limit the actual effects of energy weapons to a greater extent.
Only a thin layer is needed to reduce the direct hit effect of most energy weapons by more than 20%.
This layer of Astrophagous Fluid Armor itself is an additional attachment and can be easily repaired.
And this is the overall structure of the armor.
The biomass material inside the armor goes without saying.
The best carapace materials that the insect queen can make will be used on it, and Chen Ming has repeatedly optimized and strengthened it. The quality is there.
The metal material of the spacecraft armor is even more outrageous.
When Chen Ming first built this capital ship, he considered it his most important spaceship and the flagship of the fleet.
In addition, the corpse of the leader of the phase beast is not an easy material to obtain. It is impossible for Chen Ming to kill the giant beast that protects the phase space and use it as material after receiving the blessing and protection from the phase space.
Therefore, when he designed and built this battleship, he did not consider the issue of mass production at all, and piled materials wherever they could.
In the end, the ordinary-grade materials in the spacecraft's armor layer accounted for less than 20%, and high-grade materials accounted for 46%. The rest were all special-grade materials that Chen Ming put in regardless of cost and only for the best results. Material.
The manufacturing costs are extremely high, and the maintenance costs are endless.
But Chen Ming also thought clearly. If he only had one such spaceship, it would be no problem at all with the support of an entire Zerg clan and the Yuhui that was also developing rapidly.
Many people in the project team complained about Chen Ming's wasteful use of resources. After all, those high-end and special materials could be used to create more battleships.
However, as the subsequent conflicts between Chen Ming and Leviathan using Zerg battleships were made public by Chen Ming, such voices became much less frequent.
How important it is to have top combat power with comparable strength when facing top combat power.
Whether this top combat power is a psyker or a powerful spaceship.
But even so, there are still people who are saying something.
For example, why didn't Chen Ming use such materials to build Titan-class ships?
Not to mention whether there are any phase beasts that can reach the size of Titan.
Just the size difference between the capital ship and the Titan class could kill half of Chen Ming's life, and he simply couldn't produce that much material.
Subsequent maintenance and repairs can completely drag down Chen Ming's economy.
What's more, the theory of Titan-class ships was only developed half a year ago, and now the theoretical research has not been completed. It is all nonsense to work on Titan ships.
Chen Ming was too lazy to pay attention to them and continued to do what he should do.
Anyway, he is the leader of the project, and his ideas are the most important in the design of this battleship.
Therefore, the shield of this battleship was also equipped with a psychic shield at Chen Ming's forced request.
The shield was one of the earliest issues discussed when the spacecraft was designed.
It's just that most of the shield Chen Ming at that time looked down upon it.
So he forcibly suppressed the shield problem.
Until the Plane Nightmare was killed and the research on the Plane Nightmare's psychic shield was completed, the Empire had a certain level of psychic knowledge, enough to reproduce the psychic shield.
Chen Mingcai decided the development direction of the spacecraft shield.
This decision is absolutely correct.
No shield in the Empire can match the power of the psychic shield.
As for weapons, which can be regarded as foreign objects compared to the battleship itself, Chen Ming has been developing them.
It is impossible to use a main-level weapon just by amplifying the power of a large weapon.
When designing each battleship, there will be dedicated personnel to design weapons specifically designed to support various aspects of the battleship.
Ability to maximize the advantages of capital ships.
For example, the main offensive-level weapon that Chen Ming is most familiar with is the thermal pulse laser.
This thing has a very terrifying energy consumption, occupying most of the spacecraft's energy supply when used.
The radiation value of a normal spaceship's firing keeps rising. Only battleships like Offensive, which have extremely thick armor and almost useless shields, can save a lot of energy to adapt to such weapons.
Therefore, when Chen Ming designed his battleship, he fully considered the nature and advantages of the ship, as well as his own ideas.
In the end, based on his knowledge of space and the power of phase space he mastered, he developed a space distortion generator called "Chaos" level. Weapons that attack from space.
It is equivalent to an extension of some of Chen Ming's abilities.
Although the space distortion effect was not very good when fighting Jellyfish Leviathan some time ago, Jellyfish Leviathan is an electromagnetic life.
Space weapons are definitely the best choice against most types of enemies.
to this day.
Most of the structures of the battleship designed by Chen Ming have been manufactured, and only the final steps of the ship's research and development phase are left to carry out the assembly, optimization, and factory processes.
In three months at the latest, the research and development process of this battleship will be completely completed.
In Chen Ming's office.
Chen Ming closed the reports on his computer that had been scattered among the battleship project teams in recent times, and breathed a sigh of relief.
That’s almost it for today.
He will have more time to look at these things when the phased finishing begins in a few days.
Thinking of this, Chen Ming stood up from his desk and prepared to leave.
Although he is now able to focus on only one thing for about ten days without sleep or rest.
But there's more to his life than work, and he's not alone now.
Moreover, before the war between the Empire and the Machine Tribe began, Chen Ming had already discussed with Bai Quan the time for his wedding with Xinghai.
Since the war ended sooner than expected, accordingly, the wedding should be held earlier.
The wedding is still three months away.
Chen Ming raised the corners of his mouth slightly and was about to turn off the computer.
Suddenly, I saw two messages being sent to me on my computer.
One is from the Minister of Psychics, and one is from the Fourteenth Legion.
Thinking of dealing with distant matters first and then nearby matters, Chen Ming first looked at the message from the Minister of Psychics, which contained a document.
The content of the document is the archaeological progress inside the Shining Civilization Cultural Memorial Hall discovered some time ago in the underground of a planet in the pulsar system where the jellyfish Leviathan first appeared.
The empire sent a total of two teams to investigate the ruins.
One team started from the very beginning of the historical records of Shining Civilization and the other team started from the back to the front.
The team from the front to the back has determined the history of Shining Civilization in the primitive biological period and the period of intelligent life, and will soon be able to study the history of Shining Civilization into civilization.
This has little to do with Chen Ming, but more to do with the group that studied from the bottom, that is, from the period of the demise of the Shining Civilization.
Their progress was less than ideal compared to the other team.
After all, there was a time when words were not necessarily needed for detailed records.
The span of the early era is long, and biological evolution can be traced. As long as there are enough ancient artifacts, something can always be analyzed.
But starting from the bottom to study the end of the Shining Civilization inevitably requires the cooperation of words.
The words in this ruins have been worn away by time, and there are no clues at all.
None of the ruins of the Shining Civilization located elsewhere are as completely devoid of any written records as this ruin.
It can only be said that the pulses of pulsars in the galaxy have a great impact on many things, causing damage to electronic equipment and rust, and also causing these words to wear out and become impossible to read clearly.
even so.
This archaeological team is still trying hard to rely on the Empire's understanding of Shining to conduct research.
And, recently, they discovered a strange place on the ground floor of this shining civilization cultural center.
On a certain floor near the ground floor of this cultural center, there is a row of rusted equipment.
Through investigation with a device specially used for archeology, the team discovered some kind of mark on the wall next to it.
There was equipment that created a three-dimensional projection nearby for a long time, and then left traces of the projection on the wall.
The archaeological team took all the photos and handed them over to their superiors and finally to the Minister of Psychics.
And the reason that allowed the psychic minister to send the photo to Chen Ming.
It lies in the appearance of those projected marks.
When Chen Ming read the document to the end, he had already discovered that these marks looked like the Leviathan he had seen.
Chen Ming has seen four kinds of Leviathan before.
Scavenger, Planar Nightmare, Astral Eater, and Tricolor Jellyfish.
In the past six months, when he let Afterglow start to expand along the surrounding galaxies, he encountered two more, and he killed them both.
They are respectively a Leviathan that hatched from an egg that pretended to be a habitable planet and actually devoured all life on the planet.
and a crystalline Leviathan that exists in the asteroid belt of a certain galaxy.
At first, Chen Ming didn't think the latter was Leviathan, but just thought it was some kind of space creature.
Because they were scattered in the asteroid belt at first.
But when Chen Ming dealt with them, they suddenly merged into one, forming a crystal behemoth.
Of course, this did not affect Chen Ming's final solution.
They also dragged the bodies of the two Leviathans back to the Gaia galaxy and threw them into orbit to build a space station dedicated to studying them.
During this period, the two new Leviathan space stations also each had their own output.
The Leviathan in that egg was special.
It will find some suitable planets and inject eggs into the planets, and then the eggs injected into them will transform the interior of the planet into nutrients for this Leviathan.
And this kind of nutrition is a very scarce volatile liquid resource in the empire, even in gaseous form it is very valuable.
What this Leviathan space station studies is the principle of transformation.
And another crystal Leviathan space station has recently produced a spacecraft crystal coating.
As long as a small layer is needed, the structural strength of the hull can be improved to a certain extent.
Chen Ming certainly used this technology in his battleship design.
So he has a deep impression of all Leviathans.
Even if he only saw a silhouette, he could be sure that these marks were those of Leviathan.
Except for the Nightmare of the Plane, he had seen other Leviathan marks in the photos recorded by the archaeological team.
And there are more Leviathans that Chen Ming has never seen before.
There are at least hundreds of them in a row.
And at the very edge of this row of Leviathan's projections is a very blurry star map projection.
The archaeological team is not sure what the star map means.
After all, the star map should be a three-dimensional image, and it is really difficult to see anything from a two-dimensional projection.
But since this star map is placed next to these Leviathan projections, it means that these star maps are definitely related to these Leviathan.
The Minister of Psychics hopes that Chen Ming can check the star map to see the situation.
After all, this most likely means that Leviathan has a close relationship with the Shining Civilization.
If this relationship really exists, then Leviathan is likely to be related to the survivors, which can explain quite a lot of things.
Chen Ming thought for a while and sent a message back to the minister of psychic energy that he knew about it.
He will do it, but not in a hurry.
Immediately afterwards.
Chen Ming opened the message from the 14th Army Corps again.
The message from the Fourteenth Legion was not sent by Bai Quan, but from the commander of the legion.
Although the legion commander stayed on the front lines of the Empire and Yuhui all year round, and Chen Ming did not meet him many times, Chen Ming still had a very good impression of the legion commander.
When I came here, I probably had something to ask.
Chen Ming looked at the content of the message.
There were no documents this time, and they were basically dictated by the legion commander.
It probably refers to what happened some time ago when Yuhui was preparing to retreat because the empire won the war with the machine race and showed its determination to deal with the approaching enemies.
At that time, the minister of psychic energy came over specifically to ask Chen Ming about this matter.
Chen Ming had no objection anyway.
He only controls the part separated by Afterglow, not the large army of Afterglow.
Especially after Yuhui confirmed his existence, they were very wary of external Yuhui.
Chen Ming was stopped after several attempts, and the distance was too far, so Chen Ming was too lazy to care about them.
What's more, he already has a copy of Kletka.
This copy only needs to be optimized by his spiritual power, and it can do everything that Kletka's original body can do.
He even thought that when the Empire was chasing Afterglow's large army, he could collect some wool and get some cores that did not need to be used by the Empire, but could be taken away.
So he had no problem with it.
So it was the Fourteenth Army Corps that was responsible for the pursuit.
Yuhui and the Empire have been at odds for so many years. If he wants to run away, he must first obtain the permission of the Empire.
The pursuit has been ongoing for the past half year.
But just the other day.
Yuhui, who was still retreating vigorously, suddenly fell silent.
They disappeared on their way to escape.
Only countless supplies piled up in different galaxies were left, allowing the empire's pursuing troops to seize them.
Chen Ming thought about many situations.
For example, Sunset completely surrendered and reintegrated into the Empire.
Or commit collective suicide, preferring death to surrender.
But losing it was something Chen Ming didn't expect at all.
(End of chapter)