Chapter 2 The Coming Winter
This is the research that Perficott is currently conducting. A flying device that uses airbags to provide lift to achieve flight. To put it more simply and understandably, it is an airbag airship.
After all, she lived in an era where the steam engine had only been invented less than a hundred years ago, and the entire world was still in the stage of the first industrial revolution. It was really impossible to make a miniaturized internal combustion engine to invent an airplane. It’s difficult to understand the level of industrial production in this era.
Although it is not impossible to use alchemy to create a small internal combustion engine that can be put into practical use, doing so will increase the manufacturing cost to an unacceptable level.
That is a huge expense that is difficult to accept even with the Philosopher's Stone as support.
So Purficott finally chose the airbag airship, a large-scale flying device that had existed in human history in the world before she traveled, as a reference object, combined with some flying vehicles in fantasy works she had read. , designed this airship.
"Rigid Airbag Type Airship (Model)"
"Material: Excellent"
"Manufacturing Technology: Excellent"
"Effect: The purpose of flight is achieved by inflating the air bag with a lighter than air gas to generate lift, and provide power through a small steam engine for propulsion"
"Evaluation: Although this is just a model, it can indeed fly! Congratulations, this research is feasible in theory and practice. We only need to scale it up and solve the problem of power, and it can really fly. Flying into the sky with you.”
Looking at the evaluation given by his golden finger, Purficott’s originally serious face also had a relaxed expression.
In addition to this being one of the few works that she received praise from her own golden finger, this is also the result that she spent a year achieving. Being able to win such a review is enough to make her feel full of accomplishment. .
Although the design of the airship is very successful, it does not allow Purfict to relax in any way, because the approaching disaster makes her always have the illusion of being chased by a beast, so she must Keep your nerves tight at all times.
The world is facing a disaster, a doomsday disaster that can destroy the entire world.
Even before time travel, even with the technological level of mankind that has reached the third industrial revolution and set foot in the stars, it is still difficult to withstand a world-destroying disaster.
At first, Purficott became curious just because her housekeeper told her that the heating expenses that year had increased by 7% compared with previous years.
This is not a normal changing value. Although the change is not large, I carefully asked the loyal old housekeeper in Purficott and confirmed that the price of coal did not rise that year, and no one was corrupt or wasteful. She then became interested in how the fee had grown.
At that time, based on the idea that idleness was also idle, Purficott established a small weather observation station in the yard and began to record the temperature and weather changes every day.
The reason for this is that after excluding the influence of human factors and social environment, the only possibility that can cause this result is natural climate change.
While collecting data through the meteorological observation station she built, Purficott also found a way to obtain the meteorological observation data of the Royal Langton University, the highest university in the empire, for the past ten years through some connections. After sorting and comparing, she found that from about Since seven years ago, Langton... no, it should be said that the temperature of the entire Victoria Empire has been dropping. At first, it was only a drop in the annual average temperature of less than one degree. This drop was very slight and fell within the normal range of annual average temperature fluctuations, and did not attract any attention.
Even Purficott discovered that the cooling started at this time after rigorous calculations.
The subsequent record is that the number of snowfalls in winter is increasing year by year, the arrival of spring is getting later and later, and the duration of summer is shortening...
Until last year, the average temperature throughout the year was relatively different. It has dropped by four degrees compared to before the cooling, and the cooling rate is still increasing.
This is not a normal natural phenomenon. This degree of cooling is like shortening climate change that was originally completed within a hundred years to just ten years.
Perfect was shocked when she came to this conclusion. She even once doubted whether there was something wrong with her calculation results.
In order to verify whether this conclusion was correct, she found the Imperial Astronomical Society through Langton University and asked the group of astrologers to help with a divination. She came to the conclusion that the whole world was about to enter a cold winter. Within three years, temperatures will plummet and the entire world will be frozen.
By then, even in the warmest time of summer, the temperature in Langton will be below minus 20 degrees.
Perfect felt that he had made a mistake, or that the group of astrologers who were practicing divination had made a mistake.
However, when she even used her alchemical hands to rub a difference engine for the accuracy of her calculations, those astrologers also borrowed the Philosopher's Stone from her to conduct larger-scale divination rituals in order to obtain a more accurate result.
But in the end, Purficott verified that his calculations were correct, and the astrologers also confirmed that their divination was correct, and may even have downplayed the scale of the disaster.
Because they worked together and finally came to the conclusion that ten years later, under the most optimistic scenario, the average annual temperature in Langton would be below minus 40 degrees Celsius.
That is a low temperature that can even freeze the water vapor in the air that is usually invisible to the naked eye. In this environment, steel will be as brittle as glass, and the land will not only be covered with thick ice and snow, but also The cold is harder than steel...
The harm caused by extreme cold is devastating. Just imagine if the whole world becomes an environment similar to Antarctica, how will humans survive?
Even in the time before Perfection traveled, facing this kind of disaster, at best, it could only ensure that a small number of people could survive in this harsh environment, let alone today, a world that has just entered the first industrial revolution. .
Compared with the cold numbers obtained by Purficott, the results of those astrologers' divination are more specific, but also more cruel.
Low temperatures of tens of degrees below zero, blizzards with winds up to Level 12, the entire world completely frozen, riots when the doomsday comes...
It was a white doomsday, Everything is frozen in ice and snow. No matter whether it is a powerful magician, an alchemist who turns stone into gold, or an astrologer who divines the future, there is no way to fight against this doomsday of ice and snow.
Those astrologers predict that within ten years the entire world will return to the Ice Age, and even the equatorial oceans will be frozen. If changes cannot be made in the future, the world will It will be completely frozen within three hundred years, and the entire world will become dead.
(End of this chapter)