Chapter 703 Hourglass
Milky Way, Orion Arm.
The human territory faces the side of the Perseus arm.
After more than three hundred years of continuous transformation.
The technology of pseudo-gravitational field generators has become more mature. Not only has the energy consumption decreased, but the unit pseudo-gravitational field intensity it generates has also increased significantly.
All the planetary systems in this area have been hollowed out, leaving only individual stars, and a large number of Dyson megastructures have been built on the surfaces of these stars.
Of course, these Dyson megastructures are not full-coverage Dyson spheres, but Dyson rings.
Through the Dyson ring, human civilization can continuously extract energy from stars, and under normal circumstances, most of this energy is invested in the industry of manufacturing neutron materials.
If a war breaks out and the enemy's high-energy particles get close, they can activate the pseudo-gravitational field generator on the Dyson ring, producing an ultra-strong gravitational field with a gravitational strength roughly equivalent to that of a medium-sized black hole.
Of course, the specific strength of the pseudo-gravitational field depends on the mass of the star.
For example, white dwarfs, red dwarfs, orange main-sequence stars and yellow main-sequence stars, as well as rare giants, blue giants and blue supergiants are all stars, but the energy they can provide to the Dyson ring is different.
However, considering that giant stars are relatively rare, the vast majority of stars currently transformed by human civilization are red dwarfs, orange main-sequence stars, and yellow main-sequence stars.
Based on the current test data.
The pseudo-gravitational field generator transformed from the core of a red dwarf-level star can produce a black hole gravity equivalent to that of 46,000 solar masses.
The pseudo-gravitational field generator transformed from the core of an orange main-sequence star can produce a black hole gravity equivalent to 98,000 solar masses.
The pseudo-gravitational field generator transformed from the core of a yellow main-sequence star can produce a black hole gravity equivalent to 169,000 solar masses.
A standard medium-sized black hole has a mass of about 100,000 suns.
However, the coverage range of the pseudo-gravitational field is somewhat different from that of a black hole. I don’t know whether it is a technical problem of human pseudo-gravitational fields or the pseudo-gravitational field itself is like this.
Even if the pseudo-gravitational field reaches the level of 169,000 suns, its force field coverage can only reach a limit of 16.9 light years.
Beyond this range, the pseudo-gravitational field has no way to distort space or capture high-energy particles.
In order to ensure the security of human territory, the federal headquarters had to coordinate various groups to draw a special defense circle in the border area.
The defense circle must ensure that there are at least three stellar gravitational shields in the same direction.
At the same time, in order to ensure that these stellar gravitational shields can detect incoming attacks in advance, the Federal Headquarters coordinated with various groups to form a special Orion Cantilever Early Warning System.
Three levels of warning have been set up in the area extending outward from the gravitational defense circle.
Ensure that most attacks will be detected in advance by these three levels of warning.
After all, the stellar gravitational shield cannot be turned on all the time. Doing so will not only cause serious waste of energy, but will also seriously affect human external development.
The gravitational defense circle arranged by human civilization is now almost airtight. Not only can high-energy particle attacks prevent it from entering the core area of the human territory, but even high-speed spacecraft cannot easily enter the interior of the human territory.
Even if human civilization wishes, passing planetary systems or neutron stars can be pulled and guided by gravitational shields.
Therefore, it is too luxurious to keep the gravity shield turned on all the time.
However, the technological development of human civilization in the past few hundred years has indeed accelerated a lot.
The emergence of gravity technology has brought about an effect similar to analogy.
Various groups in human civilization are conducting in-depth research on gravity technology, hoping to develop other applications.
For example, the famous "curvature technology" requires the ability to produce space distortion in the front and back, shrinking the space in the front and stretching the space in the back, so as to achieve the purpose of superluminal movement.
Unfortunately, the curvature technology requires the distortion of space to a degree that is far beyond the capability of a pseudo-gravitational field generator.
At this stage, human civilization can only conduct theoretical verification and cannot even build a prototype of the curvature engine.
However, another application was successful.
That application is gravitational field acceleration technology.
In fact, this technology was not developed by human civilization, but was researched by the intelligent mechanical civilization.
However, this technology seems very useless in the hands of intelligent civilizations, because gravitational field acceleration technology requires a large gravitational source to utilize the principle of gravitational slingshot to increase the speed of the spacecraft.
The "large gravitational source" required here is a gravitational field at the level of a black hole, but the problem is that black holes are very rare celestial bodies and their distribution is very uneven.
This seriously limits the application of gravitational field acceleration technology.
It was not until human civilization developed a pseudo-gravitational field generator that this technology regained attention.
As human civilization is exploring the frontier of the outer region of the Orion Arm, the Federation Headquarters has organized nearby groups to build 11 "high-speed routes".
These high-speed routes are composed of a series of gravitationally accelerated stars, which can increase the speed of space battleships or spacecraft to 45% of the speed of light through continuous relay acceleration.
45% of the speed of light, this speed has surpassed all civilizations known to human civilization.
As mentioned before, when the speed of a spacecraft gets closer and closer to the speed of light, the kinetic energy brought by its speed itself will also increase exponentially.
In this case, the faster the spacecraft is, the greater the danger.
Before the advent of gravitational acceleration technology, the fastest speed of human civilization's spacecraft was only about 24% of the speed of light.
Now it has almost doubled, and the kinetic energy brought by its speed has increased by hundreds of thousands of times.
Obviously, the super magnetic field offset shield used before can no longer withstand this kind of collision.
The application of each new technology is often accompanied by a series of technological changes.
The same is true for gravitational acceleration technology.
In order to adapt to the extreme speed brought by gravitational acceleration technology, researchers from the Science Division and the Space Industry Division racked their brains and finally came up with a new solution.
This plan is the "hourglass plan".
The so-called hourglass plan, as the name suggests, is to transform the appearance of the spacecraft into a shape similar to an "hourglass".
Then, with the help of the pseudo-gravitational field generator and the magnetic field offset shield, the oncoming asteroids are sucked into the hole in the middle .
This solution not only solves the risk of asteroids and stardust particles colliding with the spacecraft along the way, but can also transform the matter sucked into the hole into jet fluid through nuclear fusion and magnetic field confinement, thereby achieving an acceleration effect.
This plan allows human civilization's spacecraft to develop their flight speed potential to near the speed of light.
