Volume 16 Tower of Babel Chapter 805: Re-Fusion
The autonomous collection robots are used to mine minerals, the autonomous collection robots are used to build smelting plants, and even the autonomous collection robots that repair damaged parts of engineering ships are autonomous collection robots that have been artificially modified and equipped with welding guns and multi-functional robotic arms, and have been programmed with new work procedures.
As for the humans on this engineering ship, they have never appeared in this memory.
But Ke Lan knew that there must be living people on this engineering ship - with the core authority of these autonomous collection robots, it is forbidden to modify the body and add new programs on their own. This restriction is also to prevent criminals from modifying the engineering robots into fully automatic killing weapons - those resistance organizations on Earth have done this before, but what they can get are all relatively low-grade goods. The role that the modified armed robots can play in combat is far less than that of a real person who has only received the most basic training.
As for the robots breaking through the restrictions and modifying themselves - Ke Lan directly ruled out this possibility: if robots could really achieve this level, the robot crisis would have already erupted on Earth. Even the artificial intelligence on the Ark does not have this ability, let alone these old-fashioned robots from a thousand years ago.
Ke Lan couldn't remember how many zombies he had devoured, one hundred... or two hundred? Anyway, the zombies outside were still pouring in, and the living armor he simulated was like a bottomless pit that could never be full, taking in all the "food" that was delivered to his door... The incomplete memory fragments were being pieced together piece by piece, becoming more complete.
The engineering ship had been docked on this asteroid for six months. Ke Lan didn't know how the people on board survived, but during these six months, nearly one-third of the asteroid's volume was mined, and the engineering ship, which was only a hundred meters long, was transformed into a five-hundred-meter-long alien spaceship...
The appearance of this airship is very rough... or it is not an exaggeration to describe it as rough, full of a strong "diesel punk" style: the power tube with pits and potholes on the surface is directly exposed on the outside of the hull, and a large number of irregular steel plates are roughly riveted together, like an old piece of clothing full of patches. Not to mention the modular design that is now popular, there is almost no compatibility between these newly added parts, and the tolerances between the parts are also terrible...
Twelve giant thrusters that look like horizontal chimneys are set in a supporting . Although Ke Lan doubts whether this thing can provide thrust for the spacecraft, at least the power tubes connected to the thrusters for transmitting fuel do not look like decorations.
If Ke Lan were to describe this alien spaceship in the shortest possible way, it could probably be summed up in one sentence: "I think this thing should be able to move."
But no matter what, this group of people were able to survive in such a harsh environment and transform... no, it should be said that they built such a "thing", which can only be described as a "miracle".
In six months, all the usable resources on the asteroid were mined. The people on the engineering ship not only mined all the ore, but also used tens of thousands of tons of smelting residue as fuel, refining it and filling the "big chimneys".
"Burning stones? Is this... heavy nuclear fusion technology?"
You know, in the old era, the technological ceiling of mankind had just reached the threshold of controlled nuclear fusion. Even the nuclear fusion reactor on the Ark was just a so-called "prototype"... and the so-called "heavy nuclear fusion" is much more difficult than the "nuclear fusion" that is often mentioned in daily life.
The nuclear fusion generally mentioned by the public should be called "hydrogen fusion" in detail. It refers to the use of isotopes of hydrogen atoms, namely protium, deuterium and tritium, to undergo nuclear fusion to produce helium, and a large amount of energy is released in the process.
The reason why we start studying nuclear fusion from hydrogen isotopes is that the hydrogen atom is the first element in the periodic table, has the smallest atomic number, the fewest neutrons and protons in its nucleus, and is relatively "light" in terms of atomic mass, so the initial energy required to initiate its fusion is the least... In short, it has the "lowest threshold."
Elements that are at the back of the periodic table and have relatively "heavy" atomic mass require much more initial energy than hydrogen, but the energy released during the fusion process is not comparable to that of hydrogen fusion energy - this is "heavy fusion", a typical high-input and high-return model.
However, with the technological level of human civilization in the old era, even controlled hydrogen fusion was still at a half-baked level, not to mention the extremely high threshold of heavy fusion... Otherwise, after discovering energy crystals, humans would not have changed this seemingly "primitive" energy supply method into the main means of energy supply for the Ark.
If it were possible to achieve high stability while miniaturizing and making the fusion reactor portable, there would most likely be no use for energy crystals now. However, precisely because this cannot be done, energy crystals, have become mainstream.
If the humans on this engineering ship have mastered the heavy fusion technology, it means that their technological level is at least five hundred years ahead of the current Ark... no, it may even be more than a thousand years!
But how did they develop heavy fusion technology on an engineering ship drifting in space where even survival and supply were problems?
If even eating becomes a problem, how can you have spare energy to do other things?
What's more, there are no conditions for conducting such experiments on the engineering ship at all - if one wants to master heavy nuclear fusion technology, there are simply innumerable technical difficulties to overcome. Each difficulty requires a massive investment of manpower and material resources, and the time and resources consumed are simply astronomical. Even the old-era Earth civilization that concentrated most of the resources of the entire solar system could not do it, so how could a small, dilapidated engineering ship do it?
Ke Lan stared at the alien spaceship in the picture, waiting for the people on the spaceship to ignite the twelve "big chimneys" - in his opinion, even if there was no explosion, the thrusters would not be able to generate any output at all.
