Under the surging electrical power from the grid, so special propellant inside this giant thruster was ionized, and then its ions began to accelerate within the coils, finally achieving extrely high speeds, converging into an extrely bright, extrely thick blue fla that jetted outwards from the tail, creating an astonishing spectacle.
For a ti, the entire massive experintal factory building was dyed blue by this bright fla.
Their maximum ejection velocity even reached 30 kiloters per second! Whereas the chemical fuel thrusters Tom commonly used at the mont generally had gas ejection velocities of no more than 5 kiloters per second.
Evidently, the higher the speed at which a unit mass of propellant is ejected, the greater the thrust it provides.
From 5 kiloters per second to a direct surge of 30 kiloters per second, the ejection velocity increased sixfold, and the corresponding thrust provided also increased sixfold!
If this ejection velocity could be applied to the current spaceships, then a battleship that originally needed to carry about 30 tons of fuel to et combat requirents would now only need five tons.
No, because less fuel would need to be carried, and the overall mass would be reduced, it wouldn’t even need five tons to et the combat requirents of a fully loaded ship in the past!
The enormous potential contained within this made Tom quite excited.
It’s just a pity...
Tom sighed softly after looking at the equipnt readings on the giant thruster.
Don’t be fooled by how bright and thick this light column is, how astonishing it looks, but the actual situation is...
They only provided about 0.05 N of thrust.
How much thrust is that?
On Earth, ignoring air buoyancy, this thrust would probably just barely be able to push a sheet of A4 paper.
And it wouldn’t be pushing the A4 paper upwards, but rely holding it suspended, preventing it from falling.
Assuming this giant ion thruster was in a gravity-free space environnt, this thrust would only be able to provide it with an acceleration of approximately 0.16 microters per square second.
It would need to accelerate for a full year to increase its speed from a standstill to about 5 ters per second, which is roughly the speed of a person running.
Not to ntion, this 300-ton behemoth is currently just an accelerator, and it requires an additional power supply.
On average, 1500 kilowatt-hours of electricity are consud by it every hour!
Overall, this ion propulsion technology is utterly useless and extrely impractical.
But Tom understood that this was actually just the beginning.
Just like when trains were first invented, they ran slower than horses. But in the future, they provided transportation capabilities countless tis greater than horses.
Although ion propulsion technology is completely impractical at the mont, that’s fine too!
As long as it continues to iterate generation after generation and develops persistently, it will eventually beco practical.
"Let’s take it slow. I’ll research it for now; anyway, I don’t plan to make ion propulsion technology practical in the short term."
At this stage, what is more likely to be practical is the secondary pressurized propulsion technology that humanity has already mastered, and which the Deep Space Spaceship also uses.
Tom’s current technological roadmap, whether optimizing chemical fuel propulsion efficiency, improving material performance, or researching controllable nuclear fission and the miniaturization of fission reactors, is all moving towards this goal.
Once secondary pressurized propulsion technology is mastered, although the overall efficiency still cannot compare to ion propulsion technology, it will far exceed existing chemical propulsion, and there is no problem with that.
At that ti, those spaceships will not have to carry tens of tons, or even hundreds of tons, of chemical fuel every ti they set sail!
Not only that, the application of secondary pressurized propulsion technology will also greatly expand his radius of activity.
By then, he would be able to do sothing he had always wanted to do but couldn’t.
That is, returning to the Inner Solar System!
The materials at the edge of the Solar System are simply too scarce.
There are only so dwarf planets, which are low in mass, small in size, and resource-poor.
Even if he extensively developed God-Enemy Star now, given his rate of resource consumption, it wouldn’t be long before everything was used up.
Only in the Inner Solar System, where there are many large planets and abundant resources, could he obtain virtually infinite resource supplies and unrestrainedly advance his technological level!
But... returning to the Inner Solar System with existing chemical propulsion is not feasible.
It can at most send small-mass objects to the Inner Solar System. To send his fleet, along with nurous supplies, a large amount of industrial facilities, and tens of millions of Clones, it is simply beyond its capability.
The reason is simple: the greater the mass to be propelled, the more chemical fuel is needed. When more chemical fuel is needed, the self-weight increases, which then requires even more chemical fuel, forming a vicious cycle that ultimately leads to needing an astronomical amount of chemical fuel to achieve this.
Tom gazed deeply at the shining star in the distant cosmos, and while continuing to maintain the optimization and iteration of the ion thruster, he once again devoted much of his energy to the upgrade and iteration of the nuclear fission power plant.
Ti thus slowly passed.
Every day on God-Enemy Star, a mountain of supplies flowed in, and on Loshen Star, tens of millions of Clones worked day and night, every factory roared day and night, and every research institute and research base produced a large amount of technological data.
In space, hundreds of old rcury-class Battleships engaged in constant battles, generating massive amounts of war-related data to feed the combat AI running in the supercomputer.
It was at this ti that Tom felt that this set of combat AI was roughly mature and should be put into use.
"It’s really not easy."
Tom was filled with emotion: "To generate data, to allow you to self-iterate and optimize, I manipulated hundreds of battleships and fought for more than ten years.
In these more than ten years, to say nothing else, just the fuel consud amounted to over 100 million tons..."
Tom had high hopes for this combat AI, viewing it as an important tool to enhance his combat power and solve communication delay problems.
Otherwise, Tom would not have invested such a massive amount of resources to produce data and train it.
Now, Tom intended to truly let it cooperate with him, control the battleship to fight a battle, and verify its capabilities.
Tens of thousands of kiloters around Loshen Star, two fleets each set up their formations.
However, after a series of tests, Tom got a result that he could never have imagined.
"What’s going on? How... how is it so bad? This, this is far worse than directly controlling the battleship while enduring communication delays."
Tom was greatly shocked.
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