Under the support of the surging electricity from the power grid, some special working fluids were ionized inside this giant thruster, and then their ions began to accelerate in the coil, eventually reaching an extremely high speed, converging into an extremely bright and thick blue flame, which was ejected from the tail to the outside world with an extremely shocking momentum. For a moment, the entire huge experimental plant was dyed blue by the bright flames. Their maximum jet speed even reached 30 kilometers per second! At this moment, the chemical fuel thrusters commonly used by Li Qingsong generally had a gas jet speed of no more than 5 kilometers per second. Obviously, the higher the speed at which the unit mass of the working fluid is ejected, the greater the reverse thrust it provides. The jet speed increased sixfold from 5 kilometers per second to 30 kilometers per second, and the corresponding thrust also increased sixfold! If this jet speed can be applied to current spacecraft, then a warship that originally needed to carry about 30 tons of fuel to meet combat needs will now only need five tons. No, because less fuel needs to be carried and the overall mass is reduced, even five tons is not needed to meet the combat needs of the past when fully loaded with fuel! Li Qingsong was very excited about the huge potential contained in it. Unfortunately... After looking at the equipment readings on the giant thruster, Li Qingsong sighed softly.
Although this beam of light is so bright, so strong, and looks impressive, the actual situation is... They only provide about of thrust. How much thrust is this? On Earth, ignoring the buoyancy of air, this thrust is just enough to push a piece of A4 paper. And it does not push the A4 paper up, but just pushes it to stay suspended and not fall down. Assuming that this giant ion thruster is located in a gravity-free space environment, this thrust can only provide it with an acceleration of approximately microns per square second. It takes a full year for it to accelerate from a standstill to about 5 meters per second, which is roughly the same speed as a human running. Not to mention, at this moment this 300-ton giant is actually just an accelerator, and it also requires additional power supply. On average, 1,500 kilowatt-hours of electricity are consumed by it every hour! Overall, this ion propulsion technology is extremely useless. But Li Qingsong understood that this was just the beginning. Just like when the train was first built, it was not as fast as a horse. In the future, it has contributed a transportation capacity that is countless times greater than that of a horse. Although ion propulsion technology is completely impractical at the moment, it doesn’t matter! As long as it continues to iterate from generation to generation and develops persistently, it will always be practical. "Take your time. Let's study it first. Anyway, I don't plan to put ion propulsion technology into practical use in the short term." What is more likely to be put into practical use at this stage is the secondary pressurization propulsion technology that has already been mastered by the human world and is also used by the Deep Space Spacecraft. Li Qingsong's current technical route, whether it is optimizing the efficiency of chemical fuel propulsion, improving material performance, or researching controlled nuclear fission and miniaturization of fission reactors, is moving towards this goal. Once the secondary pressurization propulsion technology is mastered, although the overall efficiency is still not as good as ion propulsion technology, it will far exceed the existing chemical propulsion, so there will be no problem. At that time, those spacecraft will no longer have to carry at least ten tons or even hundreds of tons of chemical fuel every time they set sail!
Not only that, the application of secondary pressurization propulsion technology will also greatly expand its activity radius. By then, I can do something that I have always wanted to do but have never been able to do. That is, return to the inner solar system! The material at the edge of the solar system is too scarce. There are only some dwarf planets with low mass, small size and poor resources. Even if he developed the Enemy Star on a large scale at this moment, given the rate at which his resources were consumed, it would not take long for all of them to be consumed. Only in the inner solar system, with its numerous large planets and abundant resources, can we obtain almost unlimited resource supplies and unscrupulously improve our technological level! But...returning to the inner solar system will not work relying on existing chemical propulsion. It could only send small objects to the inner solar system. It was not capable of sending its own fleet, the many supplies it carried, the large number of industrial facilities, and tens of millions of clones. The reason is simple: the greater the mass that needs to be propelled, the more chemical fuel is needed. The more chemical fuel is needed, the greater the weight will be, so more chemical fuel will be needed, and this vicious cycle will eventually lead to the need for astronomical amounts of chemical fuel to achieve this. Taking a deep look at the shining star in the distant sky, Li Qingsong, while continuing to optimize and iterate the ion thrusters, once again put a lot of energy into the upgrades and iterations of the nuclear fission power station. Time passes slowly like this. Every day, mountains and seas of materials flow in from Enemy Star. On Rosen Star, tens of millions of clones are busy day and night, every factory is roaring day and night, and every research institute and research base is producing a large amount of scientific and technological data. In space, hundreds of old Mercury-class battleships are engaged in endless combat all day long, generating a huge amount of war data to feed the combat AI running in the supercomputer. At this time, Li Qingsong felt that this combat AI was almost mature and could be put into use. “It’s really not easy.” Li Qingsong sighed in his heart: "In order to generate data, in order to allow you to iterate and optimize yourself, I have been operating hundreds of warships for more than ten years. Over the past decade, not to mention anything else, more than 100 million tons of fuel have been consumed..." Li Qingsong has high hopes for this combat AI, and sees it as an important tool to improve his combat effectiveness and solve the problem of communication delays. Otherwise, Li Qingsong would not have invested such huge resources to produce data and train it. At this moment, Li Qingsong planned to really let it cooperate with him, control the warship to fight a battle, and verify its ability. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers around the planet Luoshen, the two fleets each deployed their battle formations. But after some experiments, Li Qingsong got a result that he never expected. "What's going on? How... How can it be so rubbish? This is far worse than me directly operating the battleship while enduring the communication delay." Li Qingsong was shocked.
