CHAPTER 165: ALTIAR

True interstellar travel is different from the journey Tom previously undertook from the Loshen Star to Jupiter.

The two are simply incomparable, like a common person in the Earth era visiting a neighbor compared to traveling to Mars by spaceship, or even more exaggerated.

Even Human Civilization at its peak never accomplished this feat. Now, Tom must complete this great voyage by himself.

At this moment, Tom had already determined his migration target.

Altair.

That’s right, it was Altair, the star that holds an extremely important position in human culture.

The real Altair is a massive star with a mass about 1.8 times that of the Sun. Its radius is also about 1.63 times that of the Sun, its brightness is ten times that of the Sun, and its surface temperature is around 7,000 degrees Celsius.

Its distance from the Sun is about 16.8 light-years. Converted to kilometers, that’s about 158 trillion kilometers, more than ten thousand times the distance from the Loshen Star to Jupiter back then.

The reason for choosing Altair as the destination for this migration was that Tom had observed and confirmed the existence of a huge gas giant and two rocky planets there.

Besides these, there is also a large debris disk and an asteroid belt, which very likely contain many dwarf planets.

The gas giant can serve as a deuterium fuel collection site, and the rocky planets can be sources of various mineral resources. Thus, Altair provides the foundation for him to quickly gather various materials.

In addition, there is another reason. That is, Altair is located in a direction far from the Gliese 625 star system. Fleeing there would further distance him from the Mechanical Disaster, reducing the possibility of being discovered by it.

Furthermore, the distance to Altair is also quite suitable, neither too close nor too far, just right for Tom to use as a practice run for his first interstellar voyage.

Of course, Altair is only a transit point chosen by Tom. After collecting all kinds of materials there as quickly as possible, Tom will embark on another interstellar voyage until he is completely free from the threat of the Mechanical Disaster.

With the migration target determined, large-scale construction began.

This time, Tom’s construction goal was clear.

Build spaceships, build large spaceships, build large spaceships capable of interstellar travel\!

As such, the original Aerospace Carrier was far from sufficient. In fact, for Tom, even the Bluetoth Aerospace Carrier was a bit too small.

The Bluetoth Civilization had limited industrial capacity and could only carry the minimum required resources during migration, unable to conduct any scientific research activities.

But he was different\!

Even if he couldn’t conduct large-scale scientific experiments and research during the voyage, at least he should be able to carry out research with lower resource consumption, right?

If he didn’t do any scientific research and just wasted time on the journey, Tom couldn’t accept it.

So Tom designed a brand new, super-giant Aerospace Carrier.

The design of this Aerospace Carrier was derived from the previously designed one, but it was more complex and massive.

Overall, it was a rectangular, cage-like structure, with 50 thick vertical axes on each plane, serving both to support the overall structure and as internal passages, while maintaining the life support environment.

Intersecting with the 50 vertical axes were 50 identical horizontal axes. The intertwining of the 50 vertical and horizontal axes created 2,500 small cubes, like individual cages.

But this was just one layer. Tom designed 10 layers for this Aerospace Carrier, so the number of internal "cages" reached 25,000.

Its length and width reached 6 kilometers, and its height was 600 meters, so roughly calculated, its internal volume reached about 18 cubic kilometers.

Within each of these cages, various ships such as battleships, passenger ships, and industrial ships could be suspended, as could material containers, life support pods, and various living quarters, hibernation chambers, factory modules, production lines, and so on, serving diverse purposes.

It was equipped with a total of 5,000 high-speed ion thrusters, distributed not only at the stern but also widely throughout the ship. Powering these thrusters were a total of 100 large nuclear fusion reactors, also distributed throughout the ship.

Such a large number of reactors and thrusters allowed it to carry a maximum mass of up to 300 million tons while flying in space, and it could conveniently change its attitude and direction during flight.

Tom planned to build 500 of these massive Aerospace Carriers\!

In addition to the most important Aerospace Carriers, Tom also planned to build over 1,000 heavy transport ships, each with a full load mass of 20 million tons.

These heavy transport ships would supplement material transport, capable of carrying large quantities of supplies, and secondly, they were smaller and more flexible than Aerospace Carriers.

Another important construction category was battleships.

After assimilating the Bluetoth Civilization’s technology, Tom’s related battleship technology also advanced by leaps and bounds. Given this, a comprehensive upgrade of the battleship system became necessary.

This universe is not peaceful. Tom did not want to encounter enemies and then have no battleships available.

The scale of manufacturing for the newest type of battleships will be even larger than the fleet Tom currently possesses.

Even for large battleships like the Earth-class battleship, Tom planned to build 1,000 of them.

After that, 50,000 Venus-class battleships. And for the smallest Mercury-class battleship, 600,000\!

In addition, there would be over 5 million unmanned battleships, over 10,000 interstellar turrets, over 10 million various satellites, as well as interstellar missiles, space mines, and so on.

Just for the Mercury-class battleship alone, Tom would need 10 Aerospace Carriers to house them.

Including the Venus-class and Earth-class, as well as various unmanned combat equipment, and the materials and fuel needed to support these combat forces, the number of Aerospace Carriers required would be a full 100\!

Building 100 super-giant Aerospace Carriers specifically to transport battleships and combat supplies was unimaginable to the Bluetoth.

Momolans was extremely amazed by this, and even loyally advised Tom not to do so, claiming it would be too much of a waste of transport capacity.

Tom scoffed at this.

Have you forgotten how your Bluetoth Civilization was defeated back then? Wasn’t one of the important reasons the insufficient supply of materials during long-distance interstellar travel?

How could I make the same mistakes you made?

For this interstellar expedition, Tom planned to carry a total of 5 billion clones.

Of these, 4 billion clones would remain in long-term hibernation, while the remaining 1 billion clones would stay awake.

During the voyage, industrial production tasks would be fewer, so Tom planned to assign at least 800 million of these 1 billion clones entirely to scientific research with lower resource consumption.