Chapter 282: Huge Enhancement

Nearly a thousand years had passed since he had broken through to the Strong Core Civilization.

During that time, he had either been fleeing through space or at war with other civilizations. From beginning to end, Li Qingsong had never had a peaceful and stable environment in which to develop.

Now, with the trouble of the electromagnetic calamity completely resolved, Li Qingsong could finally develop with all his might, free from any other interference.

‘Peace is so precious. I can’t afford to waste a single moment…’

With a silent sigh, Li Qingsong directed all 3.5 billion Clones under his conscious link to throw themselves into research-related tasks.

Enormous transport ships once again appeared in space, shuttling back and forth between different planets. Unlike before, they no longer needed to be specially equipped with cumbersome anti-Laser defenses, nor did they need to frequently perform random evasive maneuvers.

On planet after planet, space elevators rose from the ground, connecting the circulatory “blood flow” between worlds like arteries. Of course, they no longer had to worry about defending against external attacks either, as there were no longer any outside threats within the Star System.

Factories, massive laboratories, sprawling energy plants, nuclear fusion power plants, chip foundries, cloning facilities, and more—all these gathered together like a colossal blanket, rapidly covering the desolate surfaces of the planets.

Within large-scale scientific installations, countless Clones worked in shifts, generating all kinds of technological data 24 hours a day, day and night.

In space, Li Qingsong’s fleet, piloted by tens of millions of Clones, engaged in live-fire, life-or-death combat drills. Warships constantly exploded, turning into wreckage.

Beyond the Manned Warships, a fleet numbering in the hundreds of millions—composed of Unmanned Warships, Cannon Platforms, satellites, Landmines, Missiles, and more—engaged in battles even more brutal than those on the manned front, all under the control of the Wukong AI.

Often, manned and unmanned combat would be combined. A single battlefield would contain the will of the Clones and the will of the Wukong AI, leading to increasingly diverse forms of combat.

Planetary assaults and defenses, planetary counter-offensives, combat within the strong magnetic fields of gas giants, deep-space encounters, battles for control of dwarf planets, engagements in near-Stellar environments, and more—Li Qingsong refused to overlook a single environment or combat method, pouring massive forces into live-fire drills for each one.

Under these conditions, not only were Li Qingsong’s combat experience, skills, and insights rapidly improving, but the Wukong AI’s were as well.

Its level of intelligence was also increasing at a swift pace.

The entire Lyra G16 Star System was a hive of activity, thundering with the roar of cannons, bustling and full of energy.

Under these conditions, after more than a decade of nonstop research, Li Qingsong finally achieved his first truly enormous technological breakthrough.

In the field of energy technology, Li Qingsong built upon his existing protium fusion and developed a new fusion model.

Protium plus Deuterium-Helium-3 combination fusion!

In one stage of protium fusion, helium-3 is produced. This helium-3 then fuses with other helium-3 to complete the fusion cycle.

But now, Li Qingsong actively intervened in this process. After protium fusion produced helium-3, instead of letting the helium-3 fuse with itself, he introduced deuterium gas, causing the helium-3 to fuse with deuterium.

This seemingly simple change in the process carried with it enormous technical difficulties.

The reason was simple: different elements have different requirements for their fusion environments. Li Qingsong had to develop a unified model that could simultaneously accommodate the fusion of different elements and organically combine them to increase energy efficiency, thereby raising the Q-value.

This placed extremely high demands on fields such as materials science, engineering, optics, and high-energy physics.

After extensive research, Li Qingsong finally conquered these technical challenges one by one, ultimately reaping the bountiful rewards.

The original mass-energy conversion efficiency of protium fusion was only about 0.7%. Now, Li Qingsong had directly increased the mass-energy conversion efficiency by about 40%, bringing it to approximately 1%!

A task that would have originally required 100 kg of fuel could now be accomplished with only 70 kg.

This not only meant that the fleet’s overall speed could be further increased during future Interstellar Travel, but also that the endurance of every ship, even within the Star System, was significantly extended.

The average time a Warship could operate in a space battlefield before needing to resupply was also greatly extended, not only reducing logistical pressure but also increasing combat effectiveness!

Your warship has to return to resupply after fighting for five hours, while my warship can fight for seven. It was obvious at a glance whose was more combat-effective.

Following the complete revolution in energy technology, Li Qingsong also made enormous strides in Super-distance Communication technology.

With the construction of numerous Quantum Supercomputing Bases, Li Qingsong’s research in mathematics advanced by leaps and bounds, and even highly abstract fields like quantum mathematics saw huge progress.

Coupled with technological improvements in quantum modulation equipment, Li Qingsong’s quantum analysis capabilities increased significantly.

Previously, the limit of quantum Super-distance Communication was about 1 billion kilometers. With relays, it could be extended to a maximum of 10 billion kilometers.

But now, the latest Long-range Communication Equipment Li Qingsong developed had a 60% longer single-hop range, reaching 1.6 billion kilometers. The relay noise-reduction technology had also improved significantly. He could now chain the signal 12 times, extending the maximum communication distance to 19.2 billion kilometers—nearly double the previous range!

This increase in communication range meant that Li Qingsong’s battlefield control had increased dramatically.

Previously, Li Qingsong could only exert real-time Super-distance Communication control over his Warships within a sphere with a radius of 10 billion kilometers, a total volume of 4.19 nonillion cubic kilometers.

Once a Warship left this area, Li Qingsong could no longer control it in real-time, causing its combat effectiveness to drop significantly.

But now, with the maximum communication distance reaching 19.2 billion kilometers, the corresponding controllable battlefield volume had increased to approximately 29.6 nonillion cubic kilometers—a full seven-fold increase!

At the same time, thanks to Li Qingsong’s tireless research day and night, he made huge progress not just in energy and communication, but in all other areas as well, including materials science, computing technology, High-speed Ion Propulsion, high-speed Energy Cannons, precision radar, ship hull construction, and industrial production.

In just a few decades, the total number of breakthroughs, large and small, numbered almost one hundred million!

In terms of industrial productivity, this meant that Li Qingsong’s overall industrial capacity increased by about 30% without any increase in the maximum number of conscious connections.

In terms of combat power, the average effectiveness of Warships of the same class that Li Qingsong manufactured increased by approximately 20%.

A 20% overall performance increase may not sound like much, but at this highly advanced stage of technology, where every tiny improvement was exceptionally difficult and required repeated research and refinement, it was practically a generational leap.

This level of improvement was enough to utterly crush the previous generation of technology.

But this was not the end of Li Qingsong’s technological development either.

At this very moment, Li Qingsong had an even more ambitious plan.

To develop a new generation of large Warships that were bigger, heavier, and more powerful than the Earth-class Warship—a class that could truly be considered a strategic asset.

The Mars-class Warship!