Chapter 119: Nasa’s Good News
“Commander Liu, this is the super high speed space patrol spaceship I designed for the military headquarters, 30 meters in length, ship hull 10 meters wide and 5 meters high, equipped with two nuclear fusion engines. I’ve temporarily named it Young Dragon class.”
Fan Ren was very fond of the appearance of this spaceship he had personally designed, and continued, “Let’s compare it using the 200 million kilometer distance between Earth and Mars. With Young Dragon class speed, the outbound trip takes only 30 hours, and the return trip just 35 hours.”
The design purpose is to achieve high-speed patrols in our Earth’s outer space, as well as on the route to and from the Moon, and even on other future routes.
Its two nuclear fusion engines, when fully fueled, can operate at full speed for 5 years.
Fan Ren stopped here. This was just a concept diagram he had produced relying on the supercomputer; he didn’t understand weapon systems. So he had no confidence whether it would ultimately be adopted.
At this moment, he turned his head to look at Liu Shengzhan and immediately noticed that this military commander had eagerness in his eyes, flowing out as if tangible.
“Good, good, good. What about the weapons? The systems? Old Qin, come take a quick look at what weapons can be equipped on this. Oh, Fan Ren, quickly pull up the three-dimensional diagram of the hull.”
The Old Qin he mentioned was precisely the designer who had always been in charge of Great Xia fighter jet designs, and at this moment, he couldn’t help but look at Fan Ren with anticipation in his eyes.
The two engines only occupied the tail section of this warship’s body, about 1/5 of the size and volume, so the remaining large ship hull would certainly have great utility.
Hearing this, Fan Ren didn’t hesitate and immediately brought up the internal design diagram of the spaceship.
In his conception, the middle of the ship hull needed to leave space for a three-person combat team to rotate shifts for rest.
This area plus the cockpit would take up about another 2/5 of the space, leaving the remaining small half for other uses.
“That’s enough. According to this standard, we could fit nearly a hundred air-to-air missiles inside.”
Old Qin understood the design diagram at a glance and immediately laughed out loud.
“Precisely because it has two nuclear fusion engines to provide power, once this spaceship is built, it will have the capability to fly within Earth’s atmosphere. However, it still lacks a subsystem designed specifically for ground landing.”
Fan Ren said with a hint of regret. After all, the spaceship designed with tri-titanium alloy for the ship hull had very high overall mass, and designing a landing system would necessarily occupy a lot of space.
Whether vertical landing or runway skid landing, the former requires gyroscopes to stabilize the landing posture, while the latter requires skid wheels.
Both were extremely uneconomical.
Moreover, after the current Space Hub, it would continue to expand, and by then it could fully add as many spaceship docking ports as possible.
With this spaceship’s speed, it could reach the airspace above any region on Earth within ten minutes.
After having the space elevator, there was absolutely no need to additionally design spaceships capable of landing on Earth.
This meeting lasted an extremely long time. After completing the design discussion for the Young Dragon class weapon system, the group relied on the Xinghai Supercomputer to design a transport ship with passenger carrying functionality.
At Fan Ren’s suggestion, the Ministry of Industry’s cargo transportation ships were named ‘Giant Elephant series’, and the passenger carrying transport ships ‘Gale series’.
The former had been designed long ago, while the latter was completed temporarily in this meeting.
After the several-day design meeting ended, Li Jiandong brought the design diagrams and a group of designers to stay at Xinghai Aerospace Base.
This place was very close to Great Xia Aerospace City, not far from the space elevator, and equipped with all of Xinghai’s high-tech industrial equipment.
Not long ago, the Giant Elephant series transport ship assembled in segments at the Space Hub had its segment manufacturing work completed at this base.
Next, over the next few months, they would complete the segmented construction work for one Young Dragon and one Gale.
After that, they would be transported by ground transportation directly to the space elevator, then sent to the Space Hub for assembly work.
Several months later.
United States, Nasa Aerospace Base.
Roy sat in the command hall, his expression serious as he commanded the various operators to methodically carry out the final preparations for the rocket launch.
Regarding the space rules statement previously issued by Great Xia, he treated it as a fart.
Although Great Xia had this time pushed its aircraft carrier group 2000 nautical miles east of the Eastern Great sea in one go, no matter what, the United States troops stationed in South Island Country were still steadily guarding 500 kilometers east of Great Xia.
In his eyes, Great Xia was still the same as in his past memories—when pushed, it would just bluster a couple times and wouldn’t really take any tough actions.
And now, hundreds of warships from the White Alliance were conducting military exercises majestically around that sea area.
Great Xia hadn’t made any moves either.
However, he habitually ignored that before this, the United States carrier activity range had been in seas near Great Xia, not now only able to bluster on the ocean.
On the base display screen, all preparations were complete, and the Hunter Nine Rocket had entered launch state.
Roy looked at the hull parameters one by one, nodding inwardly.
Although Mark had thrown the entire rocket project department to Nasa, he hadn’t sabotaged it; the rocket’s state was very good.
“10, 9, ignition!”
He issued the serious command.
The Hunter Nine Rocket immediately began to detach from the support frame, erupting flames from the tail, and slowly rose into the air.
“Damn Great Xia. If we could use the space elevator, where would we need all this trouble? Otherwise, the new space station would probably have been put into operation by now.”
Roy cursed inwardly; he was truly exasperated with no way out.
The current space station had to be transported into space by Hunter Nine, and then astronauts would have to do spacewalks to connect subsystems—very troublesome.
Unlike Great Xia now, where all engineering segment assembly work was completed at the Space Hub, after which it could directly be ‘dropped’ into the predetermined orbit in complete form to operate.
While they at Nasa, for this new space station, would still need to continuously launch the Hunter Nine Rocket dozens of times to transport other segments.
On the screen, the rocket had disappeared from the camera lens.
Roy tossed down the microphone; the remaining command work could be handled by his subordinates. Now he needed to go report this good news to Wells.
Great Xia Space Hub Command Headquarters.
This was a huge building just completed, located on the outermost top of the hub.
Due to the particularly important status of the Space Force, the chief commander here was currently concurrently held by Liu Shengzhan.
For a long time to come, the command headquarters would temporarily handle communication command for all ships in space, as well as route management.
A small portion of the Space Force team members under the military headquarters had already stationed at the Space Hub base, awaiting orders at any time.
These Space Force members were all selected from previous military headquarters astronauts, currently numbering around 200.
At the present stage, a large part of them would be responsible for piloting and transporting various types of ships in space.
Another small portion had been converted to a 24-hour combat force, responsible for temporary missions.
For example, at this moment, a Young Dragon class spaceship that had just completed construction and assembly was docked at the port, with three team members waiting solemnly aboard for possible orders at any time.
Not only Liu Shengzhan, but all personnel including the Space Force were extremely enthusiastic about the tasks they were now undertaking.
This was an unprecedented experience.
