Chapter 177 Deep Space Fleet I_1

In the Crisis Era, year 168, the great era of military shipbuilding arrived.

A large number of warships with full loads of 4 to 5 million tons were constructed during the standoff between Earth and the Moon.

These warships were not only for military operations but also to enable industrial colonization.

Many industrial resources and facilities were included within the warships, and each vessel, while possessing sufficient combat capabilities, could also independently establish an interstellar colony.

However, such warships were not the best configuration for military performance. The reason for not separating warships into military and industrial categories, with the best performance military warships escorting industrial mother ships, was not due to unwillingness.

But rather, it was because integrating military and industrial uses into giant warships was the most sensible approach.

First, during the Earth-Moon standoff, pure industrial mother ships were too slow and vulnerable to survival, and were easily targeted by the enemy. If the speed of these mother ships was greatly increased, other performances would have to be enhanced, which would essentially make them no different from a military warship without its main guns.

Second, as offense is far greater than defense, the method of using military warships for escort was not feasible. Instead, military warships could be dragged down by the industrial mother ships, leading to instant annihilation upon detection.

Third, in the near-frictionless expanse of space, increasing the size of military warships and equipping them with industrial mother ship facilities did not significantly increase power requirements. Instead, it was the most cost-saving measure.

The navy had a similar design philosophy, where doubling the length of a warship required very little additional power. This concept held true in space as well.

But now, with the stand off between Earth and the Moon over, and in facing the Trisolaran civilization, such warships were no longer suitable.

New types of space warships with optimum performance needed to be built, and they were known as Star-level Warships.

Star-level Warships represented the pinnacle of human design to date. If there were no major breakthroughs in existing human theories, it was unlikely that there would be any significant improvements in Star-level Warships over the next 50 years.

Depending on their weapon configuration, these warships ranged from 50 to 100 million tons (in the original, human warships were below 500,000 tons).

The maximum speed of the warships was 17% of the speed of light. It wasn't that they couldn't go faster, but increasing speed further didn't make much sense and was a losing proposition in terms of both the warships' survivability and resource consumption.

Under normal cruising conditions, warships would not exceed 0.5% of the speed of light, a speed already at the limit within the Solar System.

Regarding their main guns' firepower, there had been no major breakthroughs compared to the original warships—the effective range of attack remained within 25 astronomical units, which was also the limit of modern material applications.

While 25 astronomical units might seem far, this distance wouldn't even reach from Jupiter's orbit to Neptune's orbit.

The most challenging part in space was to search for other warships, as they were generally designed to be invisible to both radar and visible light. The only potential exposure was the infrared radiation emitted when a warship was powered up.

Searches were typically limited to arcminute angles (where a degree is further divided into minutes and seconds based on a sexagesimal system), with an intelligent system analyzing any discrepancies with the cosmic background. If a discrepancy was found, a second-level scan was initiated.

If the entire sky was divided into arcminute segments, this would create about 16 million regions (calculated by the surface area of a sphere, not divided like the number of regions by longitude and latitude). Scanning 6 arcminute regions per second, without considering the time for second-level scanning, would take a month just to scan the entire sky once.

The key was that the enemy was fast-moving; during scanning, it was very easy to miss them, hence the commander's judgment was crucial for detection. Such vigilant observation had to be sustained continuously; any negligence could lead to a preemptive strike by the enemy.

Many auxiliary cannons were added to the warships, primarily to counter the Trisolarans' Whirlwind Stomp.

This era's vigilance towards war was exceptionally sharp; with the size of the Whirlwind Stomp, humans had made innumerable speculations.

The more speculation there was, the more people felt that it was an entity beyond the comprehension of existing human theories. The unknown was ever more terrifying.

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Given its size, close-quarter combat is very likely, and the battleship's secondary guns are the last line of defense.

Star-level warships have relatively few industrial resources and are mainly used for the maintenance of the warships themselves. It is almost impossible to use them for interstellar travel; accomplishing that would be a miracle within a miracle.

In the original work, had it not been for the hijacking of the latest, most advanced, and resource-rich Universal Gravity, the Blue Space might not have been able to reach its destination.

The existing space docks on the Earth-Moon system total over a hundred, each with an astonishing ability to build, capable of constructing multiple space battleships simultaneously within a single dock.

In the near future, space battleships will undoubtedly emerge continuously from the docks like dumplings being dropped into boiling water, forming a steel torrent, which is also the most important force in dealing with the Trisolaran crisis.

At that time, a key issue needed addressing: the Solar System's expansion and colonization had almost been completed, and a large number of militarized warships integrated with industrial capabilities were built during the Earth-Moon confrontation period.

There are over 700 such warships in the Earth-Moon system, all facing the prospect of gradual retirement or dismantling for recasting, which is an unfortunate event.

Crisis Era, year 180.

At this time, Feng Zi met with Ye Chen, who proposed a new way to deal with the gradually retiring warships; Lin Sen's battle escape plan from a century and a half ago re-emerged before humanity.

After understanding the plan, Ye Chen gained newfound respect for Lin Sen but also understood the cost of the plan; not the warships, but the people on board the fleet.

Ye Chen had also questioned Feng Zi about the significance of the plan; Lin Sen's original reasoning could not completely convince Ye Chen.

Feng Zi's answer was, "The Trisolarans are afraid of our escape, which is exceedingly clear. If executing this plan right now is also the most economical, why not do it?"

Before leaving, Feng Zi also mentioned, "Trust your own intuition."

With Ye Chen's shrewdness, he naturally knew it wouldn't be so simple. This was typical Trisolaran thinking; Trisolarans don't need to care too much about people, but humans do.

Furthermore, the point that fear of escape was exceedingly clear was not a syntactical error; surely something was hidden within that fear; it was precisely this hidden reason that Feng Zi was so keen on pushing the plan.

In this era, through Mind Tactility, many Trisolaran thought patterns were understood; during the early crisis, their behaviors completely matched the Trisolaran thinking models researched by humans.

Unless it concerned the survival of their civilization, Trisolarans would not do anything superfluous. The habitually focused Trisolarans also would not dare to reinitiate contact with humans for such reasons.

At the same time, the Trisolarans did something significant—they assassinated Logic.

This evening, Ye Chen kept his eyes closed, feigning sleep, and thought about many things.

Rising from the dark Underground City, half a century of Earth-Moon deterrence had honed his mental resilience to be as firm as rock; any anomaly must be thoroughly considered.

With Ye Chen's wisdom, after negating countless hypotheses, whatever was left, however unimaginable, must be the truth of the matter.

Nobody knew that on this evening, another Wallfacer's Assistant was born, even the Trisolarans were unaware.

In fact, it wasn't far-fetched at all; the Dark Forest theory is not some profound mystery that is hard to understand; instead, it is quite simple. Humanity has many similar theories, only they can't be verified, which is why they are considered hypotheses.

The basis of the original work lay in Ye Wenjie's dying wish and the assassination attempt on Logic, which led Logic to be sure of the correctness of the Dark Forest's premises; its deductive process was instead not important.

Now, Ye Chen, combining the behavior of the Trisolarans and the many plans of Logic, Lin Sen, and even Feng Zi, who had contemplated this rule, was proving all of this on many levels.

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