Chapter 29: The Final Design
Outside the base, the brutal battle raged on without end.
Large quantities of armor sets were produced, only to be taken by a ceaseless stream of Clones emerging from the dormitory buildings. Ultimately, the armor was destroyed and discarded, littering the base’s perimeter and the railway lines.
Clone after Clone died, but the next ones to march onto the battlefield remained just as fearless, forging ahead relentlessly.
About twenty days had now passed since the first battle broke out at Copper Mine No. 1.
In that short span of twenty days, three of the nine dormitory buildings—each capable of housing 15,000 people—had been completely emptied.
This meant that in such a brief period, nearly fifty thousand Clones had died on the battlefield.
They had not died in vain.
Thanks to their sacrifices, not a single one of the ten resource bases and one main base had fallen. Not only that, but all eleven bases were still operating at full capacity.
Every moment, vast amounts of minerals and resources were sent from the resource bases to the main base, while vast amounts of supplies, equipment, and personnel were sent from the main base to the resource bases.
It was under these circumstances that the 100 firearm research teams finally made a breakthrough.
Right now, the first finished firearm was in the hands of a Clone, aimed at a target about a hundred meters away.
He pulled the trigger. BANG! A bullet shot forward at several hundred meters per second, reaching the target’s vicinity in the next instant.
But it missed. A complete miss.
A clear dent was left on the wall near the target.
’At this stage, accuracy isn’t important. What matters is firepower and rate of fire. Missed the target? No problem.’
Li Qingsong had no intention of playing sniper with the strange birds.
What were his strengths? Industrial power! The ability to coordinate on a massive scale!
That being the case, he should produce tens or hundreds of thousands of guns and hundreds of millions or billions of bullets as quickly as possible, then unleash them all like a torrential downpour.
Who cared about poor accuracy? When you fired a volley of several hundred thousand rounds at once, was precision really that important?
However, the gun they currently had was not yet up to the task.
The firearm’s design somewhat resembled the pistols Li Qingsong had seen in movies and TV shows from the Human World. Its body was only a dozen or so centimeters long, with a chamber, a grip, and a trigger in the middle.
After so long, the thousand-plus Clones conducting the research finally discovered that there was a good reason why the Human World had chosen this design for its handguns.
It was simply the most logical structure.
This was true in terms of human hand anatomy, ease of grip, rate of fire, magazine capacity, and firepower.
However, the internal structure of the pistol Li Qingsong had created was likely different from those made in the Human World.
It didn’t use a hammer-firing mechanism like a modern pistol. It was, in fact, a flintlock.
A piece of flint was installed inside. Pulling the trigger caused the flint to be struck, creating a spark that ignited the bullet’s primer and fired the round.
Its magazine capacity was ten rounds, and each pull of the trigger could only fire a single shot. It was incapable of continuous fire.
’My current industrial capacity is limited. I can’t waste precious production on this type of firearm. No, it has to be improved! Using flint to spark the primer is too inefficient, and it can’t fire continuously. The rate of fire is too slow. How can I improve it? I vaguely recall hearing about things like hammers and firing pin ignition, but what the hell *are* hammers and firing pins? What’s their structure? How are they used?’
It wasn’t just the ignition that needed improvement; the bullets also required further optimization.
The current bullets were too weak. They likely couldn’t inflict enough damage on the strange birds’ tough bodies. He had to find a way to make them stronger.
The continuous-fire capability also had to be improved.
What good was a gun that could only fire one bullet every few seconds?
The magazine capacity needed an upgrade, too. He wasn’t asking for a belt-fed machine gun like the ones in movies that could fire dozens of rounds a second. He would be satisfied with ten rounds a second. If not ten, then five. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?
Controlling the minds of over a thousand researcher Clones, Li Qingsong wracked his brain. As he thought, he began experimenting with all sorts of optimizations and alternative designs based on the current flintlock pistol.
It might have seemed like only a thousand-odd minds were working on the problem, but their thoughts were supported by all the knowledge Li Qingsong had accumulated and researched over the past few decades—knowledge gained from building an entire industrial system from scratch, constructing one steel mill, chemical plant, foundry, and power plant after another, and erecting farming bases, dormitory buildings, and massive factories.
Even the most ordinary Clone, one responsible only for twisting rebar, would eventually figure out little tricks for the job over the course of his long work, gaining his own understanding of the material.
And that understanding would, in turn, become part of Li Qingsong’s own knowledge reserves.
The combined knowledge reserves of all the Clones formed a vast, all-encompassing knowledge base.
The thoughts of these thousand-plus Clones were now drawing upon this very knowledge base.
Under these conditions, the firearms Li Qingsong created grew longer, their magazines larger, and their bullets rounder, more and more closely resembling the bullets he had once seen in movies and TV shows.
Of course, before he would have seen them and forgotten, but now, Li Qingsong completely and thoroughly understood why bullets had that shape and what characteristics that shape provided.
And so, after another two of the nine dormitory buildings had been emptied—bringing the total number of Clones killed on the battlefield to around seventy thousand—the first firearm that met Li Qingsong’s requirements for a high rate of fire, large magazine capacity, and automatic continuous fire was finally created in the laboratory.
It had a massive magazine, twenty centimeters long, with a mass of about three kilograms and a capacity of eighty rounds.
Including the magazine, the firearm’s total mass was around ten kilograms.
With three spare magazines, the total mass reached nineteen kilograms.
On Earth, a gun this heavy would have been completely impractical for combat. But this wasn’t Earth. This was Ceres, where the gravity was only eight percent of Earth’s!
A mass of nineteen kilograms had a weight of only 1.5 kilograms here!
Now, a Clone carried this enormous firearm to the firing range.
He pulled the trigger. BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! The muzzle immediately spat out bullets at a rate of four rounds per second, emptying the entire magazine in just over twenty seconds.
He casually dropped the magazine, slapped in a new one, pulled the trigger again, and fired another eighty rounds.
’This is the one!’
Li Qingsong made his decision instantly: ’Begin mass production immediately!’