Chapter 76: True Grand Planetary Development
When developing a planet, construction tasks should be prioritized. The most crucial facilities and factories, like power plants and steel mills, ought to be built first. Only after securing an initial supply of energy and materials locally should one move on to slowly building the less important factories.
However...
Li Qingsong recalled the hardship of his early days on Ceres. Back then, he had struggled to survive with only a handful of Clones, scrambling and scraping to build his industrial base one piece at a time. Now, he gave a grand wave of his hand, brimming with ambition.
’Priorities? Who needs them? Why build everything up bit by bit? We’ll just build every factory we could possibly need, all at once!’
’When I only had one ship, I had no choice but to build things piece by piece.’
’But now I have over a thousand ships. Am I still supposed to build bit by bit? If so, then I built all these ships for nothing!’
In an instant, thousands of small landing craft detached from the fleet, dispersed in all directions, and touched down across the surface of Enemy God Star.
During the preliminary phase, Li Qingsong had already thoroughly surveyed Enemy God Star’s resource reserves. He had even completed the site selection and design for the industrial base clusters long ago. Now, there was no need to consider any other factors. All he had to do was build.
After the initial materials were transported down to the surface, vast numbers of Clones began to descend in waves. With that, construction began on a staggering 500 factories simultaneously.
It wasn’t just factories being built simultaneously. Li Qingsong also directed large numbers of Clones to operate various machines, immediately beginning to lay railway tracks and construct spaceport landing fields across the surface of Enemy God Star.
All 3.3 million Clones were thrown into the construction effort.
The first structure to be completed was a massive power plant.
This plant housed 50 large-scale generators, each with an installed capacity of 500,000 kilowatts. At full power, it could generate 25 million kilowatt-hours of electricity in a single hour.
In the past, even if a power plant like this had been completed, it couldn’t have been operated. It would have had to sit idle.
After all, generating 25 million kilowatt-hours of electricity requires a significant amount of fuel, and the fuel supply itself depended on its own dedicated infrastructure.
But things were different now.
The very moment the power plant was finished, a methane mine at a methane-rich deposit and an Oxygen Ore mine at an oxygen-rich deposit were also completed.
The railway connecting the three locations was also completed at the exact same time.
Trains immediately began thundering down the tracks, transporting huge quantities of methane and oxygen to the combustion chambers of the generator units, where thermal energy was converted into electrical power.
A torrent of electricity surged through a comprehensive power grid, reaching every single location where Clones were present. The temporary power generation facilities used in the initial phase could finally be decommissioned.
With an abundant supply of electricity, the pace of all other construction projects accelerated.
The next facility to be completed was a gigantic steel mill.
Thanks to Li Qingsong’s deliberate coordination, the moment the steel mill was finished, its supporting iron mines, transport lines, chemical supply plants, and fuel and power supply factories were all completed in perfect sync.
From then on, construction on Enemy God Star no longer needed to rely on steel imported from Ceres; it could now be produced locally.
With a plentiful supply of steel, the construction of other facilities accelerated once more.
A series of mining bases and smelting plants for copper, aluminum, lead, and more—as well as subsequent large-scale foundries and precision component factories—sprang up like mushrooms after a spring rain.
With ample metal production and forging capabilities, a massive cultivation base was rapidly constructed. It covered an area of five square kilometers, stood 500 meters tall, and was divided into 230 floors.
By using double-layered planting racks, the usable area on a single floor of this cultivation base reached approximately 2,300 acres. Across 230 floors, that totaled a staggering 530,000 acres!
Inside the enormous cultivation base, countless planting racks spread out like a steel jungle. Grow lights shone down in unison, and innumerable pipes were laid out in layers. Under the control of a specialized agricultural AI, the entire operation only required a little over ten thousand Clones to function.
If used for growing wheat, this single cultivation base could produce about 2.5 million tons per quarter, for an annual total of ten million tons!
Just one such facility could satisfy the flour demand of every Clone on Enemy God Star.
Following that, livestock bases were also constructed, where countless pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens, ducks, and geese began to be raised.
「Three years passed in the blink of an eye.」
In that time, Enemy God Star had undergone a world-shaking transformation.
Its original desolation and silence were long gone. Now, railway tracks stretched to every corner of Enemy God Star, and its surface was dotted with factories and bases like stars in the sky.
In just three years, thanks to Li Qingsong’s all-out effort, all of the foundational industrial bases had been completed.
But this was not the end.
Li Qingsong still had to build even more advanced industrial factories!
A massive cloning facility and its associated structures quickly rose from the surface of Enemy God Star.
From this moment on, Li Qingsong could produce Clones locally on the planet.
After that, a massive chip fabrication plant was completed.
From then on, not only could Enemy God Star produce its own chips, but it could even begin to "export" them to Ceres.
With the chip fabrication plant finished, Li Qingsong immediately began construction on the next crucial facility.
A Supercomputing Base! And not just one—over one hundred of them!
Using state-of-the-art 45-nanometer process chips, one Supercomputing Base after another rose from the ground. The smallest of these supercomputers used over 60,000 of these advanced chips.
The largest Supercomputing Base used more than 120,000 chips!
The Supercomputing Bases were distributed throughout the various industrial zones, each beginning operations powered by its own dedicated, adjacent power plant.
Li Qingsong then installed AIs into these supercomputers. These AIs had already completed their training on Ceres and possessed considerable functionality. They would be responsible for carrying out the real-time management of every single factory.
Agricultural AI, Steel AI, Cloning Factory AI, Power Grid AI, Power Plant AI, Aluminum Mine AI...
And so on and so forth.
And then there was the most important one of all.
The Jade Emperor AI!
The largest Supercomputing Base was the new home of the Jade Emperor AI. From there, it would coordinate and control the operations of all the other sector-specific AIs.
After five full years, Li Qingsong had completed the construction of all basic and advanced industrial facilities.
The number of factories and bases on Enemy God Star had exploded into the tens of thousands, all of them churning out vast quantities of resources every second of every day.
Although these resources were relatively basic, the variety was immense. The list included methane, oxygen, rare earth minerals, cast parts, chips, paint, lubricants, and much more, totaling several hundred thousand different items. Every single one was indispensable to Li Qingsong’s technological development, and they were precisely the types of resources that were gradually being depleted on Ceres.
The construction phase was now complete, but Li Qingsong could not leave just yet.
There was one final, and most crucial, construction task left unfinished.
A large-scale electromagnetic catapult!