Rebirth of the Super Battleship
Chapter 235: Experimental Negative Matter Cannon

After concluding that the star was being obscured by something, Xiao Yu’s research hit a bottleneck.

Ten light-years was not a short distance. At such a distance, much information was lost simply due to the remoteness. Without close-range observation, it was no longer possible for Xiao Yu to acquire any more data. Left with no choice, he had to temporarily set aside the matter and instead focus entirely on digesting the current level of technology.

Thanks to the combined efforts of Xiao Yu and several thousand scientists, research on the antimatter engine was progressing by leaps and bounds. So far, Xiao Yu had already developed a large-scale antimatter engine capable of powering a County-Class spaceship. With this breakthrough, conditions were now in place to begin research on tachyons.

Manufacturing tachyons required a massive amount of energy and a sufficiently advanced level of antimatter technology. Xiao Yu was now capable of fulfilling both conditions.

Under Xiao Yu’s command, tens of thousands of ships participated in the construction of the first negative matter cannon.

Although he did not yet have the ability to construct a giant negative matter cannon like the ones at the Azure Market, with a barrel diameter of five kilometers, he could just barely manage to build a smaller version.

A negative matter cannon must include two components: a Faster-Than-Light detection module, and a tachyon launch module, essentially the attack module.

The Faster-Than-Light detection module was relatively simple. Since tachyons traveled at FTL speeds, faster even than the quickest FTL spacecraft, they could catch up to a vessel in curvature travel and be reflected back along the same route. By analyzing their various alterations, it would be possible to determine the target’s speed, mass, volume, and other data.

The more difficult part was the attack module. To support the immense energy requirements, the energy supply module within the attack module had to be constructed on a massive scale. Such an extensive energy supply module meant a large number of precision instruments, which in turn meant exponentially increasing construction complexity.

But these challenges were overcome by the team of scientists led by Xiao Yu. According to statistics, during the construction of the first negative matter cannon, Xiao Yu encountered over 40,000 technical problems. Just in laying the barrel alone, there were more than a thousand.

Out of these 40,000 technical problems, Xiao Yu personally solved over 20,000 on his own. The remaining 20,000 he assigned to scientists from over a hundred different races. Among them, scientists from the Luka Civilization solved more than 7,000. The scientists from the remaining races resolved an average of about 120 problems per race.

Every single technical solution was recorded by Xiao Yu, compared against his existing technological methods, and through this process, outdated techniques were continually eliminated and replaced with newer, more efficient ones.

The construction of this negative matter cannon was a driver for the advancement of Xiao Yu’s entire technological base.

“It seems my strategy of gathering scientists from other intelligent species across the universe wasn’t wrong. Without their help, if I had conducted all the research alone, it would have taken at least twice as long as it has now.”

Looking at the construction blueprints quietly resting in his mind, Xiao Yu was filled with emotion.

The construction data, blueprints, and related materials occupied a full 0.1% of all his storage devices, a data volume greater than the combined hard drives of the entire Earth era.

With the research phase complete, the actual construction work began. Xiao Yu was able to handle this step on his own without the assistance of the scientific group. Thus, he assigned them new tasks: to continue researching how to enhance the power of the negative matter cannon, reduce its energy consumption, and minimize its size. Meanwhile, he threw himself fully into the construction work.

After conducting a full survey of the binary star system, Xiao Yu decided not to construct the first negative matter cannon on a planet, but instead to build it in orbit around the brown dwarf.

According to Xiao Yu’s plans, the cannon would measure over ten kilometers in length, with a width of seven kilometers and a height of three kilometers. In stark contrast, the diameter of the cannon’s muzzle would be less than two hundred meters. Its power would be sufficient to shatter the Four-Dimensional Shield of a County-Class spaceship in a single shot.

Xiao Yu knew that even the Molian Civilization had only just begun exploring negative matter cannon technology; otherwise, they wouldn’t have limited themselves to constructing them on planetary surfaces without installing them on starships. However, Xiao Yu’s current level was still below even theirs, barely at the most basic stage.

Negative matter cannons were primarily designed to target spacecraft traveling at curvature flight speeds. If installed on a planetary surface or in stellar system orbits, the cannon would lose this primary function. That’s because, within a star system, due to gravitational interference from the star, ships generally would not engage curvature flight, it would be extremely dangerous.

Although tachyons traveled far faster than light, a negative matter cannon positioned within a stellar system still couldn’t directly attack ships outside the system. The reason was simple: although interstellar space was a vacuum, there would always be some amount of cosmic dust. Over distances of tens of billions of kilometers, even the sparsest interstellar dust accumulated into a significant quantity, and this would greatly diminish the effectiveness of the cannon.

Nevertheless, this step was unavoidable. Only after building a functional negative matter cannon could one begin to consider how to optimize it, miniaturize it, and eventually equip it on spacecraft for combat during FTL.

Furthermore, even if placed within a star system, a negative matter cannon remained an extremely powerful fixed defensive weapon. Xiao Yu hadn’t forgotten the Henan, a ship that had been attacked by a negative matter cannon and instantly vanished from the cosmos.

Under Xiao Yu’s command, tens of thousands of mining bases on the rocky planet operated at full power. Every moment, thousands of tons of minerals were being extracted. After initial processing on-site, they were transported to the forging workshops for further refinement, then moved to the casting and precision machining workshops. There, the materials were shaped into intricate components according to Xiao Yu’s design schematics. Robots then loaded the parts onto ships, which transported them to the construction site.

At a distance of thirty million kilometers from the brown dwarf, the orbital zone was pitch-black due to the brown dwarf’s lack of visible light and the remoteness of its companion star. But the arrival of one ship broke the silence.

It launched an artificial sun powered by an antimatter engine. After launch, the artificial sun quickly reached its designated location. Propelled by its onboard engines, it stabilized in position, and then activated its antimatter engine, unleashing a blinding radiance that illuminated several dozen kilometers of surrounding interstellar space.

That was just the first. Then came the second, the third…

Xiao Yu deployed dozens of artificial suns in total, and only after banishing all the darkness in the area did he stop launching them.

Bathed in artificial sunlight, a Village-Class starship arrived at the designated construction zone. Its hatch slowly opened, and several robots equipped with reaction engines flew out carrying a cube-shaped device. They placed it in orbit.

This was the first component of the negative matter cannon. Following the first came the second. More robots emerged from the Village-Class ship, carrying another irregularly shaped device. They connected the second component to the first and linked them with pre-prepared circuits.

Sensors installed inside the parts transmitted a signal confirming a successful connection. Upon receiving this signal, Xiao Yu proceeded with the installation of the third, fourth components…

Every part of the first negative matter cannon was manufactured at the ground base before being transported here. The base handled manufacturing, while Village and Town-Class ships were responsible for transport. Assembly took place exclusively at the orbital site.

Thanks to this division of labor, construction progressed rapidly. After just a single day, the device had reached nearly one hundred meters in length, using the first component as its core. That made it comparable in size to the largest human-made spacecraft in Earth’s history, the Russian Salyut space station.

As its volume increased, it could accommodate more robots at once. Now, over a thousand construction robots of various designs were working busily across its surface. Thousands of ships were delivering fuel and components, and at every moment, robots with flaming jets on their backs darted between the ships and the growing machine.

At least seventy percent of Xiao Yu’s entire industrial forging capacity had been committed to this project. That represented a force equivalent to several hundred human societies’ total manufacturing output, now entirely focused on accelerating the construction of this device.

Every step of its construction had been meticulously planned by Xiao Yu, and he had prepared solutions in advance for most foreseeable problems. Yet even with such comprehensive and precise preparations, countless issues still emerged during the actual process. But the seven thousand scientists who were utterly devoted to Xiao Yu were far from idle. Well-fed with generous material support, they threw themselves into the work every day with high spirits, eager to solve the problems Xiao Yu encountered.

Under the radiance of several hundred artificial suns, the size of the first negative matter cannon was rapidly increasing…