Rebirth of the Super Battleship
Chapter 236: Forum

To be precise, the negative matter cannon Xiao Yu was building did not yet have any real combat value. Its power was too weak, its range too short, and in terms of overall performance, it was still inferior to high-powered elemental decay grenades or material disintegration beams.

However, this step was nonetheless essential. To use an analogy, this negative matter cannon was akin to the gunpowder rifles used by human armies before World War I. It was precisely because of the foundation laid by those primitive firearms that humanity advanced further and further down the path of hot weapons, eventually developing all manner of high-powered arms.

Three months after the construction mission began, the cannon had grown to five hundred meters in length and three hundred meters in width. Its interior was filled with a labyrinth of intersecting passageways and circuits, with piles of instruments cluttered together in organized chaos.

As the chief designer and chief engineer of this entire construction project, no matter how complex the internal structure of the negative matter cannon became, Xiao Yu had a precise understanding of every tiny detail within it.

“Energy transmission pipeline number three has an issue… After the detection module is activated, the monitoring module draws so much power that it causes excessive heating in pipeline number three. If this error isn’t corrected, it could even burn out the internal instruments.” During the process of calibrating the core instruments, Xiao Yu detected this problem through the omnipresent sensor systems.

He had long since lost count of how many issues had arisen since the start of construction. In truth, every moment of the building process revealed new problems.

“Right now, I’m already dealing with tasks like resolving the stress issues in the attack module’s pipelines, precision in angular calibration, optimization of the antimatter engine, thousands of problems in total. I really don’t have any more bandwidth.” With a helpless sigh, Xiao Yu made a decision. “Assign this issue to the scientists of Species Number Eight. They seem to have a peculiar talent for this kind of problem.”

For the sake of convenience, Xiao Yu had numbered all the species under his command. The Luka Civilization was, without question, designated as Species Number One. This number not only represented their strength, but also their position in Xiao Yu’s mind.

“Species Number Eight, new task assignment. Deadline: two months. Your objective is to resolve the excessive heating issue caused by overload in the energy transmission pipeline. Detailed specifications are as follows… If the problem is not solved within the deadline, a comprehensive report must be submitted.”

Xiao Yu transmitted this message to the zone on the planetary base where Species Number Eight was located.

“Understood, Master. Please rest assured, we will definitely solve the problem within the allotted time and will not hinder the overall construction timeline.”

Moments later, Xiao Yu received a response from Species Number Eight.

This type of situation had occurred many times over the past few months. Xiao Yu had to accept a universal truth: no matter how thoroughly one prepared in advance, there would always be unforeseen issues during the actual forging process.

“A tip for you: during your research, you can get in touch with Species Thirty-Seven, Fifty-Two, Forty-Nine… hmm, and also Species Eighty-One. Their current projects are somewhat related to this one,” Xiao Yu instructed. “Also, when you encounter problems, make sure to check the internal forum. When everyone pools their wisdom, solutions can always be found. Keep your focus on solving problems, don’t let some laughable sense of pride delay the research process.”

The leader of Species Number Eight responded respectfully, “We will follow your orders, Master. Please be at ease.”

During this period, in order to further enhance the efficiency of scientists from various races and better integrate their resources, Xiao Yu allocated a portion of his computational power to develop a forum accessible to all scientists. Scientists from every race could use their native scripts, languages, or video formats to communicate with others on the platform. Xiao Yu hoped that this method would help elevate their collective level of knowledge.

Beneath the internal forum, there was also an external forum open to all naturally born intelligent beings. On the external forum, Xiao Yu would periodically assign scientists to carry out science popularization campaigns, striving to foster scientific interest among the general population. His goal was to cultivate more future scientists. As for the various biologically engineered races whose intelligence was inherently flawed, Xiao Yu paid them no attention at all. To him, they were mere tools, cheap ones at that.

Even if such beings were killed by members of their own parent civilizations, Xiao Yu wouldn’t intervene. All related laws and regulations were to be determined by those civilizations themselves. However, if a naturally born intelligent lifeform was killed without reason, Xiao Yu would step in. After all, even if that individual had no potential to become a scientist, who could say whether their descendants might?

To Xiao Yu, every naturally born intelligent lifeform with a complete genome was a valuable asset.

Species Number Eight resembled the angels of human mythology, except their skin tone and texture were far from appealing. In fact, it seemed that their race considered this pitch-black and severely flawed skin to be a mark of beauty. This phenomenon once again confirmed for Xiao Yu that differing living environments gave rise to differing standards of aesthetics. Perhaps, in their eyes, even Chen Mo and that now-deceased Earth girl, both of whom Xiao Yu had found quite attractive, might be considered hideous.

After assigning that issue to them, Xiao Yu returned to his other work. But to say Xiao Yu was multitasking would be a massive understatement. “One-track mind,” “ten-track mind,” “million-track mind”, none of those phrases came close to capturing what he was doing.

The number of active robots across the surface base, space station, and onboard various starships had already exceeded ten billion. That didn’t even include the countless detection instruments constantly in operation. Beyond that, thousands of technical problems were currently being processed in Xiao Yu’s mind, with solutions being actively calculated.

Even under these conditions, Xiao Yu allocated a sliver of processing power to quietly lurk in the scientific forum, observing the interactions between thousands of scientists and tens of thousands of ordinary intelligent beings.

“Help! In the stellar evolution theory, how do you calculate the post-supernova mass based on pre-explosion mass?”

“What grade are you in? That question is covered in detail in the science textbook for second-year middle school students, compiled by the Master himself. Go home and read it again. If you still don’t get it, ask your teacher. It’s an important topic. I ran into a variation of that exact problem in the entrance exam for high school.”

“I’m only asking here because I couldn’t understand the textbook! My teacher’s kind of scary, so I didn’t dare ask…”

“Ahem, the problem should’ve already provided data like stellar mass, density, and heavy element abundance, right? Here’s how the full deduction goes… There, got it? Don’t thank me, just a helpful being from Species Number Eighty-Three passing through.”

“Have you even entered university yet? There’s a mistake in your deduction process. Not entirely your fault, though this part isn’t covered until college-level physics. Let me give you a bit of science outreach: when doing this kind of derivation, you also need to account for changes in the four fundamental forces. Their collapse process proceeds just a bit faster than expected. Uh, the details… you’ll learn in college. Too bad we’re all from different civilizations and can’t meet in person. Otherwise, I’d love to hang out with you all.”

“This forum has a pretty good vibe.” Seeing these posts, Xiao Yu nodded in satisfaction.

After briefly browsing the external forum, Xiao Yu entered the internal forum.

The discussions in the internal forum were much more serious. Here, academic terminology, equations, and diagrams were everywhere. Most of the topics discussed by the scientists were ones even Xiao Yu didn’t know the answers to.

Xiao Yu’s knowledge base wasn’t superior to that of these scientists. What set him apart was his enormous memory capacity, swift thinking, and his exceptional research and learning abilities.

He casually opened a thread, left some insights of his own, and raised several deeper questions. Instantly, the thread exploded in popularity. At least several hundred scientists, either on break or currently unassigned, flocked to it and began an intense discussion.

“Even Level 2 Civilizations know about the No-Hair Theorem of black holes: once matter forms a black hole, it loses all properties except charge, mass, and angular momentum. Clearly, there’s no difference between black holes formed from antimatter and those from regular matter.”

“I disagree. What happens when an antimatter black hole meets a matter black hole? According to the theory above, if there’s no difference, they should merge. But if they do, wouldn’t that imply black holes can convert antimatter into matter? That can’t be right…”

Since antimatter also has mass, it can of course form black holes. But whether antimatter black holes are truly the same as matter black holes, and what happens when they encounter each other, even Xiao Yu didn’t know.

“Since antimatter has the opposite charge and spin compared to regular matter, maybe antimatter black holes carry different charge characteristics. What would happen when the two types meet? I don’t know either. But when our technology advances far enough, I’ll conduct relevant experiments to give you all an answer. Hmm… this is a great discussion atmosphere, let’s keep it up.”

After this lively debate, Xiao Yu summarized the thread, then withdrew the small portion of computational power he had allocated to it and redirected it to other tasks.