I can upgrade the shelter-Chapter 822 - 720: Spaceship

After the upgrade, the research center has changed significantly in appearance compared to before. The original dome, which only covered the main building and Chen Xin’s private shelter entrance, has been enlarged to form a large dome slightly smaller than a Dome City, encompassing the ecological greenhouse, geothermal Energy Tower, and other auxiliary facilities around the entire research center.

Moreover, the original weapon testing grounds have also been upgraded, with a larger area and more complete and advanced facilities.

Chen Xin also added two sets of 3D printing equipment to the research center, which, when raw materials are available, can produce all of Flame Country’s current active equipment except for the land-based aircraft carrier and Mobile Base, including small Land Ships.

For this purpose, Chen Xin specifically opened another dock beside the main structure of the research center to park a small Land Ship that was produced.

This small Land Ship is naturally an experimental product created by Chen Xin to answer the aerospace department’s query.

However, the size of this Land Ship is quite small, and to be precise, it can only be considered a micro Land Ship because it is only half the size of a Guardian Land Ship, roughly the size of the mining Land Ships rented to miners by the state, or even smaller.

Given the small size of this Land Ship, it naturally accommodates far fewer people. After Chen Xin’s repeated streamlining, the load capacity of this Land Ship is 12-15 people.

The ship only has ten narrow cabins. Compared to past spacecraft where astronauts could barely turn around, these cabins are relatively spacious, with two bunk beds and a table, the size of a normal room.

Although there are ten cabins, under normal circumstances, two cabins will be used to store supplies, extending the operational time of this Land Ship.

The entire ship is powered by nuclear power, and instead of a Nuclear Battery, it uses a micro nuclear reactor like those used on nuclear-powered trains.

This undoubtedly provides significant power for this specially-made small Land Ship, enabling it to use plasma thrusters to propel itself out of the atmosphere and into space.

The use of plasma thrusters is mainly because the core component for the Land Ship’s levitation is an anti-gravity generator. This device can counteract the effects of gravity on the Land Ship but can only negate gravity and does not provide additional lift.

At heights still affected by gravity, the anti-gravity generator can effectively cancel out gravity’s influence, allowing the Land Ship to adjust its flight altitude freely.

However, if the Land Ship’s altitude continues to increase, the lift provided by the anti-gravity generator will become progressively smaller until it reaches the Land Ship’s service ceiling.

Though this ceiling is technically near the point of breaking through the atmosphere into space, without additional lift, this small Land Ship cannot breach the atmosphere.

It is precisely for this reason that Chen Xin installed high-powered plasma thrusters to provide the thrust needed to send the Land Ship completely into space.

To enter space, thrust alone is not enough, as space is truly a vacuum. The Land Ship must ensure a completely sealed hull because any leakage would not only cause precious air to be lost, but the leak point would also become an additional force point, leading to loss of control.

This is one of the reasons why human-made spacecraft remain relatively small: to ensure the vessel’s sealing while making the outer shell robust enough to withstand the harsh conditions of outer space, presenting a formidable challenge in terms of both materials science and structural engineering.

Although Chen Xin could upgrade the entire Land Ship to an interstellar-capable Spaceship via system upgrades, considering it is to be delivered to the aerospace department, Chen Xin constructed it using the best currently available Flame Country technology.

Fortunately, with 3D printing technology, the ship’s hull can be directly printed without any gaps, ensuring superior sealing compared to traditional construction techniques.

As for the materials of the Land Ship’s hull, Chen Xin does not need to worry, as the aerospace department provided the best material formula they have, previously used for spacecraft construction.

However, even before the catastrophe, these materials were exorbitantly expensive, affordable only to the top nations on Blue Star. After the apocalypse, not even the Flame Country, which recovered its comprehensive national power relatively well, can easily acquire them.

Though the country does have raw material reserves, these are scarce resources in high demand across various departments and fields, not just the aerospace department.

To illustrate, even nuclear-powered train reactor production requires significant amounts of scarce resources to ensure reactor safety.

This scarcity of raw materials is one of the main reasons Chen Xin built this Land Ship so small.

The raw materials allocated to the aerospace department, plus some they accumulated themselves, only allowed for a Land Ship of this size after maximizing material efficiency.

Nevertheless, the length of the Land Ship still exceeds fifty meters, categorizing it as a behemoth among spacecraft.

Such a large ship not only requires a sufficiently thick multilayer hull to ensure hull strength but also cannot solely consist of crew cabins inside.

Besides standard equipment like the cockpit as a bridge, power chamber, and anti-gravity generator, Chen Xin also prepared a comparatively "large" comprehensive laboratory and an ecological greenhouse onboard.

The role of the comprehensive laboratory is self-explanatory; one of the primary objectives of space activities is conducting various scientific experiments, making a large comprehensive lab incredibly valuable for space missions.

Before the catastrophe, nations built space stations primarily to have sufficiently large spaces in space for scientific experiments.

The ecological greenhouse serves two purposes: it’s part of space experimentation for biological research and produces food to meet the ship’s consumption needs.

Even though costs can be reduced, every gram of payload is precious in space, so making food self-sustaining to free up more room for other supplies is ideal.

Under these conditions, this Land Ship came into being, built by Chen Xin.