Chapter 1578: Trench
The calendar turned a new page, and a year had passed since the Svetovid docked at the port of Mars.
Many things happened during this year.
First of all, located in the city of Svetovid.
After Golovin I and Jiang Chen’s discussion, he established the Svetovid Group with the main business focused on import and export, shipbuilding, as well as communication services. It was worth admitting that these clones were far ahead of Future Heavy Industries and other companies on Earth in technologies related to interstellar navigation.
The Lightning N1 warp engine manufactured by Svetovid Group took away the orders from Future Heavy Industries and became the standard engine for the Earth Defense Alliance’s million-ton-class starship. Due to the large technological gap, Future Heavy Industries simply abandoned this market and shifted its focus on offensive weapons, carrier-based spacecrafts, drones, and other fields.
In addition to shipbuilding, Svetovid Group also got involved in the communications services business and unexpectedly became the largest communications service provider on Mars.
There was a story behind Svetovid Group’s involvement in the communications business.
About a month after the Svetovid docked in the synchronous orbit, Golovin I went to see Jiang Chen again and asked him why he didn’t connect Heavenly Palace City’s network with Earth.
After he learned that it was due to Future Group’s limited quantum communication resources, Golovin I didn’t say anything at the time and ended the communication.
Two months later, a huge quantum communication base station was built, and three communication relay satellites ascended to the synchronous orbit of Mars. After another month, Golovin I met with Jiang Chen again. This time he did not ask about the Internet but told him that Svetovid Group hopes to establish a quantum communication base station in Celestial City and Port Marchena.
As for the accessories needed to build these two communication base stations, they were naturally prepared.
Just like that, the two separate networks on Mars and Earth were forcibly woven into one by the Svetovid Group. The quantum communication technology that Golovin mastered was so advanced that the delay in accessing the Earth’s network on Mars was reduced to under 100 pings.
Even Future Heavy Industries could not achieve such a feat. The communication resources on Heavenly Palace City were only sufficient to allow local colonies to speak to their relatives on Earth, send a message, or browse a web page…
The citizens of Heavenly Palace City welcomed the connection to the Internet. The Phantom helmet, which could only play single-player “browser games”, now regained its usefulness. Those colonists who miss their loved ones on Earth every day could finally meet their loved ones in the virtual world constructed by the Phantom.
The gravity belt solved the mobility issue, and now the network problem was also solved. The citizens who lived in Heavenly Palace City once again lived the same life they did on Earth.
Of course, Golovin I himself was the most enthusiastic about the change.
At first, Jiang Chen wondered why Golovin eagerly built a network between Earth and Mars, until Xia Shiyu reported a piece of data to him. On the day when Mars connected to the Internet, more than 5,000 accounts with IP addresses from Mars were registered on the servers of “Galaxy Edge”.
The figure of 5,000 helmets was a small number for Future Technology, which manufactured 50,000 to 100,000 helmets daily. Normally, sales of this scale would not attract the attention of Xia Shiyu or Jiang Chen. However, the person who bought these 5,000 helmets was the Svetovid Group, which made it hard for Jiang Chen not to notice.
He instructed Xia Shiyu to pay more attention, and it didn’t take long before he made new discoveries.
In the city of Svetovid, the best-selling products were holographic devices and VR devices. Based on the data from Future Technology, the Golovin people was addicted to these devices.
If they were not working, then they would be wearing the Phantom helmet… It was the evaluation of the employees of the Mars Synchronous Orbit Shipyard on their cloned colleagues.
Even though the languages these clones mastered were enough to make the most knowledgeable linguists dumbfounded, they rarely communicated with outsiders and hardly spoke outside of work. In addition to eating and sleeping, they spend almost 95% of their free time in the virtual world.
Jiang Chen thought that this might be due to the fact that they spent most of their time in the virtual world during their hibernation period.
As for another question that puzzled him, he couldn’t understand despite how hard he tried to find an answer.
He always believed subjectively that the Golovin people under the Golovin Mental System were like ants under the rule of the queen. They did not need entertainment, which had nothing to do with survival.
However, it appeared to be just his prejudice.
Is it because living in a virtual world has a completely different feel than reality?
He didn’t know.
Jiang Chen even spoke with Golovin I about this matter. But Golovin I did not seem to want to give him the answer, and he was even unwilling to share his account name…
Outside of the Golovin, there were also several important matters that happened at the alliance.
If four years ago, the idea of building a fortress in the Kuiper Belt was mostly an unrealistic fantasy, then with the advancement of technology in the field of interstellar navigation, this fantasy had started to become a practical reality.
In the past four years, the Stellar Highway of Celestial Trade had already advanced from Jupiter’s orbit to Pluto’s orbit. With the help of the warp engine and neutrino tunnel technology, the time from the Earth-Moon system to the Kuiper Belt had been reduced from one year to less than half a month.
The steel and space station accessories manufactured by Heavenly Palace City were directly sent to the synchronous orbit via the space elevator and then towed by the Seagull-class transport ship to Pluto’s orbit.
This fortress would not revolve with Pluto. However, it would slowly orbit around the Sun with a revolution cycle of thousands of years. Although this meant that the fortress would be slowly pulled towards the Sun due to the gravitational force, the gravitational force of the Sun was already quite weak due to the distance to the Kuiper belt. Therefore, this degree of displacement was completely negligible, on the distance of dozens of astronomical units and over several hundred years.
As for things hundreds of years from now, it could be considered in hundreds of years.
The alliance only had to use this fortress in the next half a century to stand between the star and the invaders and to fight the enemy together with the Earth fleet.
And that would be enough.