Super Mothership
Solar System, Moon.
After nearly half a year of development, the lunar orbit was no longer desolate. Thousands of cargo transport ships were now traveling back and forth between Earth and the Moon, engaging in frequent personnel and material trade.
The spaceport on the lunar orbit had also been expanded. Its size was now not much smaller than the Atlantis Orbital Spaceport around Earth.
At this moment, an unremarkable silver spaceship slowly approached the lunar spaceport from outside the Earth–Moon system. It then bypassed the merchant ships waiting in line and directly entered the military port…
“So… this is my empire…” Nie Yun stood by the porthole, looking at the bustling spaceport, unable to stop himself from making a narcissistic comment.
The mechanical bug: “……” (lll￢ω￢)
Although Nie Yun occasionally remote-controlled Arthas’s cloned avatar over the past few months, his true body had not been idle either.
On his return journey to Earth, Nie Yun devoted himself to studying the limits of the mechanical bug, remotely managed the development of various bases, and even went on a “Solar System round-trip tour.”
He traveled through half of the Solar System, personally witnessing Pluto’s desolation, Saturn’s magnificent rings, and Jupiter’s awe-inspiring great storm. As a native of the Solar System, he finally enjoyed the beauty of his homeland with his own eyes.
Although his avatar could experience these sights just as vividly—perhaps making this whole trip redundant—Nie Yun felt that it was like eating instant noodles with a knife and fork; the point was the sense of ceremony.
“Looks like Atlantis Corporation has been doing well lately.” Nie Yun remarked again.
Among the spaceships outside, roughly one-fifth bore the iconic silver vortex emblem, clearly belonging to Atlantis Corporation, while the rest carried a variety of national flags.
Interstellar trade was a rising industry. Naturally, Atlantis Corporation had established its own interstellar trading company early on and had claimed a sizable market share.
After initial infrastructure construction and test production, the shipyards in the Solar System’s asteroid belt had now entered a phase of explosive growth. Various warships and civilian ships were rolling off the line like dumplings and being immediately snapped up, filling a massive gap in cosmic transportation.
Large-scale starship trading became the biggest cash cow for Atlantis Corporation this quarter, helping Nie Yun recover large amounts of Infinite Coins and further boosting the prosperity of the Infinite Coin capital market.
Speaking of shipyards, one had to mention Nie Yun’s upgrades to the asteroid belt shipbuilding base.
The shipbuilding base had now outgrown its early “small workshop” phase, moved away from over-dependence on mechanical bugs, and completed a centralized and optimized industrial structure.
Traditional dock-style shipbuilding had been completely eliminated and replaced with a far more advanced “shipbuilding assembly line,” greatly improving production efficiency!
The current starship factory resembled an automobile manufacturing assembly line.
In zero-gravity, massive spacecraft had their keels laid down on the first line, hull plating added on the second, circuits carved on the third, and power cores installed on the fourth…
Beyond the main line, each processing section branched into several sub-assembly lines, each operating as a huge equipment-manufacturing plant.
Some were responsible for smelting metals and supplying raw materials, others for producing supporting systems such as radar, engines, AIs, weapons, and more.
The entire complex was a precise and unified automated assembly network, resembling a steel giant tree with countless branches. It absorbed vast amounts of mineral resources and assembled tens of millions of components into colossal iron beasts that filled the interstellar routes of Earth civilization.
Such an automated system required countless sub-factories and encompassed nearly every field of a civilization’s industrial capacity, so large that it needed the support of hundreds of asteroids for materials.
Even with Nie Yun’s high manufacturing capability, he had so far built only a single complete civilian “ship production line” to meet the skyrocketing market demand.
Military ships had far stricter requirements, with technology levels far above civilian vessels. Since they affected the civilization’s military power, Nie Yun naturally gave them greater priority.
The imitation Seafolk frigates had already ceased production. As hostilities with the Gemini Civilization intensified, Nie Yun—acting in the capacity of the “Unity of All Things Earth Civilization Branch”—could now develop his own armed forces, with no need to rely on knock-offs anymore.
More advanced warship designs, better aligned with the development needs of Earth civilization, were now on the agenda!
During this process, the Earth Defense Force—being the primary military purchaser—was also invited to participate in the research and design discussions for various new warship models.
Thanks to the highly efficient communication and ultra-realistic simulation offered by the virtual world, design proposals were quickly finalized under the coordination of the Cloud Research Institute. The first and second mass-production frigates, the Ganjiang-class and Moye-class, had already entered full-scale production.
Named after two of the Ten Legendary Swords, these two comprehensive frigates respectively focused on firepower and speed. Through various combinations, they could basically meet the Earth Defense Force’s combat needs at the current stage.
Stepping off the ship, Nie Yun looked around.
In the distance, at the civilian port, countless goods were being unloaded from cargo ships, stacked in warehouses, then either shipped to Earth or transported to the new lunar city below.
Nie Yun moved forward unimpeded—everywhere was a green light. Aside from his escorts’ code-designations, he didn’t even bring any robot bodyguards.
On his own turf, Nie Yun had no need to worry about safety—especially since he himself was essentially a humanoid nuclear weapon with overwhelming combat power.
“Let’s go! We’re heading to ‘Third New Moon City’ to have a look.”
Filled with anticipation, Nie Yun stepped into the space elevator leading directly down to the new lunar city…
…
“Third New Moon City” was the first large-scale space city built by Nie Yun as a human immigration pilot project!
Four months ago, the first human immigration vessel, the New Continent, landed. Fifty astronauts became the first lunar immigrants, marking humanity’s entry into a new era of expanding into the universe with their true bodies—not remotely.
Using the advanced ecological technology from the Gemini civilization, combined with the unique biological engineering of the Kara civilization, and built by the highly efficient robot construction teams of the Ghost Captain, a space colony city with a massive technological leap was erected. In just half a year, the city already had a clear prototype.
As of today, “Third New Moon City” already had a resident population of three thousand, with nearly ten thousand transient residents—and the scale was still rapidly expanding.
As for the name of the city—one that made the corners of people’s mouths twitch—Earthlings chose not to question it… or comment on it…
The Ghost Captain’s notorious trolling-style naming habits had become widely known. After all, even a base named “Eastern Factory” had been openly added to the lunar GPS navigation system as the largest satellite base near Third New Moon City…
Rumor had it that Chinese-speaking nations were still debating whether to include it in the new Lunar Geography textbook, while Western media were enthusiastically watching and commenting on the situation.
Ahem! In short, it was a rather tragic story.
TL Note- Development....
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