I can upgrade the shelter

There isn’t much room for modification structurally, as the tent itself is meant to contact the air. Additionally, this is a tent made of soft materials, making it impossible to create a vacuum layer or fill it with rigid high-performance insulation materials between the outer and inner fabrics to make an insulation layer.

The traditional double-layer design is already a reasonable structure, even for expeditions on Mount Everest and in the North and South Poles, this double-layer tent is adequate.

All Chen Xin could do was add an inflatable insulation layer to the tent’s base to prevent heat from dissipating to the ground, and add a small porch with a two-layer curtain at the entrance, preventing cold air from entering the tent directly when someone opens the curtain, thus reducing heat loss indoors.

For large tents like medical tents, the tent door and floor are the main channels of heat loss. As long as these two areas are insulated, the tent can achieve a decent thermal retention effect.

Beyond this, the improvement comes in terms of materials.

Due to cost issues, large tents use PVC airtight fabric. As previously mentioned, PVC materials tolerate temperatures between -40°C and 65°C. Beyond this range, the material properties change, and it loses its original performance.

For small tents, manufacturers are less concerned about cost, so they can use PU and PE materials with better performance as coatings for the tent fabric, providing better protection for the tent.

Among these, PU material, polyurethane, is currently the best insulating material internationally. Chen Xin and his survival group friends used polyurethane coatings as insulation material when they built their shelter.

Depending on the material formula, it can withstand temperatures from -50°C to 150°C, and TPEE thermoplastic polyester elastomer, also known as polyester rubber, performs even better, tolerating temperature ranges from -70°C to 200°C, making it an excellent insulation material today.

If possible, Chen Xin would naturally want to use this material to upgrade the current medical tent. However, it is unfortunate these high-performance insulation materials are scarce resources highly demanded by the nation. Despite having a decent production, Lin City doesn’t have much stock.

Faced with this situation, all Chen Xin could do was consider using some existing materials to make do.

The captain has put in effort to help Chen Xin with the tent modification, arranging Lin City’s staff to coordinate the material requirements he needs.

PU materials, being high-performance insulation materials, are essential resources for Lin City, unlikely to be spared for Chen Xin’s tent improvement.

However, the staff could provide Chen Xin with some insulating felt.

"Insulating felt? This can make do, right? So how much can you get me?" Chen Xin asked upon hearing the staff mention only insulating felt. Although it was far from the materials he desired, given the resource scarcity, he had no choice but to use what was available.

Seeing Chen Xin not despising the insulating felt, the staff quickly said, "This was initially ordered for building greenhouse tents before the city experienced the meteor impact, which prevented the construction. Quite a lot of the ordered insulating felt was left over. If you need it, I can arrange a batch for you."

"Alright, get a few rolls first. Covering the tent with it can at least enhance the warmth," Chen Xin said, as this was all he could suggest.

While the staff arranged for the insulating felt to be delivered, Chen Xin wasn’t idle. He returned to the already pitched tent to see what could be improved.

Inside the tent, five volunteers allocated to him were gathered around a heater.

Unlike Chen Xin and the rescue team members who had Protective Suits, they only wore ordinary winter clothing, sitting around the heater, roasting their snow-drenched shoes, causing an unpleasant smell inside the tent.

Though Chen Xin wore Power Armor, with its air filtration system preventing him from smelling it, he could still imagine what the smell was like.

Obviously reminding him, besides enhancing the tent’s insulation, the heater could be improved to provide more heat.

This is clearly Chen Xin’s old expertise, and now he even has a versatile mechanical arm, not requiring a system upgrade for the heater’s modification.

Taking an unused heater beside him, Chen Xin clumsily maneuvered the Power Armor to sit on the ground.

Though this suit of Power Armor wasn’t exaggerated like those weighing one to two tons in sci-fi works, it still weighed several hundred kilograms, making it unsuitable to sit on a temporary sickbed beside him for fear of breaking it. Thus he could only sit on the ground.

Fortunately, the initial design of the joints considered flexibility, so sitting on the ground wasn’t a problem.

Using the mechanical arm to disassemble the heater, while using the scanning equipment on the mechanical arm for an overall scan of the heater, Chen Xin looked at the scan results projected on the helmet screen, contemplating how to proceed with modifications.

In the tent, there were four heaters in total. Considering safety issues, all were electric heaters powered by an external source, the source being the Isotope Thermoelectric Battery from Chen Xin’s car yesterday.

Given the output power of one Isotope Thermoelectric Battery, supplying power to several tents is entirely sufficient.

Therefore, without worrying about electricity consumption, the simplest and most direct way to modify the heater is to increase power output directly. Though brute force solutions like this are wasteful, many times problems can be solved this way.

Considering the Isotope Thermoelectric Battery provides stable power output for ten years, amplifying the power is indeed the simplest choice now.

Chen Xin briefly considered and chose this approach.

However, this requires optimizing the heater’s circuit to prevent burning out or short-circuiting due to excessive power.

Controlling the mechanical arm for further disassembling the heater, Chen Xin decided to try modifying the heater without the system upgrade this time. Having a versatile mechanical arm, a top tool, he didn’t think he couldn’t handle a heater.

However, after disassembling the heater into a pile of parts, Chen Xin discovered an embarrassingly inconvenient truth.

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That is, without raw materials, even with a mechanical arm capable of 3D printing parts and performing various mechanical maneuvers, Chen Xin couldn’t complete the heater’s modification out of thin air.

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