chapter 60
I pushed the throttle up, watching the engine quickly reach its theoretical redline. It was loud with the propeller attached, but there was proper power here. Everything was monitored, and later on, I would be disassembling it to see which part, if any, had damage or wear on it.
The heat management system was working better than I expected. The material science of the galaxy was so far ahead of Earth that I now had access to motor oil that I could easily say was a hundred times better than what we had.
There were some problems I needed to work on, as I would need to build an air movement system into this engine as well, so we could keep the pistons cool. The electromagnets also caused quite a bit of heat when they got close to each other and then pushed off.
It managed to survive 10 minutes fully redlined, but it was starting to have some misfires. No matter how good the electromagnets are, there are still physical limits. And right now, I had pushed the engine beyond its limits. Now it was time for the final test.
I slammed the throttle down fully as fast as I could. The engine ramped down quickly, but still in a controlled manner.
“That went better than I expected. Is it time to start training the second engine tests?” Lola commented.
“Yes, it’s time,” I said a bit dejectedly.
The second engine was close by. This one was an electric engine, basically just an electric motor with the gearbox in front of it, attached to a propeller similar to how the radial engine was set up.
She brought up a good point when I started to build out the radial engine. With better materials available to build better electric motors I should run tests on both to see which one would be better. I made this electric engine as durable as I could to give it a chance. As it was smaller and weighed less, I could give it a stronger shell against battle damage.
They should have about the same power output, with the electric engine being a lot smaller than the radial one and weighing a bit less. The scaling up would affect the radial engine worse, but not by too much.
As I started to run the tests, the gearbox helped quite a lot in managing the electric motor’s problem of constant max torque. The setup without it would be rough.
Another problem in this testing, not just with the electric engine but the radial one as well, was the propeller itself. Right now, it was just a regular propeller moving air, but the propeller that would interact with the very fabric of space itself would act a bit differently.
As I understand it, you need to deliver energy in the form of electricity to the propeller itself so it can actually start interacting with the fabric of space.
The more power you give, the more deeply it interacts with the fabric of space. The side effect is that the harder the propeller would be to turn. If you aren’t careful with that energy management, you could easily rip the propellers from your ship.
But they would cost too much to buy smaller versions to test. So in the end, for the full build, whatever engine I’m going to build, we still don't know if it will work until we actually test the full-sized version.
Electric engine testing came to an end, and Lola started running simulations from the data we collected. I disassembled both engines, scanned everything, and uploaded that data to Lola as well so she could model engine damage over time and battle damage. Lola was also helping FH, teaching her how she does things, so eventually FH could take over.
Lola, during her free time, was designing herself a proper war mech that would be big enough to fit her current core. I’m still keeping quiet about trying to integrate her into a smaller personality core, and while I have a theory about how I could make it work, I’m going to need a lot of practice making personality cores like Dean and Sam have.
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While Lola and FH continued to work, enough of the droid parts had been printed out that I could start assembling them. A bunch of their outer shells had different colorings. They were mostly stripes, and right now, five chest pieces had blue and five had red stripes. These were going to be the two combat squads led by Sam and Dean, respectively.
I have yet to inform them of that fact, but I believe they are going to be good at running their own squads. For now, I think that would be enough purposely made combat droids. We will probably have multiple squads of combat drones as well. They, however, are not the priority for now. In fact, even the combat droids wouldn’t be a priority, but we needed to hide the fact that Sam and Dean were not made by me.
My skills have come quite a long way, but it was still crazy to think that most of them were still at novice proficiency. I was certain that my telekinesis was close to advancing, as I found it easier to hold screws in place or even larger pieces when I welded them together.
It was crazy how much just this little bit of help was making me work so much faster and making that work even better quality. I couldn’t wait to see what i would be capable of in the future. My sixth sense was also working, helping guide my hand and giving even more insight into how to make things better and function more smoothly.
This feeling, I never wanted to lose it. Seeing how I was getting better, and having a visual representation of it, was way too satisfying.
Down on the planet, there must be a way to see how many skills I could have. That way, we could hopefully start planning out a proper build for me. I would also like to start advancing my overall rank. That was the only way to properly start to be safe in this galaxy.
It took me two days to finish building out all the droids and eight more personality cores. I learned so much from doing that, but I would need to do even more. One thing I wasn’t going to do was give the eight new AIs full personalities. No, they would start out as simple AIs.
This came with some disadvantages—mainly their ability to improvise—but they had their squad commanders for that. What this would allow them to do was develop by interacting with the world.
AIs that developed this way were always better at their specific tasks, and while they would learn to do other things as well when they got more complex, overall, I wanted more specialized AIs rather than full generalists that are masters of none.
Bob had been diligent. He had unloaded all of the cargo we had and not randomly, either. It was meticulously organized in the hangar. Once again, the way he’s programmed, he shouldn’t have done it so meticulously, but he’s a wonderful oddity.
Thanks to this, there were currently ten droid bodies laid out on the floor of the ship. I placed all eight new AI personality cores into their housings and then put those into their new bodies. Now came the time to inform Sam and Dean.
They were once again playing cards. As soon as I stepped close to them, they put the cards down and stood up like they were in the military.
“It’s time to upgrade your bodies. I’ve built out the new ones Lola designed, and you will have eight new brothers and sisters. You two are going to become squad leaders. The new AIs are simple ones that will slowly get more complex. Your job is to train them and be their leaders during combat. Is this something you’re willing to do?”
Both of them took a moment to think. Dean seemed more excited, but overall, I think they liked the idea.
“We will do as you want, Captain,” Sam answered, and Dean gave a sharp nod.
“Then it’s time to upgrade your bodies.”
They sat down and allowed me to open them up, which was a bit weird. Pulling out the AI housing wasn’t that hard. I installed them inside their new bodies and woke them up.
They took some time to get used to their new bodies, but eventually, I asked them if they were ready.
“We are, Captain,” Dean answered, and so I started to wake up the rest of the AIs. Slowly, they began waking up as Dean, Sam, and I started to instruct them.
The first moments of an AI’s life are always crucial, and you really need to be there and help them understand what they are and what their goals are going to be.
It was a long process. Lola and FH also finished their simulations. Turns out that I was somewhat correct in my assumptions. While the electric engine was better at almost everything. It was really falling short in long-term maintenance and, of course, battle damage, with even a bit of damage taking it out of commission.
Surprisingly, the radial engine was also better at heat management. I had not expected that.
It was a lot more difficult to handle the problem of heat, especially in the vacuum of space, for the electric engine. There were ways of mitigating it, but that would also cause some power loss.
The regular reliability, I thought the electric engine would do better, but during long-term reliability simulations with proper maintenance, the radial engine actually beat it out. Even if it needed more regular maintenance. So overall the radial engine needed more attention, but it would be better for the long term.
There was also another consideration, and that was how securely you could connect either engine to the ship itself and how integrated it could be. It wouldn’t be a problem if it was a stationary engine, but if I wanted to be able to move it into a vertical position, the radial engine offered more opportunity.
In the end, even with the battle damage advantages the radial engine had, all of it was close enough that it was going to end up as more of a preference choice than anything else. And well, that choice was going to be easy, I was going to choose the engine that I came up with myself.
With that, the choice for the side engines had been made. They were going to be my design of an electromagnet radial engine that would be able to move into a vertical position, with propellers made out of space monster materials to allow them to work in the vacuum of space.
Right now, it was still too early to start building out the full-sized version, as I wouldn’t even have anywhere to mount it. We also didn't know if the structure we’d build would be able to handle the stress these types of side engines would bring to it. For that, we needed more processing power and more tests.
The delivery of the massive number of processors we ordered would take a few more days to fully arrive. But in the meantime, it was time to start building even more AI personality cores.
This time, they were going to be smaller versions so I could start upgrading all the droids I currently had. And even though most of them I will keep as the simple AI they are, this new type of core has too many other advantages to not upgrade every AI I can.
This should also give me enough experience that I should be able to upgrade FH, then Bob, and hopefully I could surprise Lola as well and manage to fit her into a personality core without changing anything about her.