Humanity Is Gone, but I Have Billions of Clones

Radar technology was another area Li Qingsong had prioritized for focused research over the past several years.

After all, radar served as a warship's "eyes."

While optical detection was certainly important, the use of optical telescopes was severely limited on a space battlefield. They had to be complemented by radar to achieve the necessary situational awareness.

Furthermore, aside from large targets like optically visible warships and massive celestial bodies, smaller targets—such as Missiles, artillery shells, or even small satellites and ships using optical stealth—could only be detected using radar.

On the battlefield, increasing a Warship's survival rate demanded even more from its radar. It wasn't enough to just detect relatively large targets like Missiles and shells; the radar also had to be capable of detecting minuscule targets like an Electromagnetic Cannon Projectile, which might only be centimeters or even millimeters in size and weigh anywhere from a fraction of a gram to just a few grams.

Through simulations, calculations, and reverse-engineering the Blutuk Civilization's weapons, Li Qingsong had essentially confirmed it: on an interstellar battlefield, the Electromagnetic Cannon Projectile was the most widely used and most lethal weapon of all!

If you couldn't intercept an Electromagnetic Cannon Projectile, a warship's defensive systems could be considered more than 90% collapsed.

'Rely on armor alone to stop an Electromagnetic Cannon Projectile?'

Even against a projectile from one of his own Electromagnetic Cannons—like the five-gram projectile with a muzzle velocity of 15 kilometers per second he'd worked with before—the impact was over 19 times more powerful than a bullet from the strongest Gunpowder Guns. What kind of armor could possibly withstand that?

The heaviest tanks from the Earth era couldn't even handle armor-piercing rounds from mere Gunpowder Guns, let alone an Electromagnetic Cannon Projectile with at least 19 times the destructive force.

And for the sake of a warship's mobility, Li Qingsong obviously couldn't make its armor that thick.

Doing so would turn the Warship into a tortoise—a sitting duck.

That left only one viable solution.

Interception!

He had to find a way to stop those devastatingly powerful projectiles before they could hit the Warship.

A Warship's armor was meant to withstand stray shots and small, low-impact Electromagnetic Cannon Projectiles, not large, high-yield ones.

And if you're going to intercept something, the first step is to detect it.

'If you can't even detect them, how can you possibly talk about interception?'

But even the largest of these projectiles rarely exceeded ten grams. They were minuscule, and they typically traveled at speeds of over ten kilometers per second.

'How could anyone possibly detect such tiny, high-speed targets in the boundless expanse of space?'

This was a job for high-speed radar.

Unlike conventional radar, high-speed radar operated at a higher power, emitting higher-energy electromagnetic waves to enhance the target's signal-reflection strength.

At the same time, high-speed radar required more advanced and powerful algorithms, using matched filtering and coherent integration to enhance its ability to detect faint signals.

Its scanning speed also had to be incredibly fast.

The interstellar battlefield was simply too vast and the projectiles moved too fast. A sector of space could be clear one second and have an incoming projectile the next. This necessitated repeated, high-frequency scans of the entire celestial sphere.

All of these demanding performance requirements were now concentrated into a single device, which had to fulfill every one of them.

Decades ago, when he began this research based on the previous generation of radar, Li Qingsong had wondered, 'Can I really develop a radar this advanced?'

'Building a radar to these specifications... the thought alone seemed absurd.'

But Li Qingsong didn't give up. Instead, he buckled down and dedicated millions of Clones to the task. He opened up the supply lines, broke the project down into hundreds of thousands of technical details, and, in conjunction with his overall technological progress, pushed forward little by little, iterating one step at a time.

'A certain material can increase sensitivity by 0.5%?'

'Use it.'

'Another material can improve echo resolution by 0.1%?'

'Use it.'

'A particular configuration can reduce the total mass by 1%, but it's incredibly difficult to manufacture, with extremely low production capacity?'

'Then we'll just build larger, more precise foundries and bury the problem in sheer numbers to increase capacity.'

Through this process of gradual, bit-by-bit advancement, with virtually no expense spared, Li Qingsong finally, after decades, built a radar that preliminarily met the performance requirements.

Of course, it couldn't be mounted on a Warship yet. It was simply too large.

It was built into an entire building, its various components and equipment filling nearly the whole structure. Its total mass reached a terrifying 100-plus tons.

Now, it was beginning its first practical test.

Several hundred meters from the building, a dozen small, high-speed Electromagnetic Cannons were brought into the air by ships and then began a ferocious bombardment of the surrounding area.

Hundreds, even thousands, of tiny Electromagnetic Cannon Projectiles rained down every second, kicking up clouds of dust all around the building.

The radar, operating at full power, did its utmost to collect data on every small, high-speed object in the surrounding environment.

The bombardment lasted for one hour. During that time, the dozen or so Electromagnetic Cannons fired a total of over two million Electromagnetic Cannon Projectiles. And of those two million-plus projectiles, the radar successfully captured precise trajectory and velocity data for a full 1.6 million of them!

The farthest one it tracked was over a hundred kilometers away!

Looking at the data, Li Qingsong was filled with emotion. He felt that the decades of painstaking effort he had poured into this project had been fully rewarded.

It still couldn't achieve a detection rate of over 99%, and its size, mass, and energy consumption were all too high, but it had nonetheless taken a crucial first step.

All that remained was to continue with optimizations.

Development of the high-speed radar was at least 80% complete, and for now, there were no insurmountable obstacles in sight.

But this didn't mean he had mastered interception technology.

The reason was simple: radar was only for detection. To achieve true interception, he also needed a corresponding weapons system.

Li Qingsong had to find some way to influence the projectiles whose velocity and trajectory had been detected, altering their course so they wouldn't strike the Warship.

There were only two viable methods to achieve this.

First, by using another Electromagnetic Cannon Projectile. Second, by using a Laser Cannon.

The first was a kinetic impact: simply knocking the incoming projectile off its trajectory. The second was thermal ablation: using a concentrated energy beam to increase the projectile's internal energy, causing it to explode and thus deviate from its original path.

In addition to these two methods of interference, he also needed immense computational power.

High-speed radar, data processing, weapon turrets, and the firing of projectiles or Lasers—only by integrating all four could he truly intercept an attack.