Chapter 122 121: Live Fire
The figure of 75,000 total ships was one Li Qingsong had arrived at after a comprehensive assessment, factoring in his current maximum number of consciousness connections, his corresponding engineering capabilities, technological level, and more.
A fleet of this scale was nearly the absolute limit of what he could currently support.
Over the years, Li Qingsong's maximum number of consciousness connections had been slowly increasing, thanks to advancements in biotechnology and the continuous refinement and enhancement of the Nuwa AI.
While there hadn't been another massive leap like the previous jump from ten million to one hundred million, there were constant, minute increases—a few tenths of a percent at a time.
Almost every newly cultivated generation of Clones brought some degree of improvement, however small.
As a result, Li Qingsong's maximum number of consciousness connections had now reached 120 million.
Li Qingsong believed that in a typical social, intelligent civilization, the highest possible ratio of the total population to those fully dedicated to military-industrial and combat roles was approximately one hundred to one.
In other words, a civilization with a population of 120 million could support about 1.2 million military-related personnel. On average, it would take one hundred people to support a single soldier.
After all, soldiers are entirely removed from productive labor; they produce no resources themselves, yet they consume them in vast quantities.
The fuel for starships, the manufacturing of equipment, personnel salaries, even the electricity and devices for research—wasn't every single one of these things astronomically expensive?
And having one hundred people support a single soldier was only possible in a society with highly advanced technology, abundant resources, and extremely high productivity.
Within that one percent of military-related personnel, the vast majority would be taken up by those in logistics, maintenance, production, R&D, training, and administration. The ratio of front-line combatants to total military personnel was about one to fifty.
In other words, it took fifty military-related personnel to support a single front-line combatant.
Thus, a civilization of 120 million people, with 1.2 million military-related personnel, could support approximately 24,000 front-line combatants.
Factoring in rotations, shift changes, and other elements, even if all 24,000 of these front-line combatants were piloting Mercury-class Warships, and assuming each Warship required a crew of eight, they could only support a fleet of 3,000 Mercury-class Warships.
But one must not forget that having a Mercury-class Warship operated by a crew of only eight Clones was a feat only Li Qingsong could achieve. An ordinary intelligent civilization would likely require at least sixteen people per ship.
This would shrink the fleet size again, down to a mere 1,500 ships.
If they were operating Earth-class Warships instead, Li Qingsong would require 688 Clones per ship. An ordinary civilization would need at least 1,300 people, meaning they could support fewer than twenty ships.
But for Li Qingsong, the situation was different.
The reason was simple: the society of Clones under Li Qingsong's command was completely abnormal.
His entire society had virtually no resource consumption outside of research, military matters, and basic life support.
There were no wages, no entertainment, no leisure, and no waste.
In this society, resource utilization was pushed to its absolute limit.
Under these conditions, even with an effective population of only 120 million, Li Qingsong could support the resource drain of 12 million military-industrial personnel. This was a ratio of one to ten—ten times greater than that of an ordinary civilization!
These 12 million military-industrial personnel could, in turn, support approximately 1.2 million front-line combatants—another one-to-ten ratio, which was five times greater than that of an ordinary civilization!
All told, this amounted to a fifty-fold advantage.
By this metric, even though Li Qingsong's current population was only 120 million, in military terms alone, his civilization was roughly equivalent to an ordinary intelligent civilization with a population of 6 billion.
In fact, Li Qingsong believed a more accurate estimate would be somewhere around 10 billion.
The reason was simple: an ordinary civilization could only achieve the ratios mentioned above if it were perfectly united, with internal conflict and waste reduced to an absolute minimum.
Even the slightest bit of waste would require a much larger total population to support the same proportion of front-line combatants.
And if one were to factor in research, industrial capacity, the contribution of each individual, and a host of other aspects, Li Qingsong believed the number would triple. It would take an ordinary civilization with a population of 30 billion to rival him.
It was for this very reason that Li Qingsong, with an effective population of only 120 million, dared to build a massive fleet of over 75,000 assorted starships!
The goal was so magnificent, so enormous, that even Li Qingsong had to devote his full effort to it.
Under his control, the entire Jupiter System descended into a flurry of activity.
A total of approximately 220 million Clones rotated between rest and work, ensuring that 120 million of them were at their stations at any given moment.
In the numerous newly established mines, under the unified coordination of the Jade Emperor AI and the maintenance and decision-making of countless Clones, innumerable machines roared to life. A torrent of minerals was constantly being extracted, processed on-site, and then transported along railway lines to either the space elevator bases or other factories.
Along the space lanes, thousands of transport and passenger ships shuttled back and forth, like silken threads weaving together every planet and every base.
In the uranium enrichment plants, tens of millions of high-speed centrifuges spun without pause, extracting uranium-235 from natural uranium. This was then used as fuel for power plants or transported to the warships to power their drives.
With this comprehensive support structure in place, Li Qingsong truly achieved assembly-line production for all types of starships.
A single starship was composed of tens of millions of components, and the tens of thousands of factories involved in their production operated without cease.
High-speed radar modules, microchips, supercomputer modules, Electromagnetic Cannon modules, Laser Cannon modules, propulsion modules, fission reactor modules...
An endless stream of these and countless other components converged on the one hundred final assembly plants.
Of these numerous assembly plants, eighty were dedicated to the production of Mercury-class Warships, fifteen to Venus-class, and five to Earth-class.
This production capacity was something Li Qingsong had calculated with great care. Only this specific allocation would ensure the production speed for each class of Warship met his projections.
Thus, a steady stream of warships began rolling off the production lines, each one equipped with the newest systems—their propulsion, defenses, detection, and offense all representing the most advanced and powerful technology available.
Before the entire fleet was complete—with only about 3,000 warships produced so far—Li Qingsong already initiated his next move.
Live-fire combat drills!
Actual, genuine, live-fire combat drills where large numbers of Clones would die and many warships would be destroyed!
The existing force of roughly 3,000 warships was split into two fleets. Each led by an Earth-class Warship as its flagship, they set out majestically for Deep Space. A great battle was imminent.