Chapter 524: The Tone
Most of the new unit designs Luo Wen has conceptualized are still in the early stages. To bring them to life, deploy them on the battlefield, and showcase them to the world, many issues need to be resolved. Among these, the most critical is the development of a more efficient energy system.
For the Swarm’s space forces, units below the Primordial-class rely primarily on their own energy storage cells to store energy due to their size and other factors.
Although these energy storage cells have undergone several iterations of optimization, allowing them to store far more energy than the original versions and significantly increasing the combat radius and duration of Larval and Mature bodies, they are still insufficient to support Space Octopuses in unleashing long-range firepower at will.
As a result, smaller Larval bodies are not equipped with long-range weapons, while larger Mature bodies are only equipped with secondary-grade long-range attack weapons.
The Primordial bodies, on the other hand, are all equipped with Atomic Furnaces. The continuous controlled fusion within these furnaces provides a steady supply of energy to the Primordial-class units. In the early stages, this was sufficient to meet all the Swarm’s needs and activities.
However, as the intensity of warfare and the level of opponents have continued to rise, the once-unbeatable Atomic Furnace has encountered limitations. Its power output per unit of time cannot support the simultaneous operation of multiple turrets. To increase the number of turrets on a Primordial-class unit, more Atomic Furnaces would need to be added, but this would inevitably make the unit’s body bulkier.
While this is not impossible—some Primordial-class units in the Swarm’s forces, measuring over a kilometer in length, are equipped with multiple Atomic Furnaces and more turrets—it is more cost-effective and time-efficient to produce more 500-meter-long Primordial-class units instead.
This approach not only disperses risk but also makes the forces more robust and flexible.
In the past, the Swarm’s opponents, whether the Moto civilization or the Troi civilization, also used energy systems based on controlled fusion. The only difference was the degree of optimization; there was no fundamental distinction.