Considering future maintenance and upkeep, the Living Modules used a suspended modular design. Each suspended module was equivalent to a sixty-meter-tall building.
At 2.8 meters per floor, each suspended Living Module would have twenty-one floors. With two apartments per floor, a single suspended Living Module could contain forty-two apartments.
If each apartment housed three people, one suspended Living Module could accommodate 126 people. For more than eighty-eight thousand people, roughly 705 suspended Living Modules would be needed.
Of course, it could not simply be calculated as three people per apartment, since there would also be single-occupancy units and office spaces. Still, the difference would not be too great; at most, nine hundred suspended modules would be enough.
In this design, each suspended Living Module had a footprint of roughly 180 square meters. Every floor could be divided into two ninety-square-meter rooms, or used as one large room for offices and similar purposes.
If that was the case, the cylinder would need to be at least seventy meters tall.
Yet in the design, Yue Yuan saw that the spaceship's length—that is, the cylinder's height—had reached 980 meters.
The difference was enormous! Only after listening carefully to the explanation did Yue Yuan learn that redundancy, the nuclear reactor, and all kinds of functional facilities had also been factored in.
For example, ecological circulation systems, plantations, laboratories, and various material storage warehouses.
Indeed, a Residential Spaceship could not merely consider living space. It also needed all kinds of supporting facilities, as well as warehouses for machinery and equipment humanity might take along in the future.
Yu Nanfeng continued his introduction.
Perhaps feeling that an explanation alone was not vivid enough, he imported the design data into a computer and demonstrated a 3D model of the spaceship for Yue Yuan.
A visual was certainly more tangible than mere words.
Yue Yuan looked toward the computer screen and saw a huge cylinder covered in labels and figures. From the marked values, it was easy to see that this was a barrel-shaped spaceship with a radius of 550 meters and a length of 980 meters.
Viewed from the bottom, five thick support arms extended from the spaceship's central axis toward its outer wall. Each arm pulled a section of building foundation, and sixty-meter-tall suspended building modules were embedded in those foundations, like honeycomb larvae set into a hive.
Five support arms formed one disk. The one-hundred-meter-tall cylinder consisted of ten such disks stacked together, and each disk had an independent power system that drove it to rotate.
These power systems were actually enormous electric motors. Under the control system's direction, ten giant motors could drive the ten Large Turntables in synchronized rotation, or combine into one massive linked motor to jointly power the ten Large Turntables, which could connect to one another at any time.
The nuclear reactor supplying energy was placed at the center of the Rotating Shaft.
A core nuclear reactor was an extremely massive facility, so the central shaft housing it was designed as a towering pillar more than two hundred meters in diameter.
The Main Thrusters were attached to the outer wall of the Rotating Shaft, while the Auxiliary Thrusters were distributed across each support arm. As for the Vectoring Thrusters, they were installed along the outer edges of the cylinder's upper and lower faces.
Looking over the detailed design, Yue Yuan nodded and said with satisfaction, "Use this plan. As for the multi-ship plan, don't abandon it either. Gao Kun, you will revise it into a warship design. Pi Te will arrange for the relevant departments to cooperate later. We will strive to begin the spaceship project within this year."
"No problem, but if we're designing a warship, I need the Command Department's cooperation," Gao Kun replied.
"Of course," Yue Yuan answered without hesitation.
After all, warships were for the Command Department to use, so they certainly had to participate. Although they did not understand design, they could still offer opinions on usage habits, turret placement, and such matters.
"Chief Yue, there is a problem." Seeing Yue Yuan rise to leave, Yu Nanfeng hurriedly spoke.
"Go on." Yue Yuan paused.
Yu Nanfeng hesitated, then reminded him, "Even if we build the spaceship, we won't be able to leave Callisto immediately."
"I know. But we can't just do nothing, can we?" Yue Yuan turned back and sighed.
Gan De had already explained the current state of the starry sky. The Supernova Remnant was filled with Interstellar Dust, and any spaceship in the Inertial Navigation phase would inevitably be slowed by the dust. How could Yue Yuan not know that?
But if they did nothing, humanity would likely sink into a hopeless state of despair. So even though they knew Nuclear Fission propulsion would have difficulty achieving interstellar travel, they still had to pursue it.
Only then would those trapped on Callisto see hope for survival and have something to strive toward.
Besides, it was not entirely hopeless. They only needed Controlled Nuclear Fusion to achieve a breakthrough during the spaceship's construction. That was possible. Although Callisto's technology had regressed compared to the old Earth, the decline was not severe. In the field of Controlled Nuclear Fusion, they were only about a decade or so behind and were fully capable of catching up.
As it happened, constructing the spaceship would also take a very long time.
According to the Engineering Department's estimates, a spaceship project of this scale would take at least twenty years to complete. Unless technology advanced rapidly again during that period, it would take no less.
After all, this was such a huge ship, built from scratch, and it also needed all kinds of supporting facilities as well as nearly one hundred thousand Hibernation Pods.
There had originally been some warships in Callisto's orbit, but unfortunately, they had all been destroyed in the great disaster.
In any case, they would launch the project first. If Nuclear Fusion technology made a breakthrough by then, they would replace the core Fission Reactor with a Fusion Reactor, and the thrusters would be replaced as well.
If there truly was no other way, then they could only wait until the dust clouds within the Supernova Remnant thinned enough for interstellar travel.
"I understand. In that case, this plan needs some adjustment as well. We need to reserve installation space for the power systems and install them only during the final stage of construction," Yu Nanfeng said as he looked at the simulation on the screen. That was what he had meant by asking Yue Yuan that question.
"By the way, do you have any ideas for the warship design?" Interrupted by Yu Nanfeng, Yue Yuan, who had been about to walk out the door, suddenly changed his mind and turned back to Gao Kun.
"We on Callisto have experience building transport ships. Although the old Space Dock was destroyed, the technology remains. I don't think there will be a problem. The key question is how large we should make it," Gao Kun replied.
Yue Yuan answered without thinking, "It definitely needs to be larger than a transport ship, but it cannot be too large either. If you make it as large as the Residential Spaceship, we definitely won't have enough resources."
Humanity truly was not suited to building warships at a time like this, but without even one warship, Yue Yuan could not feel at ease. Even though he knew that if they really encountered aliens, it would probably be useless.
"I think there is a problem!" At that moment, Yu Nanfeng suddenly rose from the computer and objected. "Building a warship is fine, but how are we going to take it with us?"
How would they take it with them? It would simply leave alongside the Residential Spaceship! Did that even need asking? Yue Yuan was about to say so when he suddenly realized the crux of Yu Nanfeng's objection.
Right, how would they take it with them?!
They could not have a group of people remain aboard the warship the entire time. It would be a long journey, and interstellar travel spanned a duration that humans could only cross through hibernation.
Have a group of people hibernate in a zero-gravity environment for decades or even centuries? That would definitely cause problems.
The real difficulties were endless! But traveling unprotected was far too dangerous. Even if they did not encounter aliens, they would at least have some means of response if they ran into other unexpected situations.
Without a few Atomic Bombs, hydrogen bombs, Helium-3 Bombs, and Neutron Bombs in hand, he simply could not feel secure.
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