Comprehensive Upgrade

After blasting the planet apart, Lyra turned and left. Other mining ships would come later to mine it, either pushing chunks of rock away with thrusters as if capturing asteroids, bringing a Smelting Platform nearby, or simply releasing Little Grey for nanomining.

Whether one method or several were used, this style of mining was far more efficient than flying ships into a planet and slowly digging away inside it.

Such mining methods had once been unimaginable. The power of a Level 4 Civilization was displayed here in full. Seeing an entire planet shatter, some elderly people could not help recalling Silver Mist, whom humanity had encountered when it first ventured into the stars. If they had possessed such means back then, a single shot could have wiped out Silver Mist.

After destroying that planet, Lyra headed for other planets and kept blasting them apart. Any planet humanity set its sights on could not escape being shattered by a single shot and turned into mineral deposits floating through space.

Of course, Lyra did not continue wreaking destruction without restraint. After blowing up five planets, it had more or less met certain resource demands and temporarily stopped. Yes, only temporarily. At that point, humanity had yet to complete the upgrade of its Level 4 Civilization creations, so capabilities such as space transportation had not yet been fully realized.

For that very reason, humanity's first step after acquiring resources through mining was to mass-produce new manufacturing and transportation tools: transport ships, mining ships, engineering ships, and so on, all capable of Warp Speed Travel. Once those had been built, it would further expand mining operations and improve resource-gathering efficiency before moving on to upgrades for Residential Spaceships, Biosphere Spaceships, large equipment transport ships, and more.

Humanity would not discard its obsolete Residential Spaceships