The clusters of space crystals wandering through the New World's cosmos truly counted as a natural disaster. For ordinary merchant ships and exploration vessels, encountering them was like stumbling upon a pack of wolves in the wilderness, unarmed and alone. Death was all but certain.
That was because space crystals had an extremely strong tendency to absorb and fuse with existing energy weapons, making such weapons largely ineffective against them.
In the future, after the exploration teams of the various nations had encountered space crystal clusters many times, their research departments tried to make use of this property and came up with a crystalline anti-energy armor. By the time Yu Lian had traveled back, the armor had already entered testing. It would be only two or three years before it officially entered service.
The problem was that most armed merchant ships and exploration vessels carried energy weapons as the bulk of their limited armaments, in order to save space aboard ship.
Furthermore, space crystals had a fairly simple means of attack, but it was exceptionally powerful. They could accelerate their bodies to sublight speeds comparable to a railgun projectile, then ram straight into their prey.
More importantly, if the collision succeeded, the prey ship would certainly be destroyed, with all hands lost, while the crystal itself would also be smashed to pieces. But for an entire space crystal colony, that was a perfectly acceptable cost. As long as it could replenish itself with the high-quality alloys from all those ships, it could split and produce more crystals.
By that logic, if space crystals counted as living organisms, they had to be organisms with a gestalt consciousness.
Of course, to armed merchant ships and exploration vessels with insufficient weaponry, they were indeed a natural disaster. But against a large warship that