Stendhal also found time to bury his companions' bodies beneath Orange Star's sand.
After he covered the fifteen pits with dry sand, a gust swept across the level ground. In the blink of an eye, even Stendhal could no longer tell exactly where his colleagues were buried.
The man then displayed unparalleled willpower, continuing to gather supplies outdoors in a protective suit weighing fifteen kilograms.
Meanwhile, the four robotic vehicles controlled by Luo Qi brought in quite a haul.
Damaged metal support frames +1 +1 +1...
Damaged superconducting wires +1 +1 +1...
Leftover solar panel fragments +1 +1 +1...
Slightly damaged solar panels +1 +1 +1... 124 panels in total.
It felt a little like earning experience points by killing monsters. The nonstop search drained the four robotic vehicles' batteries from 100% to 30%, but their batteries could be swapped out quickly, so there was no need to waste precious time waiting for them to recharge.
The base now had 124 usable solar panels, and its electricity supply and consumption were beginning to approach a balance.
That meant Luo Qi no longer had to worry so much about the robotic vehicles stopping work. He ran them at full capacity for all twenty-eight hours of the day, swapping their batteries immediately whenever they ran low.
At night, Luo Qi also spent an hour specifically servicing and inspecting the robotic vehicles.
The uncanny part was that one robotic vehicle was servicing another.
It was easy to imagine one person giving another a massage, but one robotic vehicle servicing another could be frightening, readily bringing an Intelligent Machines crisis to mind.
Three days of scavenging scrap passed in a flash.
Outside the ruined base, a large spread of battered solar panels now faced the sunlight at crooked angles.
Their total had reached 206.
Luo Qi had already explored an area of ten thousand square meters. Continuing would cost more than it gained and waste time.
The robotic vehicles had also recovered most of the objects blown away by the shock wave. Metal wreckage twisted into all sorts of shapes lay piled outside the main control base.
It made the entire research base look like an abandoned scrapyard.
There was no sign of an extraterrestrial base here, only junk.
As the recovery work on the perimeter drew to a close, Luo Qi assigned three robotic vehicles to dismantle the base's protective panels inside. He was preparing to build a new protected area.
First, they would remove the foundation panels from the two destroyed sections. The new base section would be built two hundred meters to the east.
Luo Qi named it No. 1. As for directions, Orange Star's magnetic field was so weak that compasses were completely useless. This also meant Orange Star could not withstand solar storms and protect its own atmosphere.
Luo Qi therefore used the planet's rotational axis as the vertical X-axis and the sunrise-to-sunset axis as the horizontal Y-axis. He then designated sunrise as east, with north at the top and south at the bottom.
The main workforce building No. 1 consisted of the robotic vehicles and Stendhal. The man who had started out as a mascot had become a model worker, diligently applying himself.
No. 1 would serve as the storage area for servers transferred from the main base. It would be a hemispherical room ten meters in diameter, with a floor area of roughly seventy-eight square meters.
The research base's internal structures consisted first of a grid of square frames that provided stability, followed by five-centimeter-thick metal sandwich panels fitted into those frames.
The metal sandwich panels were formed by filling the space between two metal sheets with gel. The gel contained liquid gel that could actively seal minor damage.
During dismantling, the metal sandwich panels could be removed simply by undoing the screws securing them to the frames.
For badly damaged metal sandwich panels, a liquid-oxygen-and-liquid-hydrogen torch was used to heat the metal sheets and separate them from the gel.
The metal fragments were useful, and so was the salvaged gel. It could be used to repair damage to other metal sandwich panels.
All they had to do was pack enough hardened gel into a hole and heat it with a flame. The gel would soften and seal the opening.
Robotic Vehicles 3 and No. 4 continued dismantling foundation panels to supply materials.
Robotic Vehicle 5 assisted Stendhal, using its mechanical arm to position two-meter-long anchoring pins at calculated points while Stendhal swung a sledgehammer.
Each foundation panel required four anchoring pins roughly two meters long to be driven into the ground, arranged in a one-by-one-meter square.
Once the anchoring pins were driven in and the foundation frame was positioned, the foundation panel could be laid down and secured with sealing screws.
All four edges of each foundation panel had a rubber layer. Fitting them tightly together prevented gas leaks, though the procedure also required an application of gel.
Luo Qi calculated their progress. With the current workforce, No. 1 was expected to be completed in four days.
As construction proceeded step by step, Luo Qi divided his attention to researching industrial production capacity.
He browsed the database and discovered that it contained no weapons-related data at all.
Luo Qi thought, It seems Water Blue Star is still wary of artificial intelligences that leave its jurisdiction. But knowledge is the most powerful weapon of all.
The base was currently a field of ruins with no production equipment. Weapons were out of the question.
He turned his attention to recycling metal scrap. To build up production capacity, he first had to smelt iron and steel.
There were currently two ways to process and produce metal.
One was fuel-based smelting, the ordinary method of burning coal to make steel.
But where the hell was he supposed to find coal on Orange Star?
The base currently had two compressed gases, hydrogen and oxygen, which could be mixed into a combustible gas. However, the quantities were pitifully small. Once they were gone, there would be no more, making this unsuitable for long-term development.
As for electrolyzing water, one look at how dry Orange Star was made it clear that water would be difficult to collect. That would require traveling to Orange Star's north and south poles, gathering solid ice from the ice sheets, then breaking it down into hydrogen and oxygen.
But the base was on Orange Star's equator.
The distance alone, more than a thousand kilometers, made Luo Qi abandon fuel-based smelting.
The second method was an electromagnetic heating coil.
Electricity and magnetism were inseparable.
Conductive wires would be arranged in a specific configuration. Once the device was switched on, the current passing through those specially arranged wires could concentrate and strengthen the electromagnetic field.
Invisible magnetic field lines would cut rapidly through the metal's molecules, while electrons struck those molecules at high speed. Collisions between particles would release enormous amounts of heat, easily melting steel. The problem was that it consumed a great deal of electricity.
Still, it was the most sensible direction for development at present. Luo Qi had a Power Storage Station, transformers, superconducting wires, and solar panels.
It looks like I can only take the second route. A slow start is fine. I have enough life ahead of me.
As long as I reach the required production capacity within three months, it will be enough to defend against the arrival of Water Blue Star's humans.
Luo Qi allocated one server's computing power and began calculating an electromagnetic heating model.
Electromagnetism, as one of the Fundamental Cosmic Forces, was ridiculously powerful.
Whether it was an electromagnetic weapon system in the development of a technological civilization, the confinement field for Controllable Nuclear Fusion, or an energy weapon, all of them required it.
Using the Water Blue Star data stored on the servers, along with the physics he had learned on Earth, Luo Qi designed a metal-processing method best suited to the base's current circumstances.
The Electromagnetic Melting Furnace can process the vast majority of industrial metals. That will let me recycle scrap metal.
And the good news is that Orange Star is a rocky planet, with its entire surface covered in sand and soil. The yellow sand and soil have a reddish tint because they contain large amounts of iron oxide.
Orange Star has 0.9 times Water Blue Star's volume, a similar crustal composition, and the same mineral elements.
The environment appeared highly suitable for development. As Luo Qi quietly worked through his calculations, he drew on the existing reserves of Water Blue Star's technological data and his understanding of physics from his previous life on Earth.
He successfully organized his knowledge, progressing from applications of [introductory electromagnetism] to applications of [elementary electromagnetism].
He was viewing the world from the shoulders of two giants, enjoying an enormous advantage.
Building generators and using metal wires both belonged to introductory electromagnetism.
Elementary electromagnetism already involved applying electromagnetic fields and exploiting the different advantages offered by varying magnitudes, frequencies, and voltages.
[Elementary electromagnetism] gave Luo Qi numerous ideas for electromagnetic applications.
Before you continue