As Oasis City's industry developed, the Captain wanted to return to space to establish contact with survivors from other star systems.
The best option would be to go to the planet of human origin that no one had ever visited, the holy land of civilization, the pearl of the universe, one of the legendary Twelve Heavens Worlds, the capital of the UEG—Earth.
To fight alongside the elites there and defend against humanity's great enemy.
However, Pastor Anderson, Lieutenant Colonel Sato, and the first City Lord Ke'er were strongly against this plan.
They developed a deep fear of the universe, believing that it was humanity's desire for exploration that attracted the great enemy, pushing themselves to the brink of extinction.
If humans had never entered space, perhaps they would still be living comfortably in a corner of Earth!
But now?
Similar foolish acts must never be repeated on Li Star!
The differences grew wider and were difficult to bridge.
Finally, in 2901, with the help of Lieutenant Colonel Sato and Pastor Anderson, the first City Lord Ke'er incited his supporters to begin an armed seizure of power.
The seizure of power quickly escalated into civil war.
The citizens who supported Ke'er rapidly spiraled out of control.
To completely abandon the idea of going to space, they did not hesitate to blow up the golden age spaceship that the survivors had originally taken to Li Star.
At the same time, the citizens' ideas became increasingly paranoid, transforming in just two weeks from opposing space travel to opposing all scientific research, all high-tech products, and even companion robots that could provide immense happiness.
After blowing up the golden age spaceship, the citizens also occupied the industrial vessel, first starting to delete database information. Later, feeling this wasn't enough, they simply planned to blow up the vessel, intending to destroy the city's industrial lifeline along with it!
Fortunately, the Captain reacted in time, fighting alongside his trusted subordinates. After suffering significant casualties, they finally recaptured the industrial vessel.
They urgently refueled the zero element reactor on the vessel with enough zero element for takeoff, allowing the industrial vessel to enter synchronous orbit under bombardment and escape the war.
For the next decade or so, the Captain closely monitored Oasis City below.
To his surprise, the damage caused by the civil war and the ideology of actively lowering the level of civilization far exceeded expectations.
Oasis City's technological level regressed to the Industrial Revolution era.
Lieutenant Colonel Sato, disheartened, decided to take a portion of the people to the depths of the Desert to live a life of unrestrained freedom.
They later developed into the Stormwind Gang.
The first City Lord Ke'er became the first City Lord, dissolving the citizen council overnight and abolishing the mayoral election system in favor of primogeniture.
The dozen or so people who supported him the most were granted the title of "City Heroes" and became the first generation of nobles.
Pastor Anderson was the most abstract. He felt that the religion he originally believed in was not effective enough in persuading the public, so he decided to combine some golden age interstellar archaeological discoveries to create a completely new religion, becoming the leader himself and writing the doctrines himself.
The Captain despaired.
Seeing that the food stored on the industrial vessel was about to run out, this loyal UEG official and his supporters sat around the star map table, with infinite longing for Earth, the golden age paradise planet, and vented the air from the vessel, gradually falling unconscious and dying.
"Doing this should slow down the rate of equipment aging. Perhaps the future Oasis City will suddenly awaken, and when they decide to return to the universe and look for this vessel, they will have to spend less effort on repairs."
"Alas..." Black Smoke sighed, "Rest in peace, buddy, at least you tried."
"What a waste!" Jubian couldn't help but curse, feeling regretful.
"That was a golden age vessel! Even if it was just a civilian ship, its energy and power must have been unimaginably advanced, at least a vacuum zero-point energy reactor and a warp drive! They actually blew it up..."
As someone in the relevant industry, he couldn't stand such anti-intellectual behavior.
Lu Yuan also felt emotional, but unlike players who focused on experiencing the "game plot," his focus was elsewhere.
"How did the Captain monitor Oasis City?"
"Through the advanced optoelectronic equipment and high-power synthetic aperture radar on the vessel, which were originally used for planetary mineral exploration," Nan Guo de Xue replied.
"Was the radar on for three hundred years?"
"No, to save power, it was shut down after the Captain committed suicide. Only the communication interception system remained on."
"So that means... communications between Apollo's various stations were also being monitored all along?"
The players were stunned for a few seconds.
"Right!"
Jubian was the first to react.
He went to the communicator's station on the bridge and pulled up the radio communication records.
"Confirmed! Over the past year, interstellar radio communications have come from three different directions: Li Star, the moon, and deep space. The latter two locations correspond to Apollo's satellite station and wormhole station. The communication delay between Li Star and the satellite station is 2.2 seconds, while the delay with the wormhole station reaches 12 hours."
Communication delay is often overlooked because the communication distance is usually not far enough.
People who play games on American servers have a deeper understanding of this; the delay is always above 100 milliseconds, making it difficult to win gunfights.
Some streamers think this is because of insufficient bandwidth or poor accelerators, but that's not the case. The length of submarine optical cables exceeds 10,000 kilometers, and it takes 70 milliseconds for light to travel back and forth, not to mention that the signal transmission speed in optical fibers cannot reach the speed of light in a vacuum.
The 12-hour communication delay between the Apollo wormhole station and Li Star means it takes 6 hours to reach there at the speed of light, a straight-line distance of 6.5 billion kilometers, greater than Neptune's orbital radius.
Coupled with the ability to determine the direction of the radio waves, the wormhole entrance in the Li Star System was thus located.
In the future, that will be the starting point for players to reclaim the entire star sea!
Next, as long as we get the technical parameters of Apollo's space fighters, we can know how quickly the Apollo reinforcements from the wormhole station can arrive, providing crucial basis for military plans!
Hopefully Ye Xing and Caoyuan can pull through!
"Any other intelligence?"
"Yes! From the communication content, Apollo's so-called satellite station is actually a mining facility. They've done a lot of infrastructure work there and are already mining Helium-3!"
Excellent!
Now, the source of nuclear fuel is also settled.
Your mining facility is doing well, but unfortunately, it probably won't always be yours.
"In addition, Apollo permanently stations 7 to 10 space fighters at the Helium-3 mining facility, while there are usually only two or three on the surface of Li Star. This might be due to Li Star's high gravity, which makes takeoff and landing costly."
Lu Yuan pondered for a moment.
"That is to say, we can first try to take down the satellite station and seize the Helium-3 mine there."
"Huh, that's not right," Guo Li Cheng thought she heard wrong, "Boss, there are clearly more air forces over there. You're going against the odds..."
Lu Yuan glanced at her.
"Apollo looks down on us a lot and definitely won't expect us to have the capability to launch a space offensive. The satellite station is likely more relaxed than Oasis City, and we can catch them off guard."
"That... that's true!"
If they can first launch a surprise attack and take down the satellite station, the number of reinforcements Apollo can dispatch in the future will decrease.
On the other hand, if they attack Oasis City first, the satellite station will receive an alert and go into high alert. Fighters can arrive in three hours to bomb.
At that time, fighting them on the ground, it's really hard to say who can beat whom.
"It's not that easy either."
Jubian heard the plan and issued a reminder from a professional perspective.
"Our aerospace plane is radar stealthy, but it cannot completely eliminate infrared signals. Outer space is not as warm as the atmosphere; it's very cold, and any heat-emitting object will be very conspicuous. According to my estimation, even a 21st-century level IRST infrared search and track system can detect our approach at a distance of 80 to 100 kilometers."
The average temperature of the universe is minus 270 degrees Celsius, only 3 degrees above absolute zero. This is the "afterglow" of the Big Bang and is still decreasing very slowly.
As long as a spacecraft's "body temperature" is higher than this temperature, it's like a light, and it can theoretically be observed with passive optoelectronic equipment.
"Perhaps, we can use solar interference as cover."
Nan Guo de Xue suddenly spoke, saying softly from the side.