Chapter 42: Massive Construction
The unprecedentedly massive construction finally began.
Tom invested as many as 50,000 Clones into this construction task.
In addition, Tom was simultaneously carrying out hundreds of other construction tasks.
With the surge in population, industrial capacity, and technological research and development capabilities, the existing hundreds of mining bases were clearly no longer sufficient.
In the next phase, Tom needed to extract more minerals.
Thus, from the remaining 10,000 Clones, Tom dispatched 5,000 Clones, who, riding trains, trucks, excavators, bulldozers, crushers, etc., formed a mighty construction army and set off for the larger, more distant locations that had already been prospected in advance to build new mines there.
Of course, it was just to build the mines; there was no need to start mining yet, as there weren’t enough personnel at the moment.
But it didn’t matter; as soon as the Clone cultivation factories were built, a continuous stream of Clones would be supplemented to get these idle mines operating.
At the same time, railway lines connecting the various bases would also begin construction, and by then, more mineral resources would be smoothly transported to the Main Base.
As a result, the remaining 5,000 Clones were now solely responsible for maintaining the daily operations of the base and producing the materials needed for the massive construction.
In the past, this would absolutely not have been enough; just the planting, breeding, and aquatic product bases alone would have kept all 5,000 Clones busy.
But now, with the completion of informatization reforms, the deployment of millions upon millions of iron-cased chips, and the establishment of a communication network that extended in all directions and connected to every single chip, the productivity of a single Clone had achieved a leapfrog improvement.
Now, only 5,000 Clones were needed to complete all logistical support and daily maintenance tasks.
Thus, the busy construction, affecting every Clone, officially began.
Every day, huge trucks with a load capacity of hundreds of tons transported building materials such as steel plates, glass, screws, rebar, and homemade cement from the Steel Plant and foundries.
At the construction site, thousands of large machines—excavators, bulldozers, mixers, rollers, and the like—worked tirelessly through the night.
Vast quantities of methane and oxygen from the methane mines and oxygen ore were first transported to the processing plant for purification, then delivered to the fuel tanks of one machine after another, driving them to contribute surging power.
Metals from various metal mines, after being cast in smelters and processing plants, became rebar, steel plates, nuts and bolts, connectors, etc., which were rapidly assembled on the already leveled huge construction site.
Coupled with the pouring of homemade cement, factory buildings, following pre-made plans, sprang up like mushrooms after rain on this formerly desolate and silent land.
After the main structure was completed, it was time for interior decoration, wiring, and equipment installation.
In the huge workshops for soilless cultivation, rows of planting racks spread out like a boundless forest.
Bundles of huge electrical wires were laid inside, connecting every fluorescent lamp, their complexity exceeding that of a spider web by tens of millions of times.
In the huge livestock farms for breeding, countless automatic water feeders and automatic dispensers, as well as numerous heating lamps, lighting lamps, and the like, were orderly installed in various isolation compartments, with dense networks of water pipes, electrical wires, and network cables.
In the massive power plant, Tom’s newly developed supercritical generator sets had already been installed.
The heat generated by the combustion of organic matter such as tolin and methane combined with oxygen caused the water in the boiler to enter a supercritical state under high temperature and high pressure.
Supercritical water, when driving the turbine to rotate, would possess higher efficiency and more stable working conditions, while also being able to drive larger generator sets.
The generators Tom prepared for the Clone cultivation factory cluster had a single unit installed capacity of 300,000 kilowatts, meaning they could generate 300,000 kilowatt-hours per hour.
Tom installed a total of five such generators.
For this power plant, Tom even specially prepared a railway line to transport pre-processed tolin, methane, oxygen, and other materials.
Another huge factory was the culture medium preparation factory.
If 100,000 Clones were produced annually, and each Clone consumed 3 tons of culture medium, this factory would consume 300,000 tons of culture medium per year.
This clearly required a specialized factory to adopt a certain automated, large-scale production model, rather than the previous manual-like operation.
At the same time, this also made it easier for Tom to control the quality of the culture medium and ensure more stable production.
At this factory, Tom built a huge storage tank, which was 30 meters high and 60 meters in diameter—a truly colossal structure.
The culture medium from the preparation factory would first be stored here and then connected to the Clone cultivation factory through pipelines.
Once the cultivation season arrived, the used culture medium in the cultivation tanks would be drained, and after cleaning the tanks, the fresh culture medium would be automatically filled into the cultivation tanks for a new round of cultivation.
At the core of the numerous and complex supporting factories was Tom’s most valued core factory, the Clone cultivation factory.
The main building of this Clone cultivation factory was 100 meters high, divided into 30 floors, each with an area of 5,000 square meters, further divided into 200 individual cultivation rooms.
Each cultivation room had 10 cultivation tanks, so one floor could cultivate 2,000 Clones.
In addition to the 25 cultivation floors, there were five floors serving as equipment rooms, rest rooms, inspection rooms, exchange rooms, and the like.
After the Clones completed their cultivation and were finally born, they would undergo a series of procedures here, such as physical examinations, intelligence tests, and initial feeding, before leaving the facility.
Everything was a streamlined production process.
In this building, Tom installed a total of 300,000 iron-cased chips, making it the building with the highest degree of automation and informatization.
Even with Tom’s extremely high efficiency, the construction of this massive factory cluster took a full year to complete.
The production of Clone culture medium had been completed, and the collected Monster Birds bodily fluids had also been filtered and purified, mixed into these culture media, and then transported into the empty huge cultivation tanks.
The first batch of 50,000 sample cells had been collected and individually placed into the cultivation tanks by the Clones.
Under the roar of the giant generators in the power plant, and with the support of this surging electricity, 50,000 high-quality Clones slowly developed.