The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 356: Cannon-launched Missiles
The main gun of the escort star scorpion and some later used large-scale biological electromagnetic railgun structures most commonly use a thick and long rod-shaped pure kinetic energy projectile, which is composed of multiple layers of hard exoskeleton containing special metal ions.

The extremely high relative speed and near-vacuum operating environment mean that kinetic bullets do not need a sharp head to enhance penetration, nor a streamlined profile to reduce resistance. The shape concept of the projectile is also different.

While the terrifying relative speed brings devastating lethality, it also means that a considerable amount of energy will be released in the impact. If it is a smaller meteorite or projectile, it will most likely vaporize directly into a ball of plasma.

The Whipple shields on various early spacecrafts were originally used for this purpose - to prevent the impact of some tiny particles of space debris. The enemy's special spaced armor is actually a derivative protection solution against directed energy weapons.

Therefore, the mass of the projectile cannot be made too small, but it cannot be too large either - the larger the mass, the more difficult it is to accelerate it to a higher speed. The first priority is to reduce the mass of the projectile as much as possible while causing sufficient damage.

A rod-shaped warhead can solve some of the problems relatively easily - a rod that is long enough allows the front end to be completely vaporized into plasma due to impact, while the rear end still has a certain killing ability, causing deeper and more deadly penetration.

And in this way, the damage caused by the entire projectile will be spread more widely, similar to the cavity effect caused by the tumbling of the warhead of a small-caliber bullet, causing greater and more shocking damage - even directly crashing into smaller enemy ships and disintegrating them in mid-air.

But this is still not enough to solve all the problems - for example, the most fatal one is the accuracy problem caused by the initial velocity of the bullet.

Unlike directed energy weapons that travel at the speed of light and can only avoid being hit by evading the enemy's aiming, kinetic weapons require a certain amount of lead time to be fired, but in this process, the opponent can easily capture the trajectory of the incoming projectile and evade it.

The distance at the astronomical unit level means that "a slight mistake can lead to a huge difference" is no longer an exaggerated warning, but an established fact - with just a slight deviation, an incoming kinetic bomb can be easily avoided.

Making the physical projectile as hidden as possible and reducing the distance at which it can be located by the enemy is a feasible way, but this raises another problem - physical artillery shells always require a certain amount of calibration, and more accurate shooting parameters can be calculated by observing the landing point of the projectile.

Later machine gun ammunition chains were often mixed with special tracer bullets that could leave a ballistic track behind them, which made it easier to determine the landing point and serve as a calibration tool. In the era of naval artillery battles, different dyes were loaded into the shells of each ship, making it easier to distinguish the water column produced by the landing point of the shells when focusing fire on the target for calibration operations.

Previously, Lin Yi had experimented with a method on the biological electromagnetic main gun carried by the escort star scorpion, which was to install a special reflective structure at the tail of the projectile, which could scatter the starlight into an extremely special spectral band, and then observe and receive it by an equally special compound eye structure.

But the effect was not very good. In addition, the positioning of the escort star scorpion changed further. Lin Yi simply gave up this method and turned to the path of reducing costs and increasing quantity.

However, the Anomalocaris nest now has a different strategy based on the new space-grade large-scale axis-based electromagnetic railgun.

These most common rod-shaped killing bombs have a small amount of interlayer living cell tissue, forming a spatial synaptic nerve structure for positioning, which is connected to the huge spatial synaptic network. In the spatial synaptic network of the nest group, each grade individual equipped with spatial synapses is a node, and the relative distance and position between other nodes can be easily determined.

Compared with sophisticated electronic components, through special anti-overload structure, this series of spatial synapse structures can fully withstand the powerful force brought by the terrifying initial velocity of the electromagnetic cannon projectile when it leaves the barrel, and continue to maintain its positioning. The cost of the shell itself does not increase too much, and the approach of large quantity and full supply is also feasible.

But that's not all - the initial velocity of the electromagnetic gun can be simply changed by adjusting the power. Therefore, another concept, which is not advanced but has been improved with advanced technology, has been proposed again - the gun-launched missile.

In later land battles, gun-launched missiles were first used in short-barreled artillery with low chamber pressure, which could give the missiles a certain initial launch velocity, save the use of propellant, and bring a longer range or a larger warhead charge.

In terms of design concept, the concept of the gun-launched missile suitable for the electromagnetic railgun has not changed much. The goal is still to strengthen the structural strength of the missile as much as possible so that it can be fired at a higher initial velocity.

There is no interference from gravity, air resistance, etc. in space, and the force of inertia of objects is infinitely amplified. This increased initial velocity can save a large amount of propellant and can support the missile to perform more intense probability cloud maneuvers or simply more flexible changes of direction. The improvement is undoubtedly huge.

The missiles used by it still roughly maintain the structure of the right-angle stone, that is, the working fluid and charge integrated fusion-fission hybrid structure. It is just larger in size and has some details optimized to cope with the initial velocity of electromagnetic orbital acceleration.

As per convention, since it is still largely based on the Stratofortress-class light-second missile, a new series is not created, but it is simply named "Stratofortress II" as a subsequent model of the same series as the Stratofortress.

This does allow the Space Hurd Shrimp, a highly specialized biological warship that can be described as "molded around a gun", to play a certain role at the distance of battleships, but its specific positioning still requires further experiments.

When a new grade is added, what kind of tactics should be adopted, whether it can completely replace the existing grades, and if not, how to match it with the existing grades are all results that can only be obtained through trial and error.

However, with the current productivity, such experiments that require large-scale combat exercises are basically small-scale. In this environment where resources are open, breakthroughs in application field technologies are not difficult.

After all, even the Ezkim civilization is still in the initial exploration stage of space warfare and has not fully tapped the full potential of existing technology. After crossing the river by feeling the stone, with the joint efforts of many parties, it is only a matter of time before it surpasses.

After the matter here was resolved, on the other side, the carpet search of the underground world of Dikla Star in the Tianyuan Four System finally locked the approximate location of the target's "body". The final encirclement and extermination was about to begin.

(End of this chapter)