Humanity is missing, luckily I have billions of clones.

Chapter 164 Price
Although a Jupiter aircraft requires four clones to operate, plus the transfer platform, the Jupiter to satellite transfer fleet, etc., the total number of clones required reaches about 4, which seems to be a large team, but compared with the previous series of processes such as nuclear fission fuel mining and refining, the manpower required is still greatly reduced.

That would have required tens of millions of clones to maintain. Now, not to mention the rest, the manpower alone has been reduced to a dozen times less than before.

The reduction in losses in other areas is incalculable.

After the Jupiter aircraft entered the atmosphere of Jupiter, the first batch of transfer platforms named "Xuanniao" by Li Qingsong were also put into use.

The Xuanniao is also an intra-atmospheric aircraft, but unlike the Jupiter aircraft, it has a larger mass and volume.

It looked a bit like an aircraft carrier from the Earth era, with a huge, flat apron and runway at the top, and below the apron were numerous facilities and living spaces for clones.

Its total length reaches 1 kilometer, its width reaches 200 meters, and its total mass is hundreds of thousands of tons, which is dozens of times larger than an Earth-class battleship.

Such a behemoth is suspended in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, relying on a huge fan driven by a nuclear fusion reactor to blow endless amounts of Jupiter's atmosphere downwards to maintain its own suspended state.

Li Qingsong built 500 such "Xuanniao" aircraft, and then distributed them in the mining area according to a roughly uniform geometric structure.

Therefore, these Xuanniao aircraft became the distribution point for Jupiter aircraft.

A Jupiter plane completed its flight in Jupiter's lower atmosphere and collected enough deuterium. It would then increase its thrust and climb to the Xuanniao platform at an altitude of 30,000 meters on Jupiter. According to the tradition of the Earth era, Li Qingsong regarded the area in Jupiter's atmosphere where the pressure was one standard atmospheric pressure of the Earth as the "surface" of Jupiter, and landed on this long runway.

After landing, the Jupiter aircraft will move to a suitable parking position, and then there will be two passages connecting to the Jupiter aircraft.

One channel connects to the gas storage tank of the Jupiter aircraft, which collects the deuterium gas collected by the Jupiter aircraft for temporary storage. Another channel connects to the cockpit of the Jupiter aircraft for clones to enter and exit. At the same time, it also collects garbage, excrement, etc. in the Jupiter aircraft, and then replenishes it with fuel, water, food and other supplies.

The clones that have been flying the Jupiter plane for a whole day will leave the plane and enter the Xuanniao platform for rest. The clones who are taking over the shift will enter the Jupiter plane and take off again with the Jupiter plane that has completed the supply and collected the deuterium, and dive into the lower atmosphere of Jupiter to continue collecting deuterium there.

Li Qingsong deployed 500 Xuanniao platforms, and there are 10 Jupiter aircraft, so on average one Xuanniao platform has to serve 200 Jupiter aircraft.

On average, a Jupiter aircraft returns to the Xuanniao platform every 24 hours.

So on average, about eight or nine Jupiter aircraft land or take off every hour, and the huge Xuanniao platform is a busy scene.

But this is not all the work of the Xuanniao platform. In addition to the Jupiter plane that continuously sends deuterium gas, there will also be heavy transport ships landing from outer space to transport the deuterium away.

Every day, the Xuanniao platform collects about 108 tons of deuterium gas. Excluding its own losses, there will be about 3000 tons left in a month.

So every month, a huge spaceship would arrive at the port, bringing in supplies and taking away the 3000 tons of deuterium gas, which would be transported back to the main distribution center on Ganymede for further distribution.

They will either flow into the power plants on Ganymede via the space elevator, or take short-distance spacecraft to other satellites, or take long-distance heavy cargo ships to other planets.

Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn, Vesta, Ceres, and so on and so forth.

Deuterium gas from Jupiter supports Li Qingsong's entire industrial system and the industrial operations of the entire solar system.

But this is not without cost, as the environment in Jupiter's cloud layer is too harsh.

Even weaker thunderstorms on Jupiter can be hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the strongest thunderstorms on Earth.

Not to mention supersonic hurricanes, which occur every day.

There will be hail on it, but the largest hail on Earth is about the size of a watermelon, enough to kill a person, but no more destructive than that.

But it's different here on Jupiter.

Hailstones as big as stones can also reach extremely high speeds under strong winds, and can even reach supersonic speeds, comparable to artillery shells.

And the number is so large that once it happens, it will be overwhelming and there will be nowhere to hide.

If a piece of hailstone like this hits you, it would not just kill a person, it would be a tragedy of plane crashing and people dying.

Crucially, Jupiter's cloud layer is incredibly complex, making weather forecasting at least 10,000 times more difficult than on Earth. Even with Li Qingsong's specially built supercomputer and a specially trained weather AI called "Dragon God," the accuracy of his predictions remains very low.

So this kind of thing often happens: a Jupiter plane is flying well and everything is calm, but the next moment, the Jupiter plane suddenly sinks without warning and falls directly into the depths of Jupiter, where it is swallowed by the thick atmosphere and the plane is completely destroyed and all the people on board die.

That's wind shear, a sudden change in airflow or density that makes it impossible for the Jupiter plane to fly normally.

Or the weather might be clear one moment and overcast the next, with lightning bolts falling from the sky like tree roots, leaving nowhere to hide. Once struck by lightning, the Jupiter plane would be instantly destroyed.

Or the next moment, there will be dense, countless hailstones flying at supersonic speed, which will directly smash the entire plane into pieces.

There were countless similar drastic weather changes. Even with Li Qingsong's current technology, an average of 10 Jupiter aircraft would crash every day due to weather conditions.

However, the Xuanniao platform is located at a high altitude where the air is thin, so it is not so dangerous.

That's not all the danger.

In addition to the changeable weather, there are also communication and equipment failures caused by Jupiter's strong magnetic field, which also results in an average of one Jupiter aircraft crashing every day.

And another environmental problem that Li Qingsong couldn't solve: gravity.

Jupiter's gravity is too high. Whether it is the clones in the Jupiter plane or the clones in the Xuanniao platform, they will suffer from the gravity of about 2.5 times that of the earth at all times.

A clone weighing 70kg weighs 175kg here, which is equivalent to each clone carrying a sandbag weighing 100kg while doing various tasks.

(End of this chapter)