Will the kemonomimi encounter Alien Ranch Story?

"Yes, Rhodes Island is one of them. However, Rhodes Island is a mining command ship, equipped with drones and a helipad, as well as a control AI. Its main function is to direct other units' operations and launch drones for mining exploration."

The doctor explained, "Other heavy mining ships might be larger than Rhodes Island's, or they might be smaller. But if they have mining systems available on board, we'll be in big trouble. You can understand that, right?"

“I completely understand!” Because the super equipment in Kazdel is still the civilian industrial equipment of the Covenant. Ursus even used a shipborne power plant to power the cutting equipment they found so that it could be used as weapons.

Even if the Terran ancestors were relatively weak, their mining equipment could probably destroy most of the active landships, but most of these things don't have a very long lifespan or are in good condition, so the Terran were reluctant to use them.

It's reasonable to assume that Letania might also possess such units, but they simply wouldn't use them lightly. However, if Kazdel launches a counterattack, and they reach the point of annihilation, the outcome becomes uncertain.

Don't let it turn out that "Laetania's open-pit mine laser has dealt you XXXX points of damage" and your flagship is gone; that wouldn't be a funny joke at all.

Of course, Letania had already experienced the infamous scene of "Covenant agricultural drones launching charge shockwave 3D bombs that caused XXXX points of electromagnetic damage to you" beforehand, so as the instigator, she was naturally worried that the other side would do the same to her.

Chapter Fifty-Six: The Karak Scoundrel

Chapter 56

If the Great Yan and Victoria were a unified empire, then Ursus was more similar to the Shinra Empire on Earth, or the Tsarist Russia with its Soviet Union structure. It consisted of roughly three principalities, each with considerable autonomy.

There are four army groups. The reason why there are four army groups in three duchies is that one of them is dedicated to defending against the northern demons, and the rest are assigned to one army group in each duchy.

Compared to the Holy Roman Empire, it lacked the system of electors, with the Principality of St. Martin-in-the-Fortuna serving as emperor and central authority, making it closer to a centralized empire in this respect. However, compared to the Soviet Union, it was a standard Tsarist system.

Nobles and mayors at all levels have considerable military and political autonomy. Due to the vastness of Ursus's territory and its harsh environment, local authorities must have considerable autonomy to maintain normal governance.

Of the three principalities, the one in the central and western part is locked in a fierce battle with Kazimir, or more accurately, the one equipped with Ulyanov-class fortress ships is pressing Kazimir down.

Even with the introduction of a small number of Kazdel weapons and warhorses, the latter could not prevent the front line from shifting a distance toward the capital after each battle.

Meanwhile, the troops of the Principality of Santo Romain were locked in a stalemate with Colombia, both sides exhausted, with Colombia fighting on its own soil.

However, the harsh environment of the Sami snowfield is also a major problem for Colombians, not to mention that they also have to devote their energy to protecting the south of Bolivar in order to deal with the increasingly intense national independence movement in Bolivar.

The Duchy of Kosiché was the site of the fiercest fighting. However, ever since Letania entered the Duchy of Kosiché, occupied the fertile plains, and began to venture deeper into the snowfields... General Winter inflicted tons of casualties on them.

They thought they could quickly deal with Kazdel and free up their resources to surround Ursus, but Kazdel turned out to be another endless source of bloodshed. Not only that, but large-scale Gallic uprisings and Gallic restoration organizations, as well as guerrillas, were active in southwestern Letania.

The original Kingdom of Gaul was located at the intersection of the four kingdoms of Victoria, Casimir, Letania, and Ursus. After the War of the Four Emperors, it was divided among Ursus, Victoria, and Letania. Ursus was given its relatively underdeveloped northern border region, while the southern industrial area was occupied by Victoria.

The central agricultural region was acquired by Letania, while the last remaining scattered territory was temporarily administered by Laterano as a neutral buffer zone.

The Gauls' fickleness put immense pressure on the Letanians, who were unwilling to relinquish what they had already gained.

However, they couldn't kill all the Gauls, so they had to find a way to bring back the Gauls from the front lines and keep them under their control.

This has resulted in a reduction in frontline troops, and an additional portion of troops must be devoted to guarding these troops who have become disloyal. Leitania's forces are already stretched thin.

After two years of fighting, the output of the Kazdel territory controlled by Letania was zero. There were no residents, no industry, no agriculture, only endless sniping and cannon fire. They had to retreat to the safer border anchorage and rely on the fleet and fortresses to maintain their presence in Kazdel as a thin barrier separating the Kazdel army from their own country.

"Rumble—" The tracks rolled over the land of Longnan Desert, and it took a lot of effort to get this land-based ship, named "Abaddon-class Armored Tactical Ship", out of the Longmen port. Longmen was unwilling to let such a thing in, and in the end, they had to find connections to barely get it into the Longnan Desert area through a specially opened surveillance channel.

Following the ancient trade route, they plunged into the territory of the Principality of Kosiché. As a practical test, the Leitanian fleet here was relatively weak, or rather, Leitania had deployed more land ships and mobile fortresses here.

However, Kosich had a considerable amount of equipment and warships at its disposal, so its losses were much greater than those in the southern theater, and the fleet dared not remain stationary in one place.

In that case, it would be the Black Serpent's fleet's turn to rumble and scatter the Letanian armored forces and infantry.

"Voyage Log: Today is the eleventh day of our voyage. We have entered the Longnan Desert and are still one day away from reaching the border town of Tarkov on the Ursus border. Ursus and Letania have been fighting in this new industrial city for four months. It is a quagmire of despair."

Talulah closed her diary; her role here was that of a mascot, or rather, an annotation for the warships' entry into Ursus territory.

After all, she was still nominally the adopted daughter and heir of the Black Serpent family, so leading troops to defend the king when the enemy was at the gates was a perfectly reasonable reason, wasn't it? When a daughter leads troops to rescue her father from his predicament, even if the Emperor of Ursus was so angry that he vomited blood, he would have nothing to say.

"Whoosh—" The distinctive sharp whooshing sound of the arc engine rang out, and a giant delta-wing aircraft slowly aimed at the main runway on the upper deck of the Abaddon. The landing gear had been lowered, and the manned reconnaissance aircraft landed accurately on the deck. The tail hook caught the arresting cable and continuously slowed down, finally stopping in front of the elevator at the end.

With the help of a towing vehicle, the reconnaissance aircraft entered the elevator platform and slowly sank below the deck. The other reconnaissance aircraft, which took its place, rose from the elevator platform next to it. The deck deflector opened, and accompanied by the roar of electric arc ignition, it was launched into the sky under the action of electromagnetic force.

The wet components and Originium engines used in these large reconnaissance aircraft are so bulky that they cannot perform bombing or dive attacks; they would simply be free kills for the enemy's anti-aircraft guns. Moreover, their payload capacity is not high; once they are filled with casters and wet components, there is not much left.

The Abaddon-class carries 400 individual spell drones (quadcopters) and 35 fire drones (artillery forerunners). The manned aircraft include 3 reconnaissance aircraft and an air command platform. The new gunships have not yet solved the problem of being deployed on the ship; those things are too big and too heavy, and the propulsion system cannot launch them from the deck.

Unlike the agile air superiority fighters on Earth, Terra's aircraft developed in a bizarre direction. After realizing that they really couldn't make dive bombers and attack aircraft, Old Xia and the Doctor gave up. Since they couldn't make agile small planes for two or three people, they decided to go all out and make them bigger.

The prototype displayed at the aviation research institute resembled the B-2 bomber on Earth, but was more than three times larger. Its six bundled arc rocket engines were brutally powerful. After deducting the necessary wet components and a large number of shift-based sorcerers, everyone realized that unless they could develop precision-guided bombs, it would be better to use non-ballistic artillery.

So they installed a tank-use Divine Light Cannon and two Hot Melt Dragon Flame Cannons produced by the Great Flame on the enlarged belly of the aircraft.

Then a new problem arose: it couldn't fly, or more accurately, it couldn't fly from the land-based ship. It was too big and too heavy. The only solution was to wait for the Sky Throne to appear, carry it high into the sky on its back, and then ignite and launch it.

Even a floating warship like the Sky Throne can only carry two of them before there's no extra space or payload.

As you can imagine, this thing is enormous and heavy. On Earth, it would be the kind of thing that designers would hang on an air force base tower for public display.

Sluggish, heavy, with a low payload capacity that allows it to use weapons that consume almost no ammunition, several crews comparable in number to a passenger plane, complex structure, and six crews requiring major overhauls after only three to five flights due to substandard manufacturing processes and materials in their arc rocket engines—

If there's even one F-86 Sabre on the other side, this gunboat, which barely has any armor, would be a sitting duck.

However, Terra has no fighter jets, helicopter-like aircraft cannot fly high, drones are even less able to keep up, and most anti-aircraft guns have insufficient firing altitude. The large and heavy fuselage and non-ballistic weapons result in good shooting accuracy.

Once the problem of how to get it to take off is solved, the Leitanians will be able to enjoy the pleasure of this flying can opener. The "Black Moth," originally planned to be deployed on the Abaddon-class ships, ultimately failed to solve the problem of how to take off from land-based ships, resulting in the Abaddon's gunship hangars being empty.

"Reconnaissance results show that the outskirts of the city have been occupied by the Letanians, while the locals and the principality's army have occupied the customs ports in the central and northern parts of the city, and they are still exchanging fire."

Have you spotted any landships?

"Aerial reconnaissance indicates that neither side has land-based vessels, only a small number of deck vehicles, including tanks and armored vehicles of various classes. However, it should be noted that the Principality's army is using a weapon similar to our thermoelectric weapon..."

The photo shows a weapon that emits two thin blue beams, and it appears to have destroyed a Leitania armored vehicle with a single shot.

However, it appears to be some kind of large vehicle-mounted weapon, and there are not many of them, so they should not pose a threat to the land-based ship.

“We’ll go around from here and cut off the Letanians’ retreat.” Talulah gestured on the map. “This is a farm with open land, and there’s a fuel refinery nearby. If Letanians want to continue their attack, they have to take this place.”

"Is our goal to occupy or to destroy?"

"Occupy the space until all equipment is dismantled; there is still plenty of internal space on the Abbotton."

Since the promised heavy gunboats and heavy attack aircraft are gone, the hangar is so empty it could host a shipboard sports meet. There are also plenty of cutting equipment and cranes, so if it's really going to be forcibly demolished, it shouldn't be a big problem.

"Beyond the refinery, to the west, there are two Originium mines. There should be quite a few Infected and our Reunion Movement comrades lurking nearby. Rescuing them and organizing them can greatly alleviate our manpower shortage problem..."

"Hopefully, this ship won't break down midway." A plethora of new technologies gave the bridge a futuristic feel. From the electronic map in front of Talulah to the various displays, touchscreen systems, and the dense array of radar and measurement data, everything exuded a high-end and sophisticated vibe.

However, in terms of military equipment, this also means that this thing has not undergone any rigorous battlefield testing. It's like a delicate flower in a greenhouse, and no one knows whether it can withstand the harsh winds and frosts of Ursus.

Who knows, at any moment, those power systems built with new materials and technologies will suddenly stop working, and then everyone will have to spend a few weeks in the wasteland to fix the problem.

Of course, from a strategic perspective, this is also a good thing, as it means that a major design or manufacturing defect has been exposed and can be improved on subsequent Abaddon-class warships. This is the significance of the experimental ship.

"Whoosh—" A short alarm sounded from the bridge, then stopped after a while. "What's going on? What happened? In the engine room?"

"A fire just broke out. An inspection revealed that the fire originated from the inner lining foam material. The fire has been extinguished, and engineers are investigating the cause."

On average, one of these minor issues occurred every day after the voyage began. The last problem was an error in the fixed lock parameters. There were no issues during static testing, but slight deformation occurred when encountering common stormy weather.

Although it did not break apart on the spot and throw the reconnaissance aircraft, which was fixed on the deck and waiting to be recovered to the hangar, out of the plane.

However, it also gave everyone a cold sweat, forcing them to stay in place for a day to replace and inspect the equipment, including the track braking system.

Otherwise, if such a huge thing couldn't lock its tracks in a storm and started to slide, that would be a huge problem. It's okay in the wild, but near a city, if this thing weighing tens of thousands of tons crashes into you, it will flatten an entire street!

After stopping the car again and checking for more than an hour, it was found that there was a design problem; most of the inner lining foam material was fine.

However, in several places, because there were multiple heat-generating devices there, the accumulated heat was not dissipated in time by the poorly designed heat dissipation system, and the material was quickly baked to the point of deformation.

The bent and deformed material somehow came into contact with another high-temperature outer shell, and after a while, it ignited. The inner foam lining in that area has now been removed, and the engineers have pulled a section of cable in and installed a powerful water-cooling fan to dissipate the accumulated heat to the heat dissipation area, temporarily solving the problem.

However, the solution to this problem is either to replace the material with a high-temperature resistant one or to modify some of the pipes to avoid a large number of heat pipes being concentrated together, causing localized temperatures to become too high and unable to dissipate.

The fire in the engine room had just been resolved, and the ship hadn't even traveled five kilometers when the alarm on the bridge went off again. This time, not only did the alarm sound, but the entire ship visibly jerked, and the inertia caused everyone on the bridge to lurch forward, barely managing to avoid falling into a heap.

"Report! Right front 1 and right front 2, the power travel mechanism is locked, cause unknown!" This is a big problem. A large group of people rushed to the side to see what was going on.

Engineers rode in a suspended platform out of the base to inspect the massive, skyscraper-like mobile structure. They eventually discovered a large piece of component stuck in the transmission system in an inconspicuous corner. Now, a big question arises: where did this part originally come from?

The most terrifying phenomenon in the repair and maintenance industry has appeared—you've discovered a deformed part that's jamming other machines.

However, after checking for a long time, you find that the whole device works normally after removing it. So where did this part come from? What is it used for? Why can it still work even when it's gone?

This story is terrifying mechanically, because if you don't understand what a part does or what it was originally doing, even if the equipment seems to be working normally now, it might suddenly disintegrate or explode in the next second.

Let alone such a large lump of stuff, even finding a sealing ring or a deformed gasket would give you a cold sweat. It means that something that needs to be sealed is leaking gas. Right now, it's okay because the flammable and explosive gas hasn't reached its "flash point" yet.

Or maybe some high-pressure valve or something is running naked, and who knows, the next second there might be a bang, and something will fly out like a cannonball.

So what's the even more terrifying story? The engineers investigated until late at night, flipping through blueprints for over ten hours, but still couldn't find where this triangular cone-shaped thing came from or where it was originally installed. This thing was half the height of a road wheel, so it was clearly not some loose metal fragment or anything like that.

So, that evening, the landship, originally scheduled to arrive in Tarkov the following day, had to be anchored in the field. Fortunately, the weather was good, and there were no storms or other disturbances. "Lower the anchoring stakes!" The folding shovels on both sides and the front and rear of the landship rolled down and firmly secured them to the ground. "Turn on all lights and wait for maintenance. All personnel on high alert..."

The engineering team is checking the situation against the blueprints, and in order to avoid waking up in heaven, Talulah has shut down most of the power systems, leaving only the emergency and lighting systems running.

The entire land-based ship was brightly lit, resembling a town that had suddenly appeared in the desert.

Construction vehicles were continuously lowered to the ground by cranes, with their booms and ladders extended, allowing engineers to approach the mobile structures, which were still warm from daytime operation, to check where the parts had come off or from which larger components they had broken off from.

Of course, there's an even simpler guess: it might have run over some exposed relic or debris, which flew out and got stuck inside. That's not impossible, but if you're going to think, "Ah, it's just debris that popped out of the ground, I'll just clean it up and drive off," just because of that possibility, you're probably going to end up in a really bad situation.

So the engineering department spent the whole night going through the blueprints and indexes one by one, but they still couldn't find out what it was by the next morning.

However, the walking structure and internal components were confirmed to be intact, with no obvious missing parts.

Just in case, this triangular cone-shaped deformable part was still put into the engineering workshop to see if it could be repaired, and in case another piece breaks off somewhere else, it could be used for comparison.

This stop-and-go journey was probably because the voyage had been going on for a long time, and many pieces of equipment were gradually entering a break-in period. The frequency of problems had increased from once a day to once every 5-6 hours on average, which resulted in the last day's journey taking almost three days to reach the destination.

Of course, the revised opinion report and troubleshooting records, which weighed about 100 kilograms, have been sent back to the shipyard, where a tugboat and a construction vessel will be dispatched soon to accompany the voyage.

Chapter 59 Escape from Tarkov

Chapter 59

In Tarkov, after a night of street fighting and close combat, the victors dragged their spoils back to their safe haven.

The losers lay in the streets and ruins, waiting for their last drop of blood to drain. As one of the scavengers, a young Ursus man, carrying a military ration bag still stained with blood, carefully crawled out of the sewer and climbed over the roadblock made of garbage.

The cranes and unloading yards on the outskirts of the city are deserted, and there are no resources worth fighting for. The crude factory machines and equipment look like metal tombs.

After a difficult climb, he reached the top of a crane. Inside the blocked control room was his living area, which he had partitioned off with wooden planks and other debris.

The space wasn't large, but it was big enough to fit a narrow little bed, a storage cabinet, and some miscellaneous items and equipment.

Tearing open the packaging bag revealed tweed biscuits issued by Ursus, so hard they could break a person's front teeth.

However, you can put an empty tin can on a small stove, pour in the biscuits and filtered rainwater, and cook it for a while to make a delicious porridge.