The stars, but they become the gray wind

From the naked singularity of the zero-point energy reactor, a negative energy stream running at superluminal speed is injected into the warp engine.

On the outside of the spacecraft, a layer of fully reflective mirrors gradually emerged. This was the effect of the warp engine warping the space in front and behind the spacecraft and generating a warp bubble. A closed space bubble was wrapping up the 22-kilometer-long spacecraft. After this layer of space bubble, which was completely closed to the outside world, was formed, accompanied by the dazzling blue light emitted by the warp bubble itself, the space in front of the warp bubble continued to shrink, while the space behind it continued to expand. The spacecraft in the warp bubble followed the warp bubble and was moving forward at a speed faster than the speed of light under the drag of the space distortion itself.

At this moment, the first spacecraft in the entire universe that can travel at a speed faster than the speed of light was born at this moment. Although neither the humans on Earth nor the stars in the sky 20,000 light-years away knew that an event had occurred that was worthy of being recorded in the history of the entire universe, a spacecraft traveling at a speed faster than the speed of light was rapidly speeding inside the sun.

"3, 2, 1, it's now! Break away from the jump!" He announced to everyone on the bridge while watching the countdown to break away from warp speed.

Near the orbit of Mars, a blue light flashed, and the hull of the Grey Wind mothership appeared in the three-dimensional universe in an instant. Before leaving the warp, the spacecraft in safe mode had automatically eliminated the high-energy particles and Hawking radiation accumulated in front of the warp bubble. Otherwise, Mars in front of the spacecraft would have been blasted into a pile of planetary fragments floating in the universe by high-energy particle jets and Hawking radiation close to the speed of light.

"Warp travel completed... This single trip took a total of 26.66 seconds.

"It only took 26.66 seconds to get to Mars? Fifty times the speed of light... That feels pretty good."

"As a short test voyage... it's quite successful, right?" Renlong sighed as he looked at the red planet in front of him displayed on the holographic projection.

"As an intra-galactic voyage, at least we didn't hit anything this time at warp speed. After all, warp engines can't avoid various obstacles along the route."

"It's my first time exceeding the speed of light, but I don't feel anything special," said Aze.

"Not at all. Apart from seeing the stars ahead distorted to a certain extent, stretching the light from those stars, you won't feel any change in acceleration on the spacecraft."

"But as a commemoration of the first faster-than-light travel, shouldn't we do something?"

"What are you doing? We're about to test a high-risk space jump engine. The work isn't done yet, Aze, don't be so anxious to open the champagne at halftime."

"Okay...but we should at least take a few close-up photos of Mars as a commemoration of our first FTL test, right?"

"Alright... in 15 minutes, we'll conduct our first test of the high-dimensional space jump engine. You can take a break in between. If you want to take pictures, go ahead, or go outside and look at Mars from afar. In 15 minutes, return to the ship to test the high-dimensional space jump engine. This time, we'll jump directly to Alpha Centauri without stopping. Everyone, relax for a while."

"Huh..." Charlotte, standing by the handrail, gripping it tightly, breathed a sigh of relief. During her time on Taylor Island, Charlotte had learned about the Alcubierre Warp Drive, which, when operating, would generate an extremely dangerous accumulation of high-energy particles and a massive amount of Hawking radiation at the front of the warp bubble. This could potentially destroy the ship and everything in its path the moment the bubble dissolved. Just as they entered FTL, Charlotte was genuinely nervous. Although she knew that the Grey Wind's warp drive, in safe mode, would eliminate the high-energy particles and Hawking radiation accumulated at the front of the warp bubble before exiting warp, Charlotte, deeply aware of the dangers of the Alcubierre Drive during her theoretical studies, felt a weight hanging over her heart in the seconds before exiting warp. Nervous, Charlotte tightly grasped Anjie's hand. Only after they had safely exited warp did Charlotte finally feel relieved.

"Mary! Come take pictures with me?" Just when Charlotte breathed a sigh of relief, Aze had already jumped up and pulled Mary out of the cabin to take some panoramic photos of the distant Mars.

"Okay... Angel sister!" Mary, who was being pulled by Aze, had just breathed a sigh of relief from the tension of exiting warp speed. While she was still in a daze, Aze pulled her to an exit leading to the outside of the cabin somewhere next to the bridge of the spacecraft. Aze was holding a telephoto lens camera that he got from somewhere, and with a relaxed and happy look on his face, he pulled Mary's wrist and went outside the spacecraft to take a commemorative photo of Mars.

"Remember to check the time when taking pictures. 15 minutes is neither long nor short. Before we start the high-dimensional space jump engine test, I will remind you one minute in advance. Don't stay outside the cabin when the jump begins." Carlisle reminded Aze.

"I know... I have a strong sense of time... After all, if I didn't have a sense of time, how could I have flirted with so many girls? And it's just a few panoramic photos of Mars... It won't take much time... Don't worry, I will remember to return to the ship in time." Aze waved to Carlisle behind him, opened the hatch of the bridge, whistled casually, skipped and walked out holding Mary's wrist.

.........

In a lounge in the cabin, Cabot put down the data tablet in his hand. His senses made of extra-dimensional matter keenly felt the fluctuations in spatial curvature generated when the spacecraft just exited the warp speed. Cabot glanced in the direction of the reactor at the tail of the spacecraft. Although this lounge was far away from the spacecraft reactor and there were countless bulkheads in between, this could not block Cabot's eyes that could see the movement of atoms, extranuclear electrons and even atomic nuclei at the microscopic level of almost everything.

In Cabot's vision, the exposed singularity encapsulated in the spacecraft's reactor released a steady stream of superluminal negative energy and negative mass exotic matter after the spacecraft's warp engine was activated. At the same time, a certain timing protection energy layer acting on the warp engine and the reactor's naked singularity also prevented the entire spacecraft from experiencing a time jump after entering warp navigation, allowing the entire spacecraft to travel to the vicinity of Mars at 50 times the speed of light with almost no time distortion.

"Hmm...it seems the timing protection program on the exposed singularity in the reactor is working perfectly. Without my authorization, it cannot be manually deactivated. As for this time ship...it's not the right time to hand it over to them now..."

"Even if I give them the power... it'll have to wait until they see their sisters on Sky Star... Compared to their current weakness... Sky Star, as a complete civilization, can make up for their shortcomings in some areas... My subordinates can also complement and coexist with their sisters on Sky Star in other aspects."

"But... over there on Sky Star... Miss Luoying should be having a lot of fun, with the spaceship racing, the lesbian sisters, and all kinds of lesbian love gossip between girls. Miss Luoying seems to be happy in every sense of the word." Cabot looked at the distant starry sky outside the cabin and smiled meaningfully at Miss Luoying, who was 20,000 light-years away, and the sisters from the Sky Star civilization whom the foursome had never met.

"You are both my gifts to each other... The Sky Star civilization will reap the coveted superluminal technology and its byproduct, the closed time curve machine... and the entire galaxy... And my dear subordinates, no... should I say daughters of another dimension... will gain... As a fully developed Type 2.7 civilization, you will become important aids and partners to those sisters, even their companions and true family. Hand in hand, you will journey into the starry sky, explore and master the entire galaxy, and then... you will receive the coming-of-age gift I have prepared for you hidden within those two black holes. At that time, you will no longer be bound by the laws of the universe."

"Rejoice... our "daughters", get ready to receive the gifts sent by your sisters!" Cabot said to himself in the empty lounge. Although there was no living creature in the entire lounge except Cabot, Cabot's words were not spoken to the air, but were spoken in a very solemn tone towards the direction where the Sky Star was in the night sky.

Although no living person heard what Cabot said at this time, even Calisi, who was connected to the ship at the neural level, disconnected from the spacecraft itself before Cabot said this and relaxed temporarily. Therefore, she did not know what happened in this lounge. Cabot said this not just for some second-year purpose, but to write the content and meaning of this speech into the system of this spacecraft in a way that no one could understand. When Calisi makes a neural connection with the operating system of this spacecraft next time, the content of this speech will be uploaded to her brain without her knowledge, and she will act as the intermediary to transfer this information. After arriving at the destination, when she makes physical contact with any Sky Star individual, the content of this letter will be broadcast to all Sky Star individuals to convey the content of this invisible letter and the gift behind it.

"Although you were initially just the product of a sociological experiment from a few individuals, just like an artist who pours immense emotion and love into a piece of work, that piece is no longer just a simple object, but the artist's child. In this respect, we are the same. Even though it's just an experiment, after investing a great deal of emotion and energy in it over a long period of time, we have come to regard you as our own children. My daughters... I will give you a priceless gift... a brand new era..."

"This will be a great era beyond the speed of light."

"This will be an era beyond space and time."

"We have crossed the long river of time and gained infinite time and space."

"Welcome... to a time when time has lost its meaning."

"So...are you...ready? My dear daughters."

Cabot opened his arms and read solemnly in the direction of the sky star.

Note 1: In current theories, if feeding a black hole is feasible, then the event horizon of the black hole will only get smaller and smaller, and it will be at the point of equilibrium between the two forces. When the gravitational force is smaller than the electromagnetic force, objects close to the black hole will be bounced away, but photons will still not be emitted from the inside of the black hole, that is, the information inside the black hole will still not escape, so the exposed singularity will not exist, because the singularity of a black hole does not emit light or reflect light. Therefore, no matter how small the event horizon is, it will always be larger than the singularity.

Singularities are calculated mathematically and currently cannot be verified by observation. They're often used in theoretical physics, but applied physics fears the concept of infinity. At a singularity, neither time nor space exist.

Because a singularity has no size, objects can approach it arbitrarily close. The formula for gravitational potential energy is Ep = -GMm/r, where G is a constant and both M and m are greater than 0. Therefore, when r approaches 0, the energy released is infinite. However, as long as the event horizon exists, falling into the singularity will occur infinitely far in the future for an external observer.

In the space-time structure broken by the singularity, the conservation of energy has no meaning, and the infinite space-time state where the singularity exists will be superimposed on each other with infinite energy density.

A singularity has infinite density, but it doesn't necessarily have infinite energy. This is because energy and matter are interrelated. According to Einstein's mass-energy equation, E=mc², there is a direct proportional relationship between energy (E) and mass (m). Therefore, when the density of matter becomes infinite, its mass also becomes infinite, and the energy it contains also becomes infinite.

In the state of a singularity, matter is compressed into a very small space, the density becomes infinite, and therefore the energy contained in the singularity also becomes infinite. This infinite energy generates a huge gravitational force at the singularity, causing the surrounding space-time to distort and form a black hole.

Therefore, although a singularity has infinite density, it does not necessarily have infinite energy. The energy contained in a singularity is associated with the increase of its density and mass.

Chapter 142: Black technology of uninducing jump of four light years in one second?

"Deploy the gravitational wave induction beacon!" Calisi gave orders to the spacecraft. As the order was given, a silver cylindrical object with a diameter of five meters and a length of about eight meters was ejected from a cargo hold on the side of the spacecraft by an electromagnetic catapult into the vacuum outside the spacecraft. After gliding for a distance by inertia, the surface of this cylindrical induction beacon flashed with a bright green light. Through the instruments on the spacecraft, Calisi on the bridge saw, as she had expected, that the display screen in front of her showed that bursts of extremely regular gravitational wave signals were detected not far from the spacecraft. Through the spacecraft's own analysis system, this regular gravitational wave signal was analyzed into a string of extremely precise positioning coordinates.

"Speaking of which...what is the principle of this guidance beacon?" asked Renlong, who had been sitting next to Kalisi since just now and watching the scene of the guidance beacon being ejected out of the spacecraft with Kalisi.

"It's actually a bit complicated... but... why don't you take a break for these 15 minutes? Why are you staying on the bridge with me and working overtime?" Carlisle, sitting in the captain's seat with her arms folded, asked Renlong.

"I don't need to rest... After all, the long journey ahead is the real test. To ensure everything goes well, it's best for me to stay on the bridge and hold my post."

"Compared to this...would you please explain how this thing works first?"

"The principle behind this thing... this involves gravitational waves... You should know that gravitational waves are essentially ripples in the curvature of space-time, right?"

"Hmm...then what?"

"However, it propagates outward from the radiation source in the form of waves. These waves transmit energy in the form of gravitational radiation. Of the four fundamental forces, only gravity can propagate in extra dimensions, or higher-dimensional space. In fact, only gravity can enter and propagate in those extra, higher dimensions. In other words, those extra dimensions are only open to the propagator of gravity—the graviton."

"In a three-dimensional universe, the speed of gravity is also strictly limited by the laws of physics to below the speed of light. The three-dimensional universe we live in is actually made up of several cosmic membranes stuck together.

The other fundamental forces cannot propagate in high-dimensional space, but gravity can, and the rate at which gravity decays with distance is also quite fast, because gravity does not just diffuse in three-dimensional space, but also diffuses to more than a dozen dimensions at the same time."

"Just like light has a wave-particle duality, gravity is the same. It can exist in the form of waves, that is, gravitational waves, or in the form of particles such as gravitons."

"The working principle of this induction beacon is similar to high-dimensional communication. It encapsulates gravitational waves or gravitational waves into a force field and then directly follows the upper part of a U-shaped path in high-dimensional space, shortening the trajectory and propagation time. At the same time, it uses the characteristic that gravity propagates not only in three-dimensional space, so spacecraft in high-dimensional space can also receive the coordinate signal broadcast in the form of gravitational waves from the induction beacon, lock onto the coordinate signal position of this frequency, and use the characteristics of high-dimensional space transition to pull themselves directly there."

"Then, with the guidance beacon providing positioning, what is the farthest distance we can jump in one go?"

"Theoretically, there's no upper limit. Even if this beacon is located in the Andromeda Galaxy, as long as we can receive the coordinate signal it broadcasts and directly adjust the ship's high-dimensional space jump engine to lock onto the corresponding frequency, we can jump to it almost instantly, no matter how far away the target is."

"Theoretically?"

"In theory, this is true. In reality, the gravitational wave signal broadcast by a beacon is limited in transmission distance. Even in high-dimensional space, the transmission of gravitational wave signals will attenuate with increasing distance. To increase the transmission distance of gravitational wave signals in high-dimensional space, there is a simple and crude method: to increase the specific frequency broadcast power of the induction beacon, so that the gravitational wave signal can be transmitted farther in high-dimensional space. The one we just launched is a small induction beacon. If measured on the scale of three-dimensional space, it can probably provide accurate coordinate positioning for all spacecraft equipped with high-dimensional space jump engines within 3 light-years to jump to the solar system."

"This distance... seems to be enough for exploring the Milky Way, right?"

"That depends on your definition of 'enough'... If it's used as a transportation infrastructure to provide positioning for spacecraft... it's certainly a good option... but the manufacturing cost is definitely not cheap. Do you know what the internal structure of such a beacon is?"

"What are they made of?"

"When this induction beacon is in operation, it will create a number of micro black holes of varying masses inside it, and cause two or more of these micro black holes to collide and merge. Through the merger of the black holes, it will generate a gravitational wave signal strong enough to propagate in high-dimensional space and provide positioning information."

"Transmitting coordinate signals through black hole mergers? Is that so violent... Wait, what about that thing we just threw out?"

"Don't worry. The outer shell of that thing is made of color-nuclear force material. Even if the sun explodes into a supernova, it won't necessarily cause any damage to the outer shell. And it only continuously produces small, rapidly evaporating micro black holes when it's in operation. It won't create low-mass micro black holes inside when there's no spacecraft and it's needed to provide gravitational wave positioning signals."

"That's good... I was just wondering what would happen if we dropped something this dangerous into the orbit of Mars?"

"I don't think there will be anything in the solar system that can destroy the shell of this induction beacon in the next few thousand or even tens of thousands of years. What's more... if we are really worried about it having problems, we can actually make it impossible for any intelligent creature to find it... like this..." As she spoke, the purple-haired girl asked the spacecraft to send a command to the induction beacon that was ejected not far away. After receiving this command, the shell of the induction beacon began to slowly become transparent, and eventually became completely invisible.

"The beacon is also equipped with the same full-band cloaking device used on our drones. Unless someone is lucky enough to collide directly with the beacon itself, this decoy beacon will be impossible to detect in any way. Whether it's radar in various frequency bands or other conventional optical observation methods, it's impossible to detect this beacon floating in Mars orbit."

"So, as long as we have this beacon, and the distance is within 30,000 light years, we can return to the solar system at any time?"

"Well...but I have a feeling...we might not come back..."

"Once we reach our destination...if our 'sisters' allow us, we will also leave a beacon like this in their system...in case of emergency."

"Well, but... logically speaking, would they really allow something like that to continuously create low-mass micro black holes and evaporate rapidly to appear in their galaxy?"

"Probably... maybe... After all, for a being that's guaranteed to be a Type II civilization... a device that creates a low-mass microscopic black hole that evaporates quickly within a year shouldn't be considered too dangerous, right?"

"After all, compared to something like the circumstellar accelerator that they are very likely to build, a container that produces a rapidly evaporating micro black hole shouldn't be a big deal...right?" The purple-haired girl said with a somewhat uncertain tone.

"If that doesn't work, we actually have a Stargate-style anchored wormhole facility option in our database. However, the engineering required for this facility is much more time-consuming and expensive than simply dropping a beacon that can be turned on and off at any time."

"Ah... let's not talk about this. The time is almost up... I'll go remind Aze to get back into the ship as soon as possible. We're about to start our second faster-than-light voyage." During their lengthy discussion, Carlisle noticed that time passed so quickly. More than ten minutes had passed in the blink of an eye. She contacted Aze and urged her and Mary, who were still outside the cabin, to get back into the ship.

.........

"Got it, I'll be right back!" On the huge outer surface of the Grey Wind mothership that was like a steel mountain, Aze, who was without any protective measures, was looking at the red planet and its two satellites in the distance with Mary, who was wearing a full set of spacesuits. Deimos and Phobos emitted a faint light under the sunlight. Compared with the main body of Mars, the size of these two satellites was so small that they could almost be ignored. In the past ten minutes, Aze and Mary took no less than dozens of high-definition photos of Mars with their cameras, and carefully observed the two small satellites, Phobos and Deimos, with a telescope. Happy times are always short. After receiving the communication from Kalisi urging them to return to the cabin as soon as possible, Aze finally looked up at Mars in the distance and called Mary.

"Mary! Let's go, we should go back to the cabin, we are about to start the second superluminal voyage." Although he could speak directly in the other person's mind, Aze still connected to the communication device built into Mary's space suit helmet and reminded Mary.

"Okay... okay, Angel Sister." Mary, wearing magnetic boots on her space suit, moved familiarly in the weightless environment. She followed Aze through the fluorescent airtight shield at the airlock. After passing through the airtight shield and arriving in the spacecraft, Mary took off her helmet, turned around and took a last look at Mars outside the transparent airtight shield behind her, and said a small farewell to the red planet in her heart.

"See you later... beautiful red planet..."

"It might look pretty from a distance, but Mary, don't forget... the surface of Mars is incredibly desolate. At most, there might be some anaerobic microorganisms."

"Hmm... but from a distance... it really is a very beautiful and magnificent planet... even from this far away I can see Olympus Mons..."

"It's like a protruding mole on the surface of Mars." Mary sighed, holding the helmet she took off in both hands.

"Don't worry... If we have time to come back in the future, I will definitely accompany you to climb Mount Olympus, the highest peak in the solar system. Together we will become the first people to climb the solar system!!!" Aze saw what Mary was thinking, walked up and gave Mary a close hug. Mary had hardly grown taller than she was a few years ago.

…………

"Okay, everyone is here... Everyone, hold on tight, we are about to begin our second superluminal flight." Carlisle glanced at everyone on the bridge, confirmed that everyone was on board and present, nodded, sat back in the captain's seat, and connected the neural cables that controlled the entire spacecraft, intending to begin the second superluminal flight test of this spacecraft.

"This time we'll use a high-dimensional space jump engine to jump directly to Alpha Centauri in one go... If my calculations are correct, this jump will be completed almost instantly."

Carlisle took out a stopwatch from her pocket. Since she only had a rough understanding of the specific speed of the high-dimensional space jump engine before, she took out a stopwatch to calculate the time it would take for the high-dimensional space jump engine to cross the distance of 4.2 light years.

As the high-dimensional space jump engine at the rear of the hull was activated, a layer of crystal-clear fully reflective mirror gradually emerged at a distance from the outer shell of the spacecraft and not far away. This was a manifestation of the normal operation of the spacecraft's high-dimensional space warp space generator. A closed warp space was rapidly wrapping up the entire spacecraft. When this layer of warp space was fully formed, relative to the entire universe, the space where the Grey Wind mothership was located became a small high-dimensional space bubble independent of the current three-dimensional universe, and became completely invisible in the three-dimensional universe and could not be detected by any means. It also completely got rid of the constraints of the speed of light barrier. After entering the high-dimensional space bubble, its speed can theoretically reach infinity. Unlike the warp engine, which will produce obvious blue shift the moment it enters superluminal navigation, the high-dimensional space jump engine is almost completely invisible in the universe when it is started. There will be no obvious signs, even when the high-dimensional warp bubble is formed, the entire spacecraft will not emit any frequency band of electromagnetic waves or gravitational wave characteristic signals. Unlike the warp spacecraft's ostentatious superluminal navigation method with a flash of blue light, the high-dimensional space jump is quiet and silent. For observers from a third-party perspective, the high-dimensional space jump has almost no predictable characteristics when it starts. For example, the warp spacecraft will emit blue light and produce a blue shift phenomenon a few seconds before entering superluminal speed, while the spacecraft using the high-dimensional space jump engine will appear at the destination without any signs when arriving at the target. Through the special high-dimensional warp force field L, the spacecraft will show certain characteristics of higher dimensions above five dimensions, and sailing in the universe will be like a shadow passing over the ground at high speed, leaving no traces that can be traced or predicted.

As the warped mirror slowly closed, from a third-party perspective, the entire spacecraft was completely independent of three-dimensional space and time. Accompanied by a violent distortion of starlight outside the spacecraft, the space bubble disappeared directly in the solar system and almost instantly appeared near Proxima Centauri, one of the three stars in the constellation Centaurus 4.24 light-years away. In the distance, the dim light of Proxima Centauri illuminated the silver-gray shell of the spacecraft.

"It only took a little over a second from the time the bubble completely closed and entered the jump to the time it exited the jump and returned to the three-dimensional universe?" Carlisle looked at the stopwatch in her hand that she had stopped, thinking with surprise.

"It took only one second to cross a distance of over four light years... Four light years in one second... This speed... is simply outrageous."

"Looking back, it seems our previous calculations were a bit too conservative. At this speed, how could it take 72 hours to cross 22000 light years?"

"At this speed... it only takes 5500 seconds to cross 20,000 light years, which is about 1.5 hours?"

"And this is without any beacon guidance to provide positioning..."

"A jump of tens of thousands of light years without induction...hiss..." Thinking of this, Calisi, who was sitting in the captain's seat and still connected to the nerve cables, gasped.

"What's wrong? Xixi?" Hearing the sound of Carlisle taking a deep breath behind him, Aze asked with concern.

"It's okay... We just crossed a distance of 4.2 light years, and the total time... only took about a second."

"I may need to recalculate the time I estimated to reach my destination."

"Wait... one second?" Renlong asked in surprise.

"Yes, just one second..."

"Can you jump four light years in one second? At this speed, even if the distance is over 20,000 light years, it will take less than two hours at most, right?"

"That's right... I calculated before that it would take about 72 hours to cross 20,000 light-years, but that was still too conservative. The performance of this thing is beyond imagination, and we are currently jumping without induction. If there is induction, jumping over the entire Milky Way in an hour is not a dream, and it is even possible to reach the Andromeda Galaxy within a day." Calisi rubbed his temples and exclaimed.

"Compared to that... that warp drive that just jumped through the solar system at 50 times the speed of light is child's play. This thing Cabot gave us is truly cutting-edge technology in every sense of the word..."

"Unfortunately... the manufacturing cost of this thing is far too high for us right now. With our current reserves of nanomaterials, if we want to build a second high-dimensional space jump engine like this, we might need the energy of an entire galaxy to produce an identical second high-dimensional space engine."

"Is the cost so high?" asked Yuki, who was using the equipment on the spacecraft to observe the distant Proxima Centauri.

"Hmm... the shell and main body of this thing are made entirely of colored nuclear force materials. The process of driving it requires not only a huge amount of superluminal negative energy flow, but also a large amount of strange quark clusters. In its natural state, this kind of thing only exists in places like the core of neutron stars. If we want to use nanomachines to mimic this material by arranging quark structures, although it is technically possible, even if we dismantle and devour an entire rocky planet like the Earth and turn it into a nanomatter reserve, at the cost of consuming all of the nanomatter reserves, we can only barely produce a few micrograms of strange quark clusters at most. To produce strange quark clusters in large quantities, we must either convert the entire galaxy's matter into nanomatter reserves, or obtain them directly from places like the core of a neutron star. Obviously, the latter is the better option given the existence of superluminal travel technology."

"I think I roughly understand why Cabot would directly give us a finished product that can be installed on the spacecraft, instead of letting us build it ourselves from scratch. Such a high-dimensional space jump engine and the energy required to drive it would not be enough even if we dismantled the entire solar system." Carlisle stroked the long purple hair by her ears in frustration.

"Such a high manufacturing cost... If it is not a Type II or above civilization, it can't afford it at all. The energy and raw materials such as strange quark clusters required to drive this thing alone are not something that a planetary civilization can provide, right?" Renlong sighed helplessly, holding his forehead.

"More than that... a normal Type 2.0 civilization might not be able to afford this stuff. After all, if the star in the parent system is a G-type yellow dwarf like the sun, where would they get such a weird thing as strangelet?" Carlisle complained in a very sharp tone.

Chapter 143: A Superluminal Journey to the Sky Star (5000 words)

"Everyone, are you ready?" Carlisle glanced at everyone on the bridge.

"We're ready, Captain!!!" Aze responded loudly and seriously.

"Is it necessary to shout so loudly? He is not SpongeBob." Renlong said embarrassedly.

"Isn't it nice to have a little sense of ceremony?" Aze answered with a smile.

"A sense of ritual in a funny style? I feel like you're becoming more and more like a comedian..."

"SpongeBob? What is that?" Dorothy asked with a puzzled look while listening to everyone's conversation.

"Nothing much... I'm just complaining about how Aze's style is becoming more and more like a comedian who's there to liven up the atmosphere."