The rise of nanometers

The Mid-Autumn Festival has just passed.

In the atmosphere of Venus, after more than two years of hard work, the Federation has established two floating cities on Venus.

The two floating cities were officially named: Penglai Island City and Yingzhou Island City.

Among them, the area of ​​Penglai Island City has expanded to 273 square kilometers. The thickest area reaches 1,375 meters, and the thinnest area is about 120 meters.

The second city listed for construction, Yingzhou Island City, is currently only 20% of the size of Penglai Island City.

The reason why it can expand so quickly.

On the one hand, it is because the current number of spacecraft has increased. The active spacecraft traveling between Blue Star and Venus include 7 Zhurong-class ships and 12 Pioneer-class ships.

On the other hand, it is because the local industrial scale of Venus is also exploding day by day.

Most of the raw materials for floating modules are mass-produced locally in Venus, and the self-sufficiency rate for spare parts is around 96.7%.

At the same time, Venus's wind power generation and geothermal power generation are also showing an increasing speed of development. The maximum installed capacity has reached 160 million megawatts. It can stably supply 2 billion megawatts/hour per day on average and has a carbon powder reserve of 1.0 to 1.5 billion megawatts/hour. hour.

The number of astronauts currently serving on Venus is already the second batch, and the number of astronauts has increased from the previous three to 24.

Fang Gaoyuan and Asik, who are responsible for geothermal power generation technology, took a working elevator and slid down to the surface of Venus along the geothermal power cable from Penglai Island.

The working elevator is actually a simple version of the space elevator. The elevator cable is next to the launch cable, mainly for the convenience of maintenance.

There are currently 16 geothermal power cables in total, which not only bear a large part of Penglai Island’s power supply, but also play a role in fixing Penglai Island and reducing the energy consumption of Penglai Island in adjusting its floating position.

Boom boom boom…

Bursts of heavy crashing sounds came from not far away below.

Both Fang Gaoyuan and Asik were already familiar with this. This was the sound made by the carbon powder energy storage plant, which stored excess carbon powder in carbon storage balls and threw it to the surface.

It usually starts with a screeching sound, followed by a crashing sound to the surface.

In the elevator cabin, two kinds of power are used, one is the vacuum chamber buoyancy adjustment, and the other is the active engine. The former is the main power for lifting the elevator cabin, and the other is the backup power.

This design method mainly makes full use of the dense atmosphere of Venus, similar to the rise and fall of a submarine in the sea.

It not only saves energy but also prevents overloading and other situations. The descending and ascending speed of the elevator cabin is usually between 0 and 120 kilometers.

If you need to hover in the middle to repair the sending cable on one side, you only need to set the height, and then the system will automatically hover at the designated position.

This time, the two of them went to work on the surface and did not need to hover in the middle.

During the 47-kilometer journey, the elevator cabin only took about 27 minutes to reach the bottom of the cable launcher. Asik looked out the window. The red-gray air was so viscous that it seemed like a flowing liquid, and the visibility was also very low, less than three meters. 100 meters.

Not far away, dark red magma was flowing in the ravines on the ground.

This is why Penglai Island chose to hover over this area, because there is obvious volcanic activity in this area.

The ground is filled with hot magma spewing up from the mantle, and the surface temperature in this area remains between 627 and 633 degrees Celsius.

Since geothermal energy is to be used to generate electricity, it is natural to choose an area with rich geothermal energy reserves. Although the geology of volcanic eruption areas is not very stable, today's technology can already overcome many problems.

What's more, the main body of the sending cable is located in the air at an altitude of 47 kilometers, and the part on the ground is actually a counterweight.

Before laying out geothermal power cables, technicians usually use carbon storage balls to smash the selected locations to pieces.

This process is called "foundation transformation". The reason why this is done is because the geology in areas where volcanoes erupt frequently is usually not very stable. If no transformation is carried out and counterweights are built directly on top, with the geological activity, the counterweights will There will also be movement.

Therefore, carbon storage balls are used to hit the ground. These carbon storage balls have a specially added hanging ring. As long as the cable is dropped from the floating city, the carbon storage ball can be hooked with the cable.

The No. 7 transmitter cable that Fang Gaoyuan and his two men came down hooked more than 800 carbon storage balls on the ground, with a total weight of about 430,000 tons.

Penglai Island is stabilized by the weight of these carbon storage balls, which are equivalent to the ship's anchor, firmly fixing the ship on the sea.

Due to this anchoring method, the ground portion of the sending cable can ignore many geological activities.

After being hit by more than 800 carbon storage balls weighing 500 tons, the surface of the earth had been changed beyond recognition and turned into a small basin.

This kind of basin is called an "artificial geothermal basin". The temperature inside is higher, and the surrounding magma will flow into it.

After the magma flows in and solidifies into magma rock, the carbon storage balls will be fixed in the magma rock, which increases the total weight of the counterweight in disguise.

In the elevator cabin, Fang Gaoyuan and Asik became busy.

In order to generate electricity, the power cable uses an internal water circulation system, so it must have enough heat-absorbing area on the ground to heat the cold water poured from Penglai Island into high-temperature and high-pressure water vapor, and then drive the steam turbine.

Of course, today's power generation systems are usually composite, which uses a steam turbine to generate electricity using a temperature difference, making the thermal efficiency even higher.

However, this power generation system is not without its shortcomings. On the one hand, the amount of work is relatively large, and on the other hand, the electronic equipment on the ground is easily damaged.

Fang Gaoyuan replaced three broken temperature sensors with new ones through the robot.

These sensors and monitoring equipment must be exposed to the outside, so they are prone to damage.

Asik sent out a floating airship to conduct an inspection of the surrounding ground. Although Penglai Island, which is located at high altitude, is not afraid of large-scale volcanic eruptions, this does not mean that they can be negligent.

Precisely monitoring volcanic activity on the ground will help understand the atmospheric movements of Venus.

The blimp is not wirelessly controlled, but is connected to a special optical fiber line. There is no way around this.

The atmosphere on the surface of Venus is too viscous. Although long-wave communication can be used reluctantly, it is difficult to achieve precise control of big data.

This is similar to the situation of a submarine in the sea.

In order to ensure accurate big data control, only optical fiber line communication can be used.

The small airship flew slowly, collecting all the conditions on the nearby surface in the thick air.

However, this process is very slow. This is because the visibility is too low and the atmosphere is too dense, which is not conducive to the work of detection equipment.

The airship must stay more than ten meters close to the ground and detect carefully.

There have been cases where small reconnaissance airships were destroyed by sudden volcanic eruptions.

The work took more than four hours.

After Fang Gaoyuan checked various equipment, he said: "Asik, prepare to return!"

"OK."

The small airship returned to the elevator cabin, and then the buoyant vacuum chamber of the elevator cabin began to evacuate the internal air, and then the elevator cabin rose at a constant speed.

the other side.

Unlike Penglai Island City, which is located near the equator of Venus, Yingzhou Island City is located within the Antarctic Circle of Venus.

There are currently only two geothermal power cables built here, but its role here is, to a certain extent, more important than Penglai Island City.

Thank you for your support (ω｀)