The expansion of Base No. 2 went quite smoothly. Li Ruobai applied for part of the production capacity to produce five large pipeline excavators. These new engineering locomotives have the ability to dig 300 meters underground in a day. With these five excavators, a huge space with an area equal to the base and a depth of 3 meters can be dug out every day on average.
The project volume of one million cubic meters has far exceeded the current refining processing capacity of the base. Li Ruobai urgently increased production of 10 large refining furnaces, but it was only a drop in the bucket. So we had to pile the excess earth around the base. To prevent blocking the view, the new soil was spread evenly over a week. The area around the base was raised a lot.
Li Ruobai is very ambitious and plans to dig out a huge space 30 meters deep underground. This is the rhythm of building a second base.
Chu Jungui had no objection to this, but he only appropriately limited the proportion of Li Ruobai's production capacity to avoid delaying the production of other equipment.
The construction of the new base was a major event, and Li Xinyi also joined in and was responsible for a large amount of the design and construction budget.
The expansion of the underground base is not simply about digging a hole, but involves a series of exploration, design and construction procedures. The girl first used the Cambrian to send out shock waves to conduct a comprehensive exploration of the underground structure. Then she directed the excavator to dig underground and dug a vertical passage up to 100 meters deep.
Through this passage, the girl had a rough understanding of the regional structural distribution of the entire underground base. Still uneasy, she arranged a drilling machine and drilled another 300 meters underground to analyze the retrieved samples.
The underground soil quality of the base is as predicted, neither loose nor tight, and is of the kind that can be seen everywhere on the planet. No valuable mineral veins were discovered during this exploration, and all that was dug were ordinary rocks. However, the content of basic metals in this planet is very high, much higher than that of the parent star, but most of them are in the form of chlorides.
The foundation columns of the base are 50 meters deep into the ground. In order to make full use of the underground space, Li Ruobai plans to cut off part of the foundation columns and then strengthen and thicken the other part to serve as support columns for the new underground space. This part of the work requires considerable computing power. The task model designed by Li Ruobai requires two Cambrian and Candlelight master computers to operate at full capacity, and it also takes about a month to complete.
The girl couldn't stand it anymore, so she spent ten minutes modifying Li Ruobai's model, replacing it with a new algorithm, and then threw it to the mastermind. The calculation time immediately changed from 32 days to 3 hours and 20 minutes.
Kaitian immediately seized the opportunity and spared no effort to ridicule: "It is indeed a second-class advanced human being. He can't even make a model. The queen needs to take action, don't waste my precious 45,880 minutes of life."
Li Ruobai was furious: "Little one, don't bully others too much! You act like you can impress Xinyi's model."
Kaitian's eyes emitted a rainbow of light and said: "I'll show you the methods of the top cell life!"
Kaitian called up the girl's model and made drastic changes. It only took 10 minutes to successfully change the calculation time from 3 hours and 20 minutes to 31 days and 12 hours.
Li Ruobai was startled at first, and then laughed wildly: "Hahaha! It turns out that the real advanced beings are only 12 hours ahead of me when they have templates. What a huge improvement!"
The light in Kaitian's eyes was messy, projecting garbled characters, showing the complexity of his mood at this moment. It made no sound and carefully adjusted the model again. Li Ruobai watched patiently and gradually became serious.
This time it took nearly half an hour to open the sky. During this period, Li Ruobai also gave suggestions from time to time. The two guys worked together and finally changed Li Xinyi's model beyond recognition. They looked at each other and smiled, then loaded the product of cooperation into Cambrian, and then saw that the calculation time changed from 31 days to 43 days.
Kaitian and Li Ruobai looked at me and I looked at you, speechless for a moment.
After a moment, Kaitian projected a black and white sentence: "What can make two fools reach a consensus must be an even stupider idea."
Li Ruobai nodded silently.
At this time, even without Kaitian, Li Xinyi's model has been calculated and the architectural plan has been given. After getting the plan, Kaitian and Li Ruobai silently divided their work and never mentioned modifications.
Li Ruobai is responsible for fine-tuning the plan in real time based on on-site conditions, while Kaitian is responsible for breaking down tasks, optimizing processes, and assigning tasks to each worker.
After a while, the excavation work was in full swing. Li Ruobai held a virtual engineering drawing and watched a large tunnel boring machine drive into the square and then dig downward.
Countless amounts of soil and gravel were ejected from the pipe towed behind the excavator and poured into the temporary storage tank. Thousands of soldiers pushed the carrying platform, loaded the soil and gravel from the storage pool onto the single-man carrier vehicle, and then sent it to the factory area to fill it into the newly built large refining furnaces.
When the pipe boring machine dug down to a depth of 10 meters, it began to dig horizontally. It excavates in circles, destroying the foundation pillars it encounters one by one. Li Ruobai also went down to the underground space to scan the strength and deformation of the top layer. The foundation of the base is an integrated design and is load-bearing as a whole, so it does not matter if there is an empty space with a diameter of more than 20 meters below. According to the design, the ground will only deform when a cavity with a diameter of more than 50 meters appears.
When the underground space is large enough, a new tunnel boring machine will be driven into the ground and excavation will begin. This time, the two boring machines dug in different directions and carefully avoided the pillars that needed to be retained.
Not long after, the third and fourth tunnel boring machines also drove underground, greatly increasing the excavation efficiency. Hundreds of engineers began renovating underground passages and then laying two transportation pipelines. One transports soil ore to the ground, and the other transports prefabricated building materials from the ground into the ground.
As construction of the two pipelines was completed, more engineers went underground, where they began by reinforcing the remaining foundation pillars. The reinforcements are specially made, preformed profiles made of basic metals mixed with non-metallic materials. The composition is somewhat similar to armor plates, and then wrapped layer by layer on the original pillars. Each remaining pillar was eventually made one and a half times thicker, increasing its support capacity several times.
After strengthening the pillars, some engineers began to level the dome, use the pillars as the base points, lay out the support structure, and reinforce the top layer. Finally, two full layers of armor plates were added to the support structure, and the ceiling took shape.
According to Li Ruobai's plan, several 50-meter-square spaces will be built underground under the base as future factory spaces. Although the space is not very large, there is currently no very large equipment that needs to be used. All small equipment and manufacturing machines can be moved underground.
After the first phase of underground construction is completed, the production capacity of Base 2 will be doubled.
