Chapter 164 - 163: The Price

A single Jupiter Plane required four Clones to operate. Factoring in the transit platforms, the transport fleets from Jupiter to its moons, and other support, the total number of Clones needed reached approximately 600,000. While this seemed like a massive workforce, it was still a drastic reduction in manpower compared to the previous series of processes for mining and refining nuclear fission fuel.

The old method had required tens of millions of Clones to sustain. Now, setting aside other savings, the manpower requirement alone had plummeted to less than a tenth of what it was before.

The reduction in waste and resource consumption in other areas was immense.

After the Jupiter Planes were deployed into Jupiter’s atmosphere, the first batch of transit platforms, which Li Qingsong named "Profound Bird," also went into operation.

The Profound Bird was also an atmospheric vehicle. However, unlike the Jupiter Plane, it possessed far greater mass and volume.

It somewhat resembled an aircraft carrier from Earth’s nation-state era, with a massive, perfectly flat flight deck and runway on top. Below the flight deck were numerous facilities and living quarters for the Clones.

It had a total length of one kilometer, a width of 200 meters, and a total mass of hundreds of thousands of tons—dozens of times larger than an Earth-class Warship.

This behemoth hovered in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, relying on enormous fans powered by a Nuclear Fusion Reactor to blast the limitless Jovian air downward, thus maintaining its suspension.

Li Qingsong had built a full 500 of these Profound Bird vehicles, distributing them in a roughly uniform geometric pattern across the mining region.

Thus, these Profound Bird vehicles became the operational hubs for the Jupiter Planes.

After a Jupiter Plane completed its flight through Jupiter’s lower atmosphere and collected enough deuterium gas, it would increase thrust and climb. Its destination was a Profound Bird Platform, hovering at an altitude of 30,000 meters. Following a tradition from Earth’s past, Li Qingsong considered the level in Jupiter’s atmosphere where the pressure equaled one standard Earth atmosphere to be the planet’s "surface." Upon reaching the platform, the plane would land on its long runway.

After landing, the Jupiter Plane would move to a designated parking spot, where two gangways would connect to it.

One gangway connected to the Jupiter Plane’s gas hold, siphoning off the collected deuterium for temporary storage. The other connected to the cockpit, allowing the Clones to disembark. This second connection was also used to remove waste and excrement from the aircraft and to replenish its fuel, drinking water, food, and other supplies.

The Clones who had been flying the Jupiter Plane all day would exit the aircraft and enter the Profound Bird Platform to rest. A new shift of Clones would then board the fully resupplied and emptied Jupiter Plane, take off once more, and dive back into Jupiter’s lower atmosphere to continue the deuterium collection work.

Li Qingsong had deployed 500 Profound Bird Platforms and 100,000 Jupiter Planes. This meant that, on average, each Profound Bird Platform had to service 200 Jupiter Planes.

On average, each Jupiter Plane returned to a Profound Bird Platform once every 24 hours.

Consequently, about eight or nine Jupiter Planes were landing or taking off every hour, creating a constant scene of bustling activity on the massive Profound Bird Platform.

But this wasn’t the extent of the Profound Bird Platform’s duties. In addition to the Jupiter Planes constantly delivering deuterium, heavy transport ships would also arrive from outer space to carry the collected gas away.

Each day, a Profound Bird Platform would collect approximately 108 tons of deuterium. After accounting for its own operational consumption, it would have a surplus of around 3,000 tons per month.

Thus, once a month, a massive spacecraft would dock at the platform. It would deliver fresh supplies and transport the 3,000 tons of deuterium to the central distribution hub on Ganymede for further allocation.

From there, the deuterium might be sent down the space elevator to Ganymede’s various power plants, taken by short-haul spacecraft to other moons, or loaded onto long-haul heavy freighters destined for other planets.

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

The deuterium from Jupiter fueled Li Qingsong’s entire industrial system, powering the industrial operations of the whole Solar System.

But this was not without a price.

The reason was, as ever, the extremely harsh environment within Jupiter’s cloud layers.

Even the weaker thunderstorms on Jupiter were hundreds, if not thousands, of times more powerful than the strongest storms on Earth.

Supersonic hurricanes were a daily occurrence.

There was also hail. On Earth, the largest hailstones were about the size of a watermelon. At worst, they could kill a person, but their destructive power ended there.

But Jupiter was a different story.

Hailstones the size of boulders, driven by the gale-force winds, reached extremely high velocities—even supersonic speeds—making them comparable to cannonballs.

Moreover, they fell in immense numbers. Once a hailstorm began, it was an overwhelming barrage with nowhere to hide.

Getting hit by one of these was far worse than just being lethal to a person; it meant the utter destruction of the aircraft and the death of its crew.

The problem was that Jupiter’s cloud layers were incredibly complex, making weather forecasting at least ten thousand times more difficult than on Earth. Even though Li Qingsong had built a dedicated supercomputer for weather prediction and ran a specially trained weather AI named "Dragon God," the accuracy of its forecasts remained extremely low.

As a result, incidents like this were common: a Jupiter Plane would be flying along smoothly, everything calm, and in the next instant, it would plummet without warning. It would fall into Jupiter’s depths, swallowed by the dense atmosphere, the aircraft and its crew utterly lost.

This was caused by wind shear. A sudden change in airflow or atmospheric density made it impossible for the Jupiter Plane to maintain normal flight.

Or, the weather might be clear one moment, only for the sky to become overcast the next, with bolts of lightning branching down from the clouds like tree roots, offering no escape. A direct hit would instantly destroy a Jupiter Plane.

Or, the next moment, it might encounter a dense barrage of countless supersonic hailstones that would smash the entire aircraft to pieces.

Such violent and unpredictable weather events were innumerable. Even with Li Qingsong’s current level of technology, an average of ten Jupiter Planes were lost each day due to weather-related crashes.

The Profound Bird Platforms, located in the thin air of the upper atmosphere, were not exposed to such dangers, however.

But that wasn’t the full extent of the danger.

In addition to the volatile weather, communication and equipment failures caused by Jupiter’s intense magnetic field also led to an average of one Jupiter Plane crash per day.

And then there was another environmental problem Li Qingsong couldn’t solve: gravity.

Jupiter’s gravity was immense. Whether they were inside a Jupiter Plane or on a Profound Bird Platform, the Clones were constantly subjected to the torment of gravity approximately 2.5 times that of Earth.

A Clone with a mass of 70 kg would feel a weight equivalent to 175 kg, which was like performing every task while carrying a 100-kilogram sandbag.