Voyage of the Stars.

Chapter 897 Super Force Field Welding Process
The ancients said, "Use your own spear to attack your own shield." The matter disintegration rays and quark-matter strong armor are the spear and the shield.

The more Yue Yuan read the report on self-healing strong materials, the more satisfied he became, because it was so powerful that it could remain intact as long as the material disintegration ray did not keep cutting at the same position.

The speed of its self-repair is not the kind of slow self-healing, but the recovery in an instant. The instant recovery is not because of how powerful human technology is, but because of the physical properties of the material itself, because the cutting and recovery of quark pairs is almost instantaneous.

The report also wrote that when this material is bombarded by matter disintegration rays, it will produce a cloud of hydrogen molecules like mist or thick clouds. Obviously, that is because after the strong reorganization of the broken pieces, new quark pairs are produced. The quark pairs then combine themselves at that moment to form protons and neutrons, forming atomic nuclei, and then spontaneously turn into the simplest and most common hydrogen molecules in the universe.

However, it requires matter disintegration rays with an intensity reaching the quark level.

The report mentioned that this material is very rare and difficult to manufacture. It is almost like the original strong material, it must be formed in a super force field at one time, and it is very difficult to cut. If it is in the shape of a stick, it can be cut with a super-powered material disintegration ray while applying tension, but if it is a large component, such as a plate, it cannot be cut a second time because it can't heal as fast as it was cut.

At the same time, its performance is perfect.

Its impact resistance and hardness index completely exceed those of previous strong materials. It is for this reason that the materials science department believes that it is not the traditional strong material known to humans, but rather a quark material.

Because although it is also a material formed by the arrangement of strongly bound particles, the principle is very different from the previous strong materials. It is formed by the rearrangement of quark pairs under the regulation of the super force field after the super force field breaks the proton-neutron barrier.

The forming process of this quark material in the super force field is very complicated and takes a long time, because it needs to be shaped and formed. If the super force field is withdrawn due to insufficient time, it will immediately turn back into the original ordinary material.

Humans call this process quark materialization, which means that by constantly adjusting the force field parameters, quark pairs are changed from their natural state to the arrangement that humans want, and then fixed.

This process is somewhat similar to the magnetization technology of permanent magnetic materials.

The magnetization process of permanent magnetic materials means that the magnetization state of the material changes under the action of the magnetic field. After being magnetized by an external magnetic field, the material can maintain its magnetism for a long time even if the external magnetic field is removed.

From this perspective, the quark-matter materials currently developed by human beings are the process of placing materials into a super-force field and quarking them. After the process is completed, the super-force field can be removed and the material's state can be maintained.

According to the report, humans must constantly adjust the structure of the super-force field during this process to produce a force field that changes according to certain rules. There are more than one billion parameters involved in each time stage, and no parameter can go wrong. If one parameter goes wrong, all the work will be wasted.

Also, not all materials can be placed in the super force field. Just like magnetized permanent magnets, it requires specific materials.

This kind of specific preliminary material also needs to be produced. The raw materials require a lot of rare elements, many of which are artificial radioactive elements. Heavy metals such as gold and silver also need to be mixed in.

According to the estimates in the report, if you turn an ordinary rocky planet upside down and obtain all kinds of rare metals, you can probably only create a 1000m piece of quark material.

Of course, when it comes to actual production, it is impossible for humans to make a cube. After all, this thing can hardly change its shape after being made by the super force field, and it cannot even be cut.

Therefore, if you want to make it into battleship armor, you must complete the shaping during the initial processing, which is quite similar to firing porcelain.

As you can imagine, it would take a long time to build a fully armed new generation flagship. After receiving this report, the relevant warship construction department made an assessment and believed that if the armor of the new flagship of mankind was all made of this material, then it would probably only be possible to build one ship like the current Tianqin.

There is nothing we can do about it.

The properties of this material require humans to use template prefabrication in the new flagship construction plan. First, it is manufactured piece by piece, then a super-force field is used to complete the quark massification, and finally the shells are pieced together piece by piece.

This requires humans to have corresponding splicing technology. After all, interstellar battleships cannot be riveted like aircraft hulls, and quark materials cannot be riveted either.

This involves another technology - super-force field welding technology.

The general principle is to use super force fields just like the process of producing quark materials. After the battleship hulls are spliced ​​together, strong pressure is applied to them. At the same time, a super force field is applied to the joint between the two parts, allowing this part to undergo the quark material manufacturing process again, so that the spliced ​​parts complete a perfect seamless whole.

Quark materials are difficult to cut, but can be glued together in this way.

In this way, a warship with a flat and smooth hull can be built.

Yes, it is a flat and smooth shell instead of a fully reflective mirror shell, because the appearance of this material is also completely different from traditional strong materials.

Traditional strong materials have an absolutely smooth surface at the macroscopic level, with 100% mirror reflectivity. However, this quark material does not inherit this feature at all. If you look closely at it with your naked eyes, you will see that its surface is like a colorless water fluid composed of countless tiny short strips of pixels, giving people a soft and tender feeling.

Before humans successfully developed this material, they could not have imagined that its appearance would be so tender, just like soft water fluid, which is in sharp contrast to its powerful performance.

After the successful development of the new material, the design of the new flagship was also released. Its shape is in line with the current Tianqin, but in order to meet the needs of the super star destroyer cannon, its size will be further increased to an astonishing 800 kilometers.

It far exceeds the size of a planetary battleship.

Humans call this level of battleship a star-class battleship.

Obviously, a star-class battleship does not mean a battleship as big as a star, but a battleship that has the ability to destroy stars.

As for the new flagship that is currently being designed, the relevant departments have initially estimated that it will take at least a thousand years from the start of construction to completion, which is very time-consuming.

However, if quark materials are not used to make armor, it will not be so troublesome.

(End of this chapter)