Starting from the Planetary Governor - Chapter 769

Chapter 764: Advanced Star Fortress and Demon-Breaking Armor

Chapter 764:

What is the greatest contributor to the development of the Advanced Star Fortress and Demon-Breaking Armor Alliance?

Of course, it’s Gu Hang’s wise leadership!

Ahem… but what else?

It’s the Grace Points.

There’s no doubt about it.

Putting aside Gu Hang’s rise to power, even the Alliance’s productivity growth is inextricably linked to Grace Points.

Technology and the black box are the primary driving forces behind productivity development.

Furthermore, regardless of the material foundation or environmental conditions, it ultimately comes down to people. All wealth and victory are earned through human effort.

Grace Points are also crucial in cultivating talent and ensuring their loyalty.

The Alliance’s direction of development has been largely established in the previous two meetings.

Next comes the issue of execution.

This is the most crucial issue.

Who doesn’t set a goal?

Formulating a plan is a bit more challenging,

but the execution steps are the most challenging.

And Gu Hang’s job is to use Grace Points to assist with this execution.

After the Battle of Rhaeduches, Gu Hang received a large sum of grace points.

However, he spent them all immediately.

However, it didn’t matter. With the Alliance’s control over fourteen star regions becoming legitimate, the system recognized that all regions had transitioned from vassalage or military occupation to core territories of the regime.

Furthermore, as the Alliance continued to establish a stable governance system over these worlds over the past two or three years, many planets began to transition from providing no or even reduced monthly grace point income to providing regular grace point income.

While the monthly grace point increase, driven solely by scale, is non-linear, more like a milestone-by-step unlocking curve, the magnitude of this wave of expansion in control and the increase in population were immense.

Even though the Alliance’s control over many regions was still fragile, having only been established for a year or two, and even though productivity in many areas had yet to return to normal levels due to the devastation of war, Gu Hang’s monthly grace income skyrocketed.

Immediately after the Battle of Rhaeduches, Gu Hang’s monthly income was only around 500,000. Now, it has grown to 1.7 million.

From that time until now, a total of three years and seven months, the accumulated revenue has exceeded fifty-three million.

And that’s not all.

During these forty-three months, there have been no large-scale wars, but small-scale, planet-wide battles have never ceased across the Alliance’s fourteen sectors.

The most common task is to eliminate those infected with the parasite, followed by the suppression of rebellious elements—there are always those who are confused and incite fools to become bandits, join cults, or simply believe in something unrealistic.

With seven thousand planets and twelve trillion people, it’s only natural for something to go wrong.

Add to that the rare campaigns against greenskins, and even after the discovery of Dark Elf pirates, the Spiderverse has occasionally been plagued by these pesky space mosquitoes. The

Dark Eldar have become the current primary target of the navy’s countermeasures.

While there have been losses in these wars, most have been ultimately won.

The total revenue has exceeded eighteen million.

Add up to seventy-one million.

Last time, Gu Hang had even reserved 20 million grace points for emergencies.

This brought his accumulated grace points to a total of 91 million.

At the end of the Battle of Rhaeduches, he had hundreds of millions. Back then, he’d lamented how difficult it would have been to amass hundreds of millions of grace points without relying on war.

But now, he’d discovered that farming was the true path!

His current level wasn’t even close to reaching his limit. As the alliance progressed, and their control over various planets deepened, the 1.7 million grace points per month was bound to soar.

Perhaps in two or three years, he could have accumulated another 100 million grace points.

Then, he could pull off another ten-draw lottery of technologies worth tens of millions, perhaps even some fate-altering, apocalyptic technology.

Even without such top-tier technology, ordinary technology still had value.

Even if a piece of technology is inferior to what’s currently in use in the Alliance—for example, Gu Hang initially pulled out the G8 series of live-fire rifles, and later the G5—it doesn’t mean it’s useless.

First, G5 production lines can be built and used on planets with underdeveloped production capacity. While the Alliance Army certainly won’t purchase the mass-produced G5 rifles, when production capacity is insufficient, some planetary defense forces can use them as a makeshift first-hand experience. It’s better than nothing, and better than using makeshift guns.

If things really don’t work out, they can be used as Imperial taxes. While cheaper than the G8 series, a little is still money.

With Imperial taxes, production and economic development have this advantage: you don’t have to worry about sales. While the price of the Imperial taxes isn’t high, and there’s no profit to be made, it’s stable. As long as costs are kept under control and don’t exceed the official price, production can be expanded recklessly, just to make a profit.

This offers a solution for many outdated products.

Of course, it’s best to focus on high-tech products. That kind of thing, the official pricing offers a relatively high profit margin. For actual production of bullets or laser gun energy cartridges, the official pricing is still too low. Supply chain, production management, production efficiency… if any one aspect is wrong, losses are likely.

Even if the extracted technology is truly useless, or even duplicated, and the Alliance doesn’t want to continue expanding production of that technology, then the extracted black boxes can be sold.

The Mechanicus is extremely concerned about black boxes. And with Gu Hang’s current status and the Alliance’s strength, there’s no fear of the black boxes being leaked—just make sure they don’t all leak at once.

A single black box could potentially fetch tens to hundreds of billions. The exact amount depends on the specific technology in the black box. A piece of technology for a broken G5 rifle might only fetch a few billion.

But that’s still a lot, enough to trade for a destroyer or even a cruiser.

Uh… looking at it this way, the profit is still not enough, at least compared to now, Gu Hang’s prize pool for low-level draws has almost been emptied. Basically, it takes 10 million grace points to draw once. If he is unlucky and draws low-level technology, it would be too uncomfortable.

After some thought, Gu Hang decided to keep 10 million of the 90 million grace points as a backup to avoid any emergency situations that would require a large expenditure of grace points.

He would use 40 million of the remaining 80 million to participate in the technology lottery.

If they could extract even a single Apocalypse-level technology, they’d be a jackpot.

Unfortunately, they didn’t.

But at least there were two Epic-level technologies,

both worth mentioning:

[Advanced Star Fortress Construction Technology] and [Modular Demon-Breaking Armor Technology].

The former was easy enough, as the Alliance already possessed the capability to build star fortresses.

The difficulty and cost of building them weren’t as great as building ships. Even without the relevant technology, with the Alliance’s current industrial base, they could simply build a batch of star fortresses and armed space stations, then have the appropriate engineering vessels to tow them to the required locations. However

, designing and manufacturing in-house isn’t as easy as having a system with a complete design and a black box. And that’s

even more so when it comes to Epic-level technology, with the word “Advanced” in it.

After some research, Gu Hang discovered that the combat power of this Advanced Star Fortress surpassed that of a Retribution-class battleship. In a space battle, two Retributions would be destroyed by it.

But that wasn’t surprising.

Since star fortresses don’t need to be moved, all they need to do is build their size. Armor can be made extremely thick, and the engine’s energy output can be fully channeled to laser weapons or void shields. This gives it a significant inherent advantage over spacecraft, which must compromise between power and agility.

Even if the technology is slightly inferior, the cost-effectiveness of increasing scale is sufficient.

The power of this advanced technology lies in its ability to elevate the firepower density and defensive strength of a star fortress to a new level without increasing costs, through optimized energy output and layout design.

More crucially, this advanced star fortress is equipped with a special gravity engine, enabling the heavy star fortress to move.

While its speed and agility are inferior to even that of a Retribution-class battleship, and its movement is essentially dependent on the gravity of large celestial bodies, rather than its own independent power system, limiting its mobility to the periphery of a planet,

this is still a breakthrough.

This unique capability overcomes the primary limitation of star fortresses in planetary defense: their limited coverage area.

Star fortresses are ultimately immobile, or at best, like satellites, orbiting a planet in a fixed orbit.

Even in this latter scenario, they still have a fixed periodicity. This periodicity often allows attackers to exploit it and orbit the other side of the planet to launch an attack.

This advanced star fortress overcomes this problem.

Of course, lacking these new star fortresses isn’t completely impossible. Multiple star fortresses can be built and placed in orbit around the planet, providing comprehensive coverage. However, this would increase costs and production time. Furthermore, due to the need for comprehensive protection, some star fortresses would inevitably be on one side of the planet and some on the other. If an enemy attacks one side, the star fortress on the other side would be completely blind.

Furthermore, the new star fortresses can leverage the gravity of planets, and of course, the gravity of larger stars can also be leveraged, and even more effectively. This means that if the environment in a system allows, and the orbit of the primary defended planet is not too far from the star, then the new star fortresses, utilizing the stellar orbit, could even be used to switch between orbits and planetary orbits, even protecting other planets in the same system. This would provide greater defensive flexibility for star systems with multiple habitable planets.

Gu Hang also immediately realized that this new type of star fortress wasn’t solely a defensive weapon.

During a war, engineering vessels could tow these new star fortresses along, bringing them to bear in suitable locations.

For example, if a planetary orbital defense system is heavily fortified, a forced attack would incur heavy losses. If a planetary orbital system could be used to exploit the star’s gravity and shift into orbit, this weapon would become a highly effective weapon for forcing a planetary defense system—stronger and much cheaper than a battleship.

Of course, its overall use case is still limited, and it can’t replace a battleship.

But solving a problem and expanding its application isn’t a bad thing.

…

[Modular Demon-Breaking Armor] isn’t just a standalone technology; it can be applied to any armored equipment. From small-scale power armor with demon-breaking properties to larger-scale Terminator armor, Knight mechs, and Titans, from armored vehicles to tanks, and even starships.

The effect is that armor equipped with this technology can be made to resist psychic energy, warp energy, and demonic energy. These powers will be significantly weakened, or even completely neutralized.

This technology is very useful against psychically adept xenos and cultists.

However, due to its high cost, it is almost impossible to use it on weapons like armored vehicles and tanks. The cost of the demon-breaking armor would be even higher than the tank itself, and with that money, it would be better to build a few more tanks and increase the number.

It is also unlikely to be used on starships. Starships are valuable, but they are too large to be practical.

The most suitable application is still on power armor, allowing Space Marines or the Alliance’s elite Honor Guard to carry out decapitation operations against enemy psychic units on the battlefield.

Gu Hang is quite interested in this technology.

At the very least, it provides an additional piece of equipment specifically for combating demons and cultists.

Furthermore, the prophetic vision he had witnessed above the Kingdom of Storms, featuring the endless appearance of cult traitors and Warp demons, filled him with worry. He suspected these Chaos enemies would be the primary enemy in the so-called Final War. The widespread

deployment of Demon-Breaking Armor should give the Alliance a significant advantage against such foes.

Even without seeing any signs of progress yet, Gu Hang intended to initiate mass production of Demon-Breaking Armor. He didn’t necessarily need to deploy it to the entire army immediately, but at least building a large reserve was a good idea for a rainy day.

After drawing from these four 10 million technology tiers, he still had 40 million remaining. Of these, 15 million were spent on talent development and commissar training.

The remaining 25 million were used to redeem various levels of factory buildings, academy buildings, and church buildings.

It seemed like a lot, but when divided among over 7,000 worlds, it wasn’t much.

At the very least, with these talented individuals and these factory buildings, the Alliance’s economic production goals would be more easily achieved.

————

I’ll write another chapter before dawn to catch up with yesterday’s.

(End of this chapter)