Chapter 228: Dyson Sphere Project! The Infinity Night!
After reviewing the details and construction requirements of the megastructure [Quantum Slingshot], Li Ang turned his attention to the System's All-Heavens Roulette.
Thanks to completing a Level 2 mission and unlocking the scientific hub megastructure [Singularity Power Plant], he had earned one guaranteed Level 9 Legendary draw.
Currently, Li Ang's draw tokens included: one guaranteed Level 10 Legendary, one guaranteed Level 9 Legendary, and ten additional chances with at least Level 8 rewards.
A total of twelve consecutive spins—two guarantees!
"Old Li's been fighting this war for so long… I guess this is what it means to finally hit it big."
Li Ang chuckled to himself.
Without delay, he activated the All-Heavens Roulette and silently speculated about the possible prizes he might pull this time.
His guaranteed Level 10 Legendary was from the Stellaris universe, so he suspected the jackpot item would be a megastructure or some kind of superweapon.
It might even be a Dyson Sphere—or perhaps something like the World Burner.
The Level 9 guaranteed pull, on the other hand, was from the Halo Infinite universe.
Last time he got a guaranteed Legendary from Halo, he'd pulled an Infinity -class supercarrier.
So maybe this time, he'd score the Halo Array or another massive Covenant warship.
Either way, as long as the System's guarantee mechanic was in play, Li Ang wasn't too stressed.
After all, this wasn't some scammy gacha system from a certain infamously stingy game studio—no need to worry about "soft pity" or missing guarantees!
Every Legendary-tier item that appeared in the roulette pool was guaranteed to be good.
They were either scalable, endgame-ready assets like Matrices or Gene Seeds...
Or ultra-powerful megastructures, warships, and bio-weapons—things like Ringworlds, Infinity -class flagships, or the Scorpid Manticore Virus.
Basically, no such thing as a "bad pity pull" here—the experience was always top-tier.
As Li Ang's thoughts settled, the spinning roulette wheel gradually came to a halt, and the results of the 12-draw session lit up on the screen.
---
[Your 12x All-Heavens Roulette Results:]
Dyson Sphere (Level 10 Guaranteed Legendary · Stellaris · Quantum Architect)
CSO-class Supercarrier · The Infinity Night (Level 9 Guaranteed Legendary · Halo · Covenant)
Hyperion Battlecruiser (StarCraft · Terran Dominion)
Centurion Exoskeleton (Warhammer 40K · Adeptus Mechanicus)
MAX Power System (Ultraman Tiga · Dr. Eight-Tails)
PROJECT-X Dark Matter Energy Rifle (District 9 · Prawn Civilization)
Full VR & Holographic System Suite (Ready Player One · IOI Corp)
Med-Pod (The Wolverine · Yashida Corporation)
Batpod (The Dark Knight · Wayne Enterprises)
Hextech Construction Robot (UX Galaxy · BuildBot Division)
[...]
---
"Holy sht?!"*
The moment Li Ang saw that his guaranteed pulls were the Dyson Sphere and The Infinity Night, everything else paled in comparison.
He forcibly resisted the urge to jump up and shout, blinking hard to make sure he wasn't misreading the results.
A quick double-check confirmed it: he hadn't misread anything—the guarantees were, in fact, a Dyson Sphere and the Covenant's CSO-class Supercarrier The Infinity Night!
"This is it. We're going orbital, baby. Where the hell are the Trisolarans? Come here and line up as fuel!"
After calming his excitement a little, Li Ang turned back to the screen to examine the newly acquired megastructure: the Dyson Sphere.
First of all, the construction conditions for the Dyson Sphere in Stellaris were fairly straightforward:
You can't build it in a star system that has any habitable planets—because the structure would completely enshroud the star and drain all its energy.
This would cause all planets in the system to lose their life-sustaining light and heat, turning them into frozen, barren wastelands.
Destroying habitable planets just to build a Dyson Sphere would be wasteful and inefficient.
After all, habitable planets in the vastness of space are already rare and valuable.
Most star systems are desolate and inhospitable, so it's better to construct Dyson Spheres in systems that have no habitable worlds to begin with.
Aside from that, there are three types of celestial bodies around which Dyson Spheres cannot be constructed: black holes, neutron stars, and pulsars.
The reason is simple: these objects are basically the "gangsters" of the universe.
Their surrounding space is plagued with gravitational anomalies, dimensional distortions, extreme radiation, and unpredictable energy emissions.
In short—they're a nightmare to deal with.
Placing a megastructure like a Dyson Sphere near them would be courting disaster.
One day the black hole might just snack on the whole thing, or a neutron star might pulse out a wave of radiation and fry its systems.
Lastly, dual-star and triple-star systems are also unsuitable.
The reason? Their orbital mechanics are complex and chaotic.
Unlike single-star systems where planetary orbits are stable and predictable, multiple-star systems constantly shift due to gravitational tug-of-war.
Just look at the Trisolarans' home system—three suns dancing around like they're in a cosmic rave, wreaking havoc on everything nearby.
In such chaotic environments, a massive structure like a Dyson Sphere could easily end up getting smashed into oblivion.
Therefore, the ideal location for a Dyson Sphere is a single-star system, without any black holes, neutron stars, or pulsars, and preferably barren.
The conditions might seem strict, but in the vast expanse of the universe, such systems are still reasonably findable.
Finding a suitable site could be delegated to the AI Europa.
"Building a Dyson Sphere's actually way simpler than the Quantum Slingshot. Just pick a good spot and get to work."
Li Ang nodded thoughtfully. The Quantum Slingshot needed engineering ships and complex assembly—it was a whole logistical nightmare compared to the Dyson Sphere.
In contrast, this Dyson Sphere was a pre-made megastructure—essentially a freebie from the All-Heavens system.
All Li Ang had to do was supervise its assembly and activation.
The entire construction period might take two to three years, or even less!
After all, this was a complete structure from the system—not something he had to forge from raw materials or prototype from scratch.
"Guaranteed Legendaries are just too sweet. With this thing, I'll save a ridiculous amount of energy expenses!"
The more Li Ang looked at the Dyson Sphere, the more he liked it.
Its primary function: to extract energy from a star and convert it into power generation.
The construction concept was elegantly simple—possibly the simplest of all megastructures:
Wrap the star in solar panels.
Then convert 100% of the star's light and heat into usable energy—squeezing every last drop of fuel from it.
Of course, while the idea was simple, the execution was a nightmare.
With the current capabilities of Universal Megacorp, building a Dyson Sphere from scratch was probably beyond their limits.
And even if they could just barely manage it, the cost would be so astronomical that it'd severely slow down the company's growth.
But the same old truth still applied: the only problem with expensive things—is that they're expensive!
A single Dyson Sphere could cover the entire energy needs of Universal Megacorp's massive fleet.
And we're not talking current needs—we're talking five times the current scale!
That's right.
Just one Dyson Sphere could fuel over a thousand Infinity -class warships.
That alone could quintuple the Megacorp Navy's size.
A dream come true for the entire fleet!
"Wahoo! We're taking off!"
At this point, Li Ang was so overjoyed his grin practically reached his ears.
He'd originally expected the Dyson Sphere to be a late-stage reward unlocked in Phase Five…
But to his surprise, he'd hit the jackpot early—pulling it from the guarantee pool in a single lucky draw.
White-knighting a megastructure for free? Now that's the good stuff!
Suppressing his excitement and steadying his trembling hands, Li Ang finally shifted his attention to another heavyweight item from the Multiverse—none other than…
…the CSO-class Supercarrier Long Night of Solace from the Halo universe!
In Li Ang's mind, the priority level of this golden-legend-class warship was on par with even a Tier-10 Dyson Sphere megastructure.
Because in any sci-fi setting, this beast of a ship would absolutely be classified as a Tier-1 juggernaut!
Even when compared to the 3,000-kilometer motherships of the Reaper civilization from Independence Day, the CSO-class holds its own—perhaps even pulling ahead in one-on-one combat scenarios.
"The pinnacle of warships in Halo, the pride of the Covenant, a top-tier Tier-5 carrier…!"
Just looking at the system panel's specs for the Long Night of Solace, Li Ang could already envision this colossal, seemingly Infinity flying colony ship—a mobile fortress the size of a small asteroid.
In the Halo universe, aside from the literal megastructure that is the Mantle's Approach, nothing else really comes close. The CSO carrier is, without question, a dominating force!
Without the slightest hesitation, Li Ang switched to the detailed view and began closely examining the ship's specifications.
> [CSO-class Supercarrier: Long Night of Solace
Note: The Covenant's flagship in Halo
Length: 28,960 meters
Width: 11,447 meters…]
He had barely started reading before the numbers floored him. Sure, he'd known it was massive—but this massive?
It wasn't until he saw the concrete stats that Li Ang truly grasped what kind of monster he was dealing with.
Just its length alone reached nearly 30 kilometers—that's over half a full marathon!
Its absurd 10-kilometer width? That's the length of two Infinity-class ships put together. This thing didn't just qualify as a capital ship—it dethroned the Infinity itself!
And that's not all. Its weight? An earth-shaking 152 billion tons—an absolute titan in gravitational terms.
Its outer hull was clad in layers upon layers of high-cost, heat-resistant, ultra-durable nanolaminate armor.
This was the same kind of material used on Needlefish-class battleships in Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans—strong, lightweight, and incredibly resilient.
With a body this massive, the Long Night of Solace had to be constructed using the lightest, toughest materials available—and nanolaminates were the ideal choice. Compared to durable alloys like durasteel, the performance gap was minimal, making them almost equivalent.
Naturally, a ship of this sheer scale and weight couldn't function without anti-gravity propulsion—and not just one engine, but three.
Only then could it effectively counter its own crushing mass, ensure stable operations, and achieve normal cruising speeds.
"I can't believe the Covenant's slipspace drive actually outperforms the latest model developed by our own megacorp…"
That was when Li Ang noticed something particularly interesting from the system's data panel.
It turned out the Covenant's slipspace engine used a distinctively different structural technology, and its optimization performance had nearly reached the level of the Infinity-class's hyperdrive.
And that's saying something, considering the Infinity's FTL drive was literally reverse-engineered from ancient Forerunner tech—one of the most advanced systems in the entire Halo universe.
To put it in modern terms, the performance gap between them was like comparing an NVIDIA RTX 4090 to AMD's RX 7900XTX.
Both are top-tier GPUs, but the 4090 still edges out the 7900 in raw performance.
That's the difference an architecture can make—and the Covenant's slipspace engine was built on exactly that kind of edge.
As of now, the hyperdrive tech self-developed by LA Megacorp still lagged slightly behind the Long Night of Solace.
If the Long Night's slipspace engine was an RTX 4090, LA Megacorp in-house drive would be more like an RTX 4070 Ti.
In day-to-day operations, the performance gap is almost unnoticeable.
But once you crank everything to the max—burning full power and running at peak output—you'd feel that difference.
That's how it was between the Infinity, the Long Night of Solace, and LA Megacorp 's proprietary engine tech.
During subluminal cruising, all of them moved at roughly the same speed. But when pushed to full throttle, the Long Night of Solace was still the one to cross the finish line first.
Facts are facts. If you're falling short, grind harder.
That said, Li Ang was surprisingly optimistic—he wasn't the least bit disheartened by the performance gap between the Long Night and his own FTL tech.
After all, LA Megacorp 's engine was based on emerging hyperspace navigation technology. Some hiccups in the early stages were to be expected.
It just wasn't a mature system yet.
But as the tech was refined and iterated upon over time, it would eventually close that gap—and even surpass both the Infinity and the Long Night of Solace in high-performance scenarios.
No question about it.
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