Chapter 92: Weapon Research

As long as this inexplicable sense of unease lingered, Jason could not find any peace of mind.

He had already made a firm decision: whether they ended up facing hostile alien civilizations or subterranean Martian monsters, as long as the threat wasn’t a biological plague, they would solve it with nuclear weapons! Nuclear warheads were humanity’s ultimate weapon and, by extension, its greatest protector.

If one strike wasn’t enough, they would drop two. If two weren’t enough, they would drop ten!

From the Noah’s desperate escape from their dying homeworld to the theoretical bombardment of hostile alien spacecraft, nuclear weapons were the definitive answer. Of course, if an enemy could withstand a concentrated nuclear barrage, then humanity was likely doomed anyway.

The colony’s engineers had successfully manufactured twelve Helium-3 nuclear warheads, each boasting a staggering yield of one gigaton. However, Jason still felt a sharp pang of regret. This small arsenal had consumed a full one-eighth of humanity’s incredibly limited Helium-3 reserves. Every single drop of the isotope was precious. Furthermore, countless advanced scientific experiments required Helium-3; burning it all to build explosives felt like a terrible waste of resources.

Yet, even with twelve gigaton-class warheads in the armory, Jason’s anxiety wasn’t quelled. He desperately needed a more powerful, brutal, and easily mass-produced weapon: the Tetrahydrogen Nuclear Bomb.

“Professor Hao Yu, what is the current status of the Tetrahydrogen Nuclear Bomb project?” This was the third time Jason had walked into the Wolfpack Design Bureau’s headquarters recently, and his question was always exactly the same.

The Wolfpack Design Bureau’s primary objective over the past few months had been finalizing the automated super-train network. Now that the trains were operational and the field tests had come back flawless, the core engineering team finally had some downtime.

Jason immediately capitalized on this by assigning them the theoretical design task for the Tetrahydrogen bomb, constantly urging them to accelerate their research.

Professor Hao Yu, the Bureau’s director, was an absolute weapons fanatic and incredibly enthusiastic about the project. Furthermore, the young engineering prodigies under his command were fiercely ambitious. The moment they heard they were being tasked with designing a next-generation nuclear weapon, their excitement went through the roof.

“A Tetrahydrogen Nuclear Bomb!” one of the younger engineers had gasped during the initial briefing. “That’s a theoretical weapon. What’s the payload mechanism?”

“You are all familiar with the core reactions powering a star, correct?” Professor Hao Yu had replied, his eyes gleaming. “Four hydrogen protons fuse together under immense pressure and extreme temperature to form a single helium nucleus, releasing a colossal amount of energy in the process. A warhead designed to artificially replicate and weaponize this exact principle is called a Tetrahydrogen Nuclear Bomb.”

The team had gone wild with excitement. They frantically began scribbling calculations on any available surface, their literal, wolf-like howls of triumph echoing down the corridors. This chaotic, high-energy environment was a unique hallmark of the Wolfpack Design Bureau’s culture, though it often left the neighboring research departments feeling helpless and annoyed.

The Tetrahydrogen Nuclear Bomb, a weapon utilizing standard, abundant hydrogen isotopes, was the absolute king of nuclear armaments. It could be endlessly mass-produced, and its destructive yield could theoretically be scaled up infinitely.

Standard deuterium-tritium hydrogen bombs and advanced Helium-3 warheads were strictly bottlenecked by the extreme rarity of their raw materials. The Tetrahydrogen bomb, however, utilized baseline hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, making up over 90% of all visible matter. The fuel supply was virtually inexhaustible!

However, as a veteran weapons designer, Professor Hao Yu understood the apocalyptic difficulty of actually engineering such a device. To replicate the reaction conditions found within a star’s core, they would need to artificially generate temperatures exceeding 15 million degrees Celsius, combined with a crushing pressure of roughly 250 billion standard Earth atmospheres!

Generating 15 million degrees Celsius was actually manageable; human technology could already achieve that thermal threshold in short bursts. But 250 billion atmospheres of pressure? That metric was absolute insanity. It required compressing a gas until it was 150 times denser than liquid water!

In physics terms, this required applying a continuous force of 2.5 times 10^{17} Newtons across a single square meter. To put that into perspective, it was the equivalent of taking the sheer mass of two hundred and fifty massive mountain ranges and concentrating their entire crushing weight onto an area the size of a standard dining table.

Achieving that level of sustained pressure was currently impossible for human engineering. They could easily compress a gas into a liquid, but compressing a liquid into a hyper-dense solid state was a monumental hurdle.

A star naturally achieved these extreme conditions thanks to the immense gravitational weight of its own mass. Human technology simply didn’t possess a mechanism to replicate that gravitational crush. This was the primary roadblock preventing the creation of the Tetrahydrogen Bomb.

Knowing this, Professor Hao Yu had deliberately thrown the project at his arrogant young researchers just to dampen their overconfident spirits.

It worked perfectly. After a few days of running the math, the young engineers looked like zombies who had lost their souls. They stumbled around the lab, bumping into walls, their boastful roars replaced by frantic, defeated muttering.

At least they had become much more well-behaved.

Professor Hao Yu was secretly delighted by their humbling, often bursting into laughter when he reviewed their failed simulation data. Jason, however, was not amused by the delay.

“If your team cannot handle this, I will reassign the project to the Tesla Division!” Jason finally snapped, his face stern. “They are currently short on assignments anyway.”

Upon hearing this, Professor Hao Yu’s expression shifted drastically, his face flushing bright red. He immediately roared, his voice booming across the lab. “Absolutely not! When it comes to thermonuclear weapon design, they are nowhere near as competent as we are!”

He was technically right; there were several rival defense contractors aboard the ship, but none as historically successful as the Wolfpack. Still, Hao Yu panicked at the threat. If he actually lost this flagship project to a rival division, his proud engineering staff would absolutely rebel!

He couldn’t bear the professional shame.

“It has been weeks. How do you not even have a basic structural schematic yet?” Jason asked, softening his tone slightly. He didn’t want to break the man’s spirit; he just needed results.

“Of course we have theories!” Professor Hao Yu spat, hating it whenever his capabilities were questioned. He tapped his console, pulling up several complex schematics. “It’s not that we are incapable, Captain. It’s just that the preliminary ignition technologies simply don’t exist yet!”

He expanded a massive graph detailing the relationship between thermal energy and compression.

“This is a theoretical phase diagram charting the temperature versus pressure requirements for Tetrahydrogen fusion. Humanity has rarely studied this specific reaction pathway in the past, so the data models are completely blank. We have to map the physics from scratch…”

As he spoke, Hao Yu calmed down, slipping back into his element. “We obviously cannot generate 250 billion atmospheres of pressure. Therefore, our only viable workaround is to drastically lower the pressure requirement by exponentially increasing the ignition temperature.”

“Currently, the absolute highest temperature humanity has ever artificially generated is roughly 10 trillion degrees Celsius. However, that was a microscopic, localized thermal spike achieved within a massive Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. We obviously cannot pack a multi-kilometer particle accelerator into the casing of a deployable warhead.”

“Using a standard Helium-3 detonation as the primary ignition stage for the Tetrahydrogen core is an option, but the thermal transfer models are highly unstable. It isn’t guaranteed to trigger the secondary fusion chain…”

“Inertial confinement via laser ignition is currently our most promising theoretical avenue. The most powerful experimental laser arrays can instantaneously generate focal temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius and localized shockwave pressures over 100 billion atmospheres. I am currently running simulations to see if layering those lasers inside a warhead casing will work…”

Lost deep in thought, Professor Hao Yu began rapidly muttering to himself, completely forgetting that the Captain of the Noah was standing right next to him.

Looking at the exhausted scientist, Jason knew in his heart that Hao Yu had been secretly obsessing over this project for a long time. Given the Professor’s proud personality, he definitely wanted to solve the impossible physics problem in secret and present a completed, flawless weapon to amaze the entire colony.

The reality was just that the physics were brutally unforgiving. It wasn’t a lack of genius; it was just that engineering the ultimate nuclear weapon was still slightly beyond humanity’s current technological grasp.

“Here are our top three theoretical ignition options. Take a look at the data yourself. Each one is mathematically feasible, but engineering them is a nightmare…” Professor Hao Yu finally snapped out of his trance, sending the encrypted files directly to Jason’s datapad.

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