Qin Zhongquan's destination was still the old place. The asteroid belt had always been a shelter for free mercenaries. Not to mention this two-hundred-meter-long "small boat", even national-level large warships and aircraft carriers could be hidden there during wartime.
Of course, the name "Asteroid Belt" is just a name that was widely circulated in the past. Its actual appearance is completely different from what is described in those legends. Except for a few relatively stable orbits used for temporary parking, all other places have been mined out by the miners in the Community era through their day-to-day work. What remains are only some broken stones and spacecraft wreckage.
People today can't imagine the productivity of that time, but the annual reports of the United Mining Corporation provide some clues. Even without the Community's automatic machinery, simply by exploiting hundreds of millions of space miners, they were able to achieve the industrial miracle of annual production exceeding one billion tons of various minerals!
The Moron class had ceased acceleration fifteen minutes prior and was currently using a diamond-shaped wreckage the size of the warship's forward area to evade optical tracking. This location was approximately 1.2 AU from Mars, with a communication delay exceeding 30 minutes, making any attempt to track them extremely difficult. Overall, the best barrier at present was still distance. No battle would exceed a single light-second. As long as those tailing them failed to detect them within this timeframe, tracking would be declared a failure.
Qin Zhongquan ordered the warship's cooling system and communications module shut down, and simultaneously operated the control panel to reduce the power of the energy core to the lowest level. The temperature inside the bridge was gradually rising, but given the size of the ship, it wasn't necessary for the crew to wear exoskeletons.
The ship's passive radar would tell fate within a few cycles, but they just needed to rest for now.
The original Barracuda-class armed merchant ship should have just finished accelerating and entered inertial navigation. Red Fox, commanding it, must have exhausted his allocated funds, so it must be fully loaded with supplies and ship fuel. Red Fox had a good reputation among the freelance mercenaries and was more than capable of securing the ship's high-value cargo. However, the scheduled rendezvous point was further away, and considering the recent developments in the Outer Rim, it was difficult to contact them for the time being—doing so would increase the risk of exposure for both parties.
Qin Zhongquan planned to think of a name for the new ship first. It was too awkward to always call it "target".
This battleship looks to be about 240 meters long and 145 meters wide, with a cross-section that resembles a flattened bulb of garlic. The front half of the long axis is made up of cylindrical compartments reserved for weapons, while the middle section consists of several large hangars arranged in parallel. Each hangar can accommodate two base unmanned aerial vehicles or 60 boat-class fighters. Of course, these hangars can also be converted into weapon bays and cargo bays, but it may not be possible to find a suitable orbital assembly platform on the outer ring.
The name "Platypus" would be more descriptive, as it was a round, deadly animal found on Earth that fired darts that could draw blood - he had seen it in "The Complete Guide to Mutant Animals in the Solar System".
Qin Zhongquan waved his hand in the air a few times in front of him, and his brain controlled the eye implant to move the characters in the AR vision to one side of his field of vision, and then generated another name.
The name "Dirty Snowball" wasn't bad either; naming ships after their appearance was a tradition among space mercenaries. The ship's original paint had long been stripped away by smugglers, leaving only the distinctive white primer and bright silver scratches of Earth. It looked like the common dirty snowballs found in Jupiter's rings, but that made it quite common. He had seen no fewer than four hundred ships with that name.
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