As the smallest planet in the galaxy, Lava Planet's extreme surface environment and close orbit to its star made it unsuitable for transformation into a fortress planet. However, Bai Yi had no intention of missing out on the rich mineral resources it held. He launched his construction vehicles onto the planet and instructed them to construct a portal, aiming to completely drain it dry.
A week passed quickly, and the portal was connected to the grid three days ago. More construction units and prefabricated parts continued to flow from New Mars through the subspace barrier inside the portal to Lava Star.
With the concerted efforts of over a hundred builders, the main body of the planet harvester was completed within 72 hours. Seen from space, it now resembles a giant six-pointed starfish, firmly attached to the north pole of the lava planet.
The collection facilities at the bottom of the harvester have been started, and dozens of huge gears like grinders are turning. The surface of the lava planet, which is not solid to begin with, is quickly divided into huge blocks of rock. These blocks of rock are crushed by the gears and carried into the interior of the harvester. After preliminary sorting, they enter the central crushing facility.
Here, useful resources are cut into large chunks, while other debris is completely crushed into powder and then pressed into blocks by huge hydraulic presses.
Once everything is completed, the pre-processed ores will be transported out via a conveyor belt behind the harvester. One end of the conveyor belt goes straight through the North Pole gate and connects to the ore processing station on New Mars.
As the construction progresses, the ground will gradually collapse from the pressure of the planetary harvester, and the harvester will penetrate deeper into the planet, all the way to the core. However, before that, the construction sub-construction will complete the construction of all areas, the temporary conveyor belts will be dismantled, and all resources processed by the harvester will be directly transferred to the resource warehouse on New Mars through the built-in subspace gate.
A massive storage warehouse has been built on the surface of New Mars, occupying an area roughly equivalent to a city block on Earth. Furthermore, due to the use of technology similar to that of a Planck container, the space within the warehouse is not flat as usual, but rather folded. This means that the entire warehouse's volume is actually much larger than it appears from the outside.
In order to build such a warehouse, Bai Yi almost used up all the alloys left after building the planet harvester. But fortunately, both the mines on New Mars and the harvesters on Lava Planet can continuously replenish new mineral resources for him.
The mines on New Mars were no longer ordinary open-pit operations. The original mining equipment had been dismantled, and the pits formed by the excavation were completely covered by a layer of silver alloy. In the center of the alloy ground, a massive hole, several dozen meters in diameter, appeared in the middle of the pit.
The cavern was clearly man-made, its entrance a perfectly rounded shape, its edges rimmed with metal. The cavern was bottomless, but the surrounding walls were sheathed in metal plates. Every hundred meters, reinforced rings as thick as a person could be seen, supporting the surrounding pressure.
The cavern was so deep that even with the lights on, the bottom was invisible. But if you stood at the entrance, you could hear the rumbling sound from deep underground through the thin atmosphere. It was as if a giant beast had drilled through the earth's crust and was causing trouble below.
In fact, there is indeed such a steel behemoth.
Deep underground on New Mars, a giant tunnel boring machine was working continuously. However, unlike the tunnel boring machines in Bai Yi's previous worldline, its head did not have a metal cutterhead. Instead, it was equipped with several fragmentation wave generators. No matter how hard the rock, after encountering the green fragmentation waves emitted by these devices, it would disintegrate into a pile of worthless powder at the molecular level.
The powder will be sucked into the shield machine by a giant fan, then pumped out through the ventilation ducts in the shaft and finally discharged into the atmosphere.
This powder was worthless to Bai Yi, as its molecular fragmentation made its recovery expensive and inefficient. Rather than collecting usable materials from this pile of powder, Bai Yi would rather drag a few meteorites back from the outermost asteroid belt of the galaxy.
Finally, the behemoth stopped. It had penetrated the long-solidified mantle of New Mars and reached the planet's core. A window opened in the front of the tunnel boring machine, and a probe extended from it. It began to scan New Mars' core, analyzing its specific composition.
After everything was finished, the shield machine began to retreat. However, judging from the cross-section of the planet, it actually rose up by a hundred meters.
A space is left in front of the shield machine.
Then, this steel giant began to collapse, and it disintegrated into a dozen smaller shield machines, but the heads of these shield machines were no longer equipped with cracking waves, but traditional cutter heads.
After the disintegration was completed, these son-type shield machines immediately rushed towards the core of the earth. At the same time, the cutter head rotated rapidly, brutally tearing and cutting the solid core, and then swallowing the cut parts and transmitting them to the warehouse on the ground through the subspace network.
The same scene can be seen in dozens of places on the surface of the Earth's core. These shield machines will start from the core where the density is the highest and decompose the planet from the inside out.
But they won't actually break up the new Mars; they'll hollow it out.
Before the planet's outer shell collapses under the pressure, the builders will complete the transformation of the planet's surface, and the entire planet will be completely covered with charged metal. Inside the planet, the builders will arrange supports along the holes dug by the shield machine to further maintain the planet's stability.
Large-scale internal construction will begin after most of the planet has been hollowed out. At that point, a vast army of builders will replace the makeshift scaffolding with massive pillars and construct a vast, labyrinthine array of chambers along the excavated cavities. These chambers will continue to expand within the planet until they fill its entire interior.
Then, the planet would completely transform into a metal world. A massive planetary reactor and planetary thrusters would be installed at this stage. The former would provide nearly endless energy for the entire fortress planet, while the latter would be able to propel the star out of its orbit, even carrying the entire planet into the subspace for short-distance travel at speeds exceeding light.
Of course, the energy required to carry a planet into the subspace is extremely enormous, and the resulting fluctuations can be clearly observed even from dozens of light years away. Therefore, even in the Galactic Alliance, this practice is not common.
It's not that it can't be done, but there's simply no need to do so.
After all, the mobile combat capability, especially the offensive capability, of a single fortress planet is not particularly strong. Its main function is to cooperate with armed stars to conduct systematic combat in units of galaxies.
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