405. Chapter 405: North Africa

Egypt is the largest country in the Arab world, and its resistance to Israel is the strongest, so much so that some Arab leaders in Israel have proposed that our country should change its name, otherwise the Arabs seem to be very repulsive to the name Israel.

Israel now looks like a very powerful country on the outside, ruling over 50 million people, but due to ethnic disunity, there are often group incidents, which is really a headache. Jews, Arabs, Persians, Kurds...... A large number of ******** create big and small troubles every day.

Downing eventually agreed to the renaming scheme, called the "Middle East Community", which included the entire Arabian Peninsula and the entire valley of the Two Rivers, and Egypt is now temporarily ruled by the Middle East Community.

With the inclusion of Egypt, the GDP per capita of the 31 countries of the United Nations is even lower, at about 20 euros. Of course, it is still stronger than the Entente, whose per capita GDP is about 14 euros after losing Egypt. In terms of population, the United Nations ruled 778 million and the Entente 515 million.

Most of the armies attacking North Africa were African military allies, and these Africans were more anxious to achieve results and did a lot of unreliable things, making the North African conquest more brutal than at any time during the expansion of the Windsor Empire, and many humanitarian disasters occurred, and they were attacked by international public opinion.

At present, the United Nations is roughly divided into the euro area, the Asian dollar area, the dollar area, and the newly established South dollar area and the African dollar area, due to the large military expenditure of the African Korps, the African dollar area has experienced a 5% inflation, which is the strictest among the five major regions in the United Nations, and it is also unprecedented.

Of course, this small inflation of 5% cannot be compared with that of the Entente, and each of the major giants of the Entente is robbing the common people, and even the best Britain has 8% inflation. The rest of Prussia had 9 percent, the Confederate States of America had 10 percent, the United States of America had 12 percent, Russia had 15 percent, Japan had 20 percent, and the Qing Kingdom had paid the least attention to financial stability, reaching 30 percent.

The common people of the Great Qing Dynasty secretly exchanged money for Asian dollars in underground banks, and repeated bans continued, just like the original ban on opium. Ordinary people don't know how to use foreign exchange futures to hedge risks, so they have to use a more intuitive way. From a financial point of view, the Qing Dynasty was the most dangerous member of the Entente.

The political leaders of the provinces of the Qing Dynasty spontaneously boycotted the central bank, and whichever province had the strictest control over foreign exchange would have a worse economy, because the wealth was robbed by the central bank by printing money for military spending. And provinces like Anhui, which almost broke away from the Qing Dynasty and entered China, almost openly used Asian dollars to pay, becoming the most hated thorn province of the Qing central government.

The vision returns to North Africa. On this continent separated by the Sahara Desert, there was once an ancient people who discovered that the Great Desert was rich in water. It is a treasure left over thousands of years ago when the Sahara Desert was still covered with forests.

Archaeologists have found many murals in the Sahara that date back thousands of years, depicting animals from the time, such as crocodiles, that only exist in the wetlands, testifying to how wet it once was. Unfortunately, the people who had conquered the Sahara eventually declined because groundwater was finite and they did not have the capacity to efficiently discover more groundwater.

In order to rule North Africa, Downing had to help the inhabitants of the region solve the water problem, which was a big problem that could not be solved in a limited way, and there were many inhabitants here. None of the high-altitude water collectors are inefficient enough to sustain the huge population of North Africa, and the cost is too high.

The Namaqualan Desert Garden, which Downing used to enjoy life a few years ago, was inspired by the construction of a glass waterway from the ocean to the desert, using the method of evaporating seawater to the towers and transporting fresh water directly to the garden palace.

This approach is still not enough to meet the needs of the very large population. Downing decided to improve it, no longer confined to evaporating seawater with solar energy just by the sea, but expanding the evaporated area by thousands of times.

This is done by pumping seawater directly up the towers and then using the height difference to allow a large amount of seawater to pass through the glass canal. The new glass channel has been redesigned to be particularly shallow and wide, with a closed top, leaving only a small slit for evaporated water to enter the top channel.

The water source of the top channel comes from the cold of the water vapor, and the cold source is the seawater of the side channel, and the heat that evaporates the sea water is the least lacking sunlight in the desert. In fact, this complex enclosed aqueduct has four waterways, one main evaporation channel, two flanking condensation channels, and a freshwater channel at the top.

The composite canal has a magical evaporation ability, and the water flows as it walks. There is more fresh water than seawater! After walking more than a dozen kilometers, this road can turn half of the seawater into fresh water, and the farther away you are, the more fresh water you have, forming an unprecedented reversal, because the farther away from the sea, the more fresh water there is.

At the end of the canal, the concentration of salt is so high that it can be used as a salt plant. With proper control of the evaporation capacity of the canal, it can extend up to 500 kilometers away from the water source. In other words, the composite canal is capable of providing sufficient fresh water to towns in arid, desert regions of almost all of North Africa.

Downing's grand plan is to build composite aqueducts every 50 kilometres in North Africa, for a total of 100,000 kilometres in the whole of North Africa. They are tic-tac-toe and can be found in all regions, solving the biggest problem in the world's most water-scarce region.

It is a five-year plan that means building 20,000 kilometers of canals every year, or 55 kilometers per day. One meter of canal needs 5 huge bricks, 55 kilometers is 275,000 pieces, brick movers have to move an average of 25 kilometers from the brick factory every day, if you use the sand control Great Wall when the single-wheel brick mover qì, a day can only move 28 bricks, then a total of 9,821 brick movers are needed.

There are almost 10,000 brick movers, and this number is a bit burdensome. If only the speed of the machine could be a little faster. Where is the quick and economical solution? The glider airdrop scheme that had just been invented not long ago immediately got into Master Tang's brain.

Haha, the walking speed of the machine qì person is only 30 kilometers per hour, while the glider can easily reach 300 kilometers, which is ten times higher at once. 10,000 units can be reduced to 1,000 units at once, which is too cost-effective. Moreover, it saves the laborious work of building a conveyor belt, because the terrain will change, and the laying of the conveyor belt is also a hard work.

Now the question of what power to throw the glider with is to be considered. Of course, laser thrusters are not good, this thing is so expensive, it needs to be kept secret. With a gliding ratio of 50:1, it is not easy to cross 50 kilometers (25 kilometers on average, but the maximum is 50 kilometers), and you need to throw at least a ton of cargo to a kilometer high.

According to the formula of potential energy u=mgh, it is necessary to smash 10 tons of things from a height of 100 meters to bounce 1 ton of goods to 1000 meters, or to smash 100 tons of things from a height of 10 meters, which is not a fuel-efficient lamp. It was enough to smash a 10-meter-high weight, and Tang Ning could only give up the first plan to use a trebuchet.

The primitive trebuchet could not be adapted to modern applications, and it seemed that it could only be used for high technology - electromagnetic catapult. Attach the glider to the slider and use the electromagnetic force to accelerate to a kilometer altitude and win. The control of electromagnetic force is easy to manipulate and easy to expand.

The fuel cell power of one large truck is not enough to combine several trucks, and the strength is not enough, energy storage technology can be used. Using a magnetic levitation flywheel to concentrate energy, the flywheel can be accelerated enough to match the huge energy of a 100-ton weight falling from 10 meters, and then forcefully cut the magnetic field lines to convert all the energy into power to push the slider in just a few seconds.

After calculations, Tang Ning learned that each catapult needs two energy vehicles, plus one catapult car, to form a working group, which can catapult a one-ton glider to an altitude of one thousand meters. Two working groups can form a transport loop and bounce back and forth.

This time, the electromagnetic intensity used in the technical solution is still quite large, so the latest high-temperature superconducting materials are used, and a large number of rare earths produced in Korea are still used as the raw material core. This material is a little less efficient than low-temperature superconductivity, but it is cheaper than low-temperature superconductivity and suitable for movement.

Like the brick factories on the Great Wall of Desert Prevention, the glass brick factories made from desert sand have to move about 50 kilometers every day, constantly adapting to new construction sites, otherwise the logistics costs would be even more prohibitive.

In addition to the electromagnetic catapult and a thousand gliders, the biggest cost of the project is the large glass bricks. In order to improve their physical properties of resistance to thermal expansion and contraction, materials shipped from elsewhere were added, and the cost per brick was about 0. 01 euro.

The entire project required 5 million euros in brick money. Thinking about the huge amount of work, this is quite a bargain. The people of North Africa, who had to endure the mental anguish of being conquered by the infidels, also had the joy of entering an age when there was no shortage of water, and they all had faith in the prophets of science and technology, and they wondered why the Telegraph did not mention labor money.

What is the era of great automation? We Boss Tang never needed a large number of workers to show the vastness of the project, this time the construction team only needed 270 employees, with an average annual salary of 500 euros per person, and the total annual cost was only 135,000 euros. This is still a situation where you need to work three shifts. 30 in the brick factory, 30 in catapults, 30 in construction, 90 * three shifts, that is, 270.

There are tens of millions of people in North Africa, and everyone pays 0 to Boss Tang. With 1 euro of water money, Boss Tang can almost earn back the investment in a year. And once the water problem is solved, the economy of North Africa will be driven tenfold or hundredfold. Die-hard religious elements can't resist such temptations.

If this project is really successful, the Windsor Empire will completely conquer the hearts of the people of North Africa, leaving Britain and France completely behind