After all, although faster-than-light interstellar transportation has many factors that are not conducive to cost saving, such as high threshold, long transportation cycle, and scarce transportation resources, it still has a very obvious feature, that is, the cargo capacity is huge.

Even if it is a passenger cargo transport immigration spaceship, a flight journey, the cargo volume it can carry is often tens of tens of billions of tons, when the cargo volume is fully loaded, there are hundreds of millions of tons of cargo, such a cargo transportation volume, a spaceship is worth the cargo capacity of hundreds of large cruise ships.

Therefore, although the cost of interstellar transportation is very high, the cost of freight is evenly spread over such a huge amount of materials, and the unit cost of some cargo freight is evenly apportioned, which is insignificant and affordable for people, which naturally makes interstellar freight more acceptable.

It's just that in the past, the vast majority of the faster-than-light spaceships of the earth's civilization were immigration spaceships, and after each spacecraft carried a large number of immigrants, the amount of materials that the major immigrant stars could transport was quite limited.

Even if you return from the immigrant star, you can bring back almost a full warehouse of goods from the immigrant star and transfer them back to the core area of the solar system, but the passenger spacecraft itself is not specially designed for cargo transportation after all, and the number of goods that each spacecraft can carry can be described as quite limited, although hundreds of millions of tons of goods seem to be quite a lot at first glance, but the cargo volume of several spaceships a year, when put on the level of the entire earth civilization, can be described as a drop in the bucket.

After all, the average of hundreds of millions of tons of cargo on a ship, but the vast majority of them are just raw materials, a considerable part of which is to be put into the field of scientific research and research to be consumed, even if the remaining part, a large part is used in the production of various industries to be digested, and the final remainder, which can be used in the field of people's consumption, is actually only an insignificant part, which is simply not enough to meet the needs of the public.

As for the specific type of food, the high-quality ingredients originating from the various immigration stars are only of the order of several hundred thousand tons per year, which is not enough for a per capita meal in front of the 180 billion people in the entire solar system.

Although it is impossible for every citizen to be able to afford the same level of consumption as everyday food, it is not possible for every citizen to be able to afford the same level of consumption as daily food, but for most citizens of the earth, it is not a problem to consume it occasionally as a high-end meal.

It can be said that in terms of market demand, this demand is completely unimaginable, the only pity is that even in terms of cost, people can afford to consume such cross-planetary products, but in terms of transportation volume, the transportation capacity of more than 100 immigration spaceships on the earth is completely unable to meet the freight demand of this magnitude.

You must know that this is the interstellar era, not the classical primitive farming era, and the ability of every citizen of the earth to consume all kinds of materials is unimaginable to human beings in the past.

Steel production alone, in today's era, the average annual per capita steel consumption of each person is hundreds of tons, and everyone can be said to be piled up by thousands of tons of various materials and products.

If you want to ask why a man can afford to consume such a huge amount of steel, is it all used to build a house? That's too much use.

Although the per capita consumption of 100 tons of steel is large, it cannot stand this era is a completely mechanized industrial era, and everyone's life and work need a large amount of materials to pile up.

For example, to create an industrial job, at least tens or hundreds of tons of steel raw materials will be consumed. In the interstellar age, the industry is purely based on the accumulation of materials, and everyone is manipulating the heavy machinery of thousands of 800 tons at every turn, and using the power of machinery to increase the strength of the human body millions of times, which is itself the inevitable development trend of industrialization.

In addition to work, the clothing, food, housing and transportation of citizens, the reinforcement of underground space, the transformation of living bases on other planets in the solar system, etc., all need to consume immeasurable resources to pile up, on average, more than 100 tons of steel consumption per capita per year, this is because the vast majority of the population is actually not working in the industrial field, otherwise, it is normal for this number to multiply several times.

It is precisely because of today's society that everyone's resource consumption is so terrifying, relatively speaking, the dependence of each member of society on other members of society is extremely dependent.

Extending to the level of civilization, the dependence of the planets of the earth's civilization on other planets is also extremely high, and the demand for trade between the planets is also extremely huge.

The more high-end the industrial chain, the more difficult the technology, and the higher the requirements for the support of the industrial system, the more the need for the close cooperation of other industries.

At the top of the industrial chain of each planet, once you want to make a breakthrough, it is essential to need more core equipment and the support of core industrial products, these things must be developed by the immigrant stars themselves, and it will take dozens of hundreds of years at every turn, and the cost can be described as quite huge, but if you can import it from the native area of the solar system, although it is not low because of the cost of interstellar freight freight, you have to pay a lot of price, but for the immigration stars, the price of this is not a small price, compared to the cost of its own research-based production, it is very small.

And it is precisely because of this demand for interstellar material circulation from individuals to societies and from top to bottom that ultimately leads to the huge demand for super-giant cargo ships for the earth civilization as a whole. The fact that the Earth civilization has built more than forty faster-than-light cargo ships in one go is also a positive feedback to this huge cargo demand.

Because this demand itself actually represents the huge centripetal force within the earth civilization, and only with the help of such a huge interstellar material circulation, the earth civilization can re-divide the industrial pattern of the entire earth civilization from the perspective of star systems and planets, and improve the overall productivity and civilization competitiveness of the earth civilization more rapidly from a higher level.

Up to now, the earth's civilization has a total of more than 70 billion immigrant planets on various immigrant planets, although this number is only a fraction of the 180 billion people in the earth's solar system.

However, it should be noted that the birth rate of the native population of the solar system, compared with many immigrant stars, is only a fraction of a fraction, and the living space in the native solar system can be described as a small incremental space, and the development of a new survival base is extremely difficult and costly, even if it is a Mars base, after such a long time of operation and transformation, by now, the ecological system of the entire planet is far less than an ordinary immigrant star, but the population of Mars is almost 30 billion today.

And the major immigration stars now generally do not even have a population of one hundred and eleven, relatively speaking, their population growth space is undoubtedly far greater than that of the native areas of the solar system.

And in the long run, the earth civilization in the expansion of interstellar space-time, is just the beginning, with the future of the overall strength of the earth civilization continues to grow, the flight efficiency of faster-than-light spacecraft to a greater extent, the earth civilization will eventually immigrate to more and more distant time and space, increase a larger number of immigrant stars, then the earth solar system native in the earth civilization in the star system will undoubtedly be further reduced.

Therefore, the focus of the future development of the earth's civilization will eventually fall into the huge immigrant planetary system, so it is undoubtedly a very necessary and urgent thing to integrate the manpower and material resources of the immigrant planets as much as possible, integrate the production capacity of all the production systems of the earth's civilization, and break through the industrial barriers and trade barriers between the planets.

In this case, not to mention the current batch of cargo spacecraft, that is, among the ships to be produced in the next few batches, the production proportion of super-giant faster-than-light cargo spaceships will also be a fairly high proportion.

This is the inevitable result of the huge interstellar cargo demand of the Earth's civilization.

The super-giant faster-than-light cargo spaceship, as a professional cargo spaceship that mainly carries cargo circulation, has the same distinctive characteristics compared with the immigration spacecraft.

As a kind of interstellar transportation for large-scale cargo transportation, the biggest feature of the super giant cargo spaceship is its huge size, and its size is the largest one among a series of spaceship types produced by the earth so far, which directly increases the difference in size compared to other spaceship types.

Other types of spaceships are hundreds of meters long, seven or eight hundred meters long, and only two or three hundred meters or even one or two hundred meters short, but the cargo spaceship is completely different, it is an almost cubic shape, a huge behemoth with a length of several thousand meters.

In terms of volume alone, this kind of super-giant cargo spaceship is thousands of times as huge as other types of spacecraft, and in terms of cargo capacity, the cargo carrying capacity of this kind of spacecraft is thousands or even tens of thousands of times that of other spaceships.

It is a kind of interstellar faster-than-light spacecraft designed for cargo transportation, with a special storage compartment for transporting various bulk cargo, container cargo, solid cargo, fluid cargo, and gas cargo, which can not only transport goods on a large scale, but also has a certain degree of compression and cargo capacity, and the space of each compartment can be adjusted at will to adapt to the different volumes of various goods.

It is precisely because of this series of specialized design that it can transport all kinds of materials to the greatest extent, and can transport interstellar cargo more efficiently than part-time immigration spacecraft. It is such a spacecraft, its full load carrying capacity has a huge trillion tons, of course, this refers to the maximum cargo weight of the spacecraft, in the actual transportation, because of the density of the cargo itself, usually can not reach the full load take-off weight.

However, this kind of super giant cargo spaceship, compared with other types of spaceships, also has its own shortcomings, its biggest shortcoming is that the speed is slower than a general spaceship, and because the size is too huge, it is relatively too bulky and inflexible, which is easy to cause certain safety risks.

In the development of the earth civilization in these years, in addition to the large-scale construction of spaceships has made certain achievements, there has also been some progress in the speed improvement of spaceships, after all, the earth civilization has too much knowledge to learn from in the field of faster-than-light spaceship manufacturing, with a series of breakthroughs in all walks of life and industrial system, it is easy to produce qualitative changes in the overall performance.

For example, the immigration spaceship, from the beginning of 3 times the speed of light cruise, only one year of cruise time, gradually increased to 4 times, so that now five times the speed of light cruise, 3 years of cruise time flight efficiency, and the spacecraft grounding and refurbishment time has also been shortened from the beginning of half a year to the current two months, the overall calculation, the flight efficiency has more than doubled.

As the latest super-giant cargo spaceship put into production, its performance has also been greatly improved under the rapid progress of this overall industrial level, but of course, compared to the immigration spacecraft, he is still a little slower, the cruising speed is only three times the speed of light, the cruising time is 2 years, and it takes three months to repair and maintain, but as a cargo spaceship, such performance indicators are already quite good, and it has very good practical value.

Although because of the type of spaceship, the proportion of safety accidents in this kind of spacecraft is relatively larger, but as a cargo spaceship, this little flaw is not a problem at all, anyway, even if the spacecraft has an accident, the safety of the crew members is still not a problem, whether it is self-maintenance, or waiting for rescue.

The birth of such a batch of behemoths can be described as a precious timely rain for the material circulation between the planets of the earth civilization, and since its successful operation, it has greatly improved the development speed of various immigrant planets and injected huge energy into the development of the earth civilization. (To be continued.) )