Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 1164: Chapter 1062: American Players: Do you look down on us?!

_1 Chapter 1164: Chapter 1062: American Players: Do you look down on us?!

_1 Space travel requires help from experts in the field of aerospace.

There’s no doubt in Xu Shenghan’s mind about that.

Experts, after all, are the ones who excel in these specialized fields!

His limited experience in spacecraft navigation was mainly piloting the No.

2 Escape Pod on the Tiangong Space Station.

However, even with these limited experiences, he noticed that managing a craft in space was vastly different than on Earth.

—— There were no highways in space, no fixed reference points.

Both the spacecraft under his rear and his intended destination were all in swift motion.

The troublesome part was, different spacecrafts didn’t even move at the same speed—they differed significantly in their velocity.

Relying on visual perception and intuition alone to navigate would invariably lead to errors.

Unless they had ample engine fuel to make adjustments throughout the journey, there was an almost hundred percent chance of deviating from the intended path!

Every single journey became a gamble—one failure, and everything was lost!

The problem was all spacecrafts had limited fuel.

Precision was crucial because they had to make every bit of fuel count.

The experts in aerospace were needed to calculate the “highway in space”, or the invisible “flight path”.

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However… what about the mathematics majors?

Why were they involved in this?

Xu Shenghan was slightly confused.

However, once he clicked on the post, the reasoning was quickly clarified through the author’s description—

The group had gathered 28 successful players who’d saved the [Tiangong Space Station], and they’d agreed on a common target: the mysterious space station situated even further away.

But the position of the space station was too far.

It was not something one could reach based solely on intuition.

So, one college student in their group sought help from a high school friend of his who majored in aerospace.

After collecting and analysing some data, the friend proposed two possibilities:

Firstly, the mysterious space station orbits just at a much higher altitude than the Tiangong Space Station, but not as far as the Moon.

Secondly, the space station is positioned at the Earth-Moon System’s L4 Lagrange Point, an area of space where gravity allows an object to remain in a stable position.

If it’s the former scenario, there is too little information to calculate the orbit.

Because the average distance between the Earth and the Moon is as high as 380 thousand kilometers, and the mysterious space station can potentially be at any altitude within this range.

It’s impossible to determine!

If it’s the latter scenario, while the L4 Lagrange Point is still a vast area, at least the position is determined—it’s on the Moon’s trajectory, forming a triangle with the Earth and the Moon.

If data such as the current altitude of the Tiangong Space Station’s orbit, flight speed, engine fuel, etc.

could be collected, then perhaps the orbit could be calculated.

At least, it would allow them to get into the region of L4 Points.

Whether they can stay there is a different story.

However, even for this relatively simpler second possibility, the calculation work required is considerable.

Especially because a lot of the data needed to be measured from scratch—The game “Gravity” was far too realistic.

After a large number of near-Earth satellites were wiped out by debris, lots of data that used to be readily available are now gone, which means new calculations needed to be made.

What’s more, annoyingly: The game ends immediately for the players after returning to Earth!

They didn’t return to the Xiajing Orbital Control Center but ended the game directly on the beach!

This completely blocked the opportunity for the players to collect crucial data at the ground-based control center in cooperative gameplay.

Without the convenience of the equipment, the need for the mathematics majors became essential—among the group, there were people who could calculate the trajectory of spacecrafts just with a pencil and paper!

“Awesome!” Xu Shenghan was stunned, and silently bookmarked the post.

——He could only stand by as an observer cheering “666”.

He was simply not up to these kinds of challenges.

However, no matter how much he praised them, Xu Shenghan didn’t hold high hopes for the post in actually finding the right experts.

The post indicated that they needed not just any math or aerospace major, but the top-level ones in both fields.

The problem was: In his eyes, those with such talents were surely some of the most promising individuals in the country—and even more so under the backdrop of global aerospace competition.

Would such talented individuals really be willing to spend their valuable time playing a game?

While contemplating this, he arrived back home.

He walked into his house, got out some bowls and plates, prepared some snack for the night, and began to eat while checking his mobile phone.

He was absent for just a short while, and upon refreshing the page, he discovered that a bunch of mysterious posts had popped up on the homepage:

[Speculation about the Mysterious Space Station’s Orbit]

[A Brief Explanation of Knowledge Related to the Earth-Moon Lagrange Points]

[Orbit, Spaceships, Cosmic Velocity, Universal Gravity, and Gravity Slingshots]

[Three Feasibility Conjectures of Permanent Self-Circulating Space Stations]

[Magnification, Pixel Restoration, and Operational Mode Speculation of the Space Elevator Image]

[Analysis on the Feasibility of Changing the Space Station’s Orbit and Falling at the Edge of the Space Elevator]

…

Ravenous from missing two meals, Xu Shenghan, who originally started eating large mouthfuls of food, saw one outrageous title after another, found his eating speed unknowingly becoming slower and slower until it came to a complete halt.

Placing his chopsticks that were suspended in mid-air, his mind was a bit muddled:

“What’s this nonsense?”

“Isn’t this a Game Forum?

What are you guys discussing?”

“Are there so many experts in this game??”

Xu Shenghan, who studies shipbuilding, suddenly feels inferior.

And he’s not alone in that sentiment.

By now, 12 hours after the game release, lots of players who progressed quickly and worked laboriously had, just like Xu Shenghan, been driven by various crises to achieve their first clearance.

So at the moment, the game community activity is very high, with players from walk of life coming over to read the posts, trying to get more valuable information.

The good news: they did get a lot of valuable information.

The bad news: too much valuable information is too high-end!

They can’t digest it all…

When have they ever seen so many hardcore science knowledge in the player community?

Randomly open a popular post, and it is filled with unfamiliar letters and formulas, richly illustrated, and very meticulous.

But out of a thousand people who click in to read, you can’t even find ten who understand it…

The most frequently replied comments are all “ignorantly impressed”.

Moreover, this strange atmosphere quickly spreads from the core player community, extending to the entire social network, and even triggers a peculiar trend——

Large numbers of self-publishing media specializing in popular science have proactively entered the field, taking advantage of this heat to popularize various scientific knowledge of astronomy, rockets, space stations, astronauts, and so on.

Even the appearance of the space elevator and the unknown spaceship prompted topics related to “extraterrestrial life” and “science fiction novels” to be brought out and popularized for netizens to see.

This unprecedented wave of popular science is sweeping across all of Daxia!

Even the global Internet is also creating waves following this trend.

This trend is even affecting fields that have never been related to games before——

At the Xiajing Aerospace Academy Family Area, Academician Yang Hong, the chief designer of Tiangong Space Station, staring at the “finished product” on his mobile phone that has over ninety percent similarity to the design drawings, a question mark slowly appears in his head:

“Did someone show him the complete blueprints?”

He is puzzled.

The Tiangong Space Station in space now only has three compartments, and it still has a long way to go before completion.

But according to the plan, the look after completion is indeed highly similar to the one in “Gravity”!

“Coincidence?”

“I need to ask about it tomorrow.”

*

Meanwhile, on the Russian Federal Space Agency and European Space Agency’s side, the problem is reversed:

“Why is this [International Space Station] and our blueprint so different?”

“Doesn’t it look too old?”

Not just old, the inside is also filled with all sorts of messy cables and outdated equipment…..

“Could it be because Cloud Dream is a Daxia company, so Daxia’s space station is made prettier, while our space station is unkempt?”

They couldn’t understand.

Although…

The specific space station blueprint hasn’t been settled yet, and all sides are still in the wrangling stage.

But they believe that their space station will definitely be beautiful too!

It won’t look like the Frankenbomination in the game!

*

Of course, the ones who are puzzled the most are the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Their question is the same as all American players:

“Even the European Union has a space station, why is ours the only one missing?”

“What’s the meaning of this?”

“Are they looking down on us?!”