This is a veritable era of great construction. This little ship, Hawk, would become a prairie fire, bringing the light of technology to the corners of this solar system and eventually illuminating the entire planet.
The six robots went about their business.
Hawke had a clear plan to speed up the mining process, and the lack of robots was a major limitation. So the immediate priority was not to build bases, but to build robots.
In order to adapt to the extremely low temperature of minus 150 degrees on Titan, the special terrain and the fact that the gravity is only about one-sixth of that on Earth, Hawke redesigned the drawings of the new robots and, after collecting enough raw materials with the ore smelting equipment, built the first Titan-specific mining and training robot.
To turn iron ore into steel, large quantities of coal were needed. As we all know, coal is formed by fossilised trees from the ancient times of the Earth, under special circumstances. Hawke did not think that he could find coal on Titan.
But Hawk had considered this situation before he set out from Earth, so he spent three months developing a brand new steel-making technology, which only needed enough fuel and some special separation and reduction techniques to make good enough steel, even better than the special steel on Earth.
This kind of robot, is a robot that has applied the new steelmaking technology. Hawke named this robot the Saturn I. The Saturn I was not a traditional humanoid robot, but a metal platform on four wheels, with several robotic hands and detection devices mounted on one side of the platform, which looked like a strange-looking duck.
But while it may be ugly, it is several times more efficient on Titan's unique terrain than the older robots.
Titan was mostly flat, and with a little hardening it would be fine, saving Hawke the time of building roads. Moreover, the ground was just right for a Saturn I robot to walk on.
After the success of the test, Hawke built hundreds more of these robots, and then built some Saturn II robots according to different divisions of labour, and then developed five different types of robots, three to seven, as the work required.
In this way, a total of seven types of robots were busy above the mines.
The robots that Hawke had built were not really intelligent robots, in fact, with Hawke's current technology, he was still far from being able to build a practical intelligent robot, let alone an artificial intelligence.
All data collection is done by the probes installed on the robots, then the signals are sent to the ship through the transmitter, which is processed by Hawk, and after that, the next operation instructions are sent back to the robots, which are implemented by the robots The next step is then sent back to the robot, where it is implemented through functional modules.
With Hawke's unparalleled computing power, it would not be a problem to operate hundreds of robots, if not tens of thousands, at the same time. The advantage of this is that almost every robot shares Hawke's intelligence, and each individual works with each other almost seamlessly.
It's truly like pointing an arm; Hawke commands the hundreds of robots as if they were his own arms, and with such precision that there is absolutely no room for error.
It was a common sight to see a Saturn VI robot sifting through and collecting a pile of hematite ore from the ground and then pouring it down towards the ground. Just as the pile of iron ore poured out of the container but before it touched the ground, a Saturn I robot came along and caught the pile of hematite ore with its own body, without a single piece of ore being spilled onto the ground It's a powerful calculator and an accurate one.
This is where the power and accuracy of computing comes in. In the mine, hundreds of robots were working feverishly without a single mistake.
It took Hawke a month to build these hundreds of robots. This included a few days of suspension due to rain. It rains a lot on Titan, you know.
At first, Hawke had the patience to wait for the water to evaporate, but then he realised that it was a waste of time. With an unlimited supply of methane on Titan and no problem with the oxygen supply, Hawke simply developed a special type of robot that would go out after each rainfall with a giant flamethrower, spewing flames of thousands of degrees Celsius, causing a huge pool of liquid methane to evaporate into gas almost instantly.
During this month, Hawke had completed the construction of six robot parts lines and an assembly plant. With enough raw materials, these lines could produce almost twenty robots a day if they were in full operation. Moreover, with a few modifications to the parts production line, it would be possible to produce even more models of robots with more diverse functions.
With enough robots, Hawke began the next step of construction.
The next step was to build a steel-making blast furnace.
The blast furnace that Hawke was going to build was different from the blast furnaces on Earth. The blast furnace on Earth needed a lot of coke to make steel, and obviously there was no coke on Titan. Hawke's blast furnace, on the other hand, incorporates the latest steelmaking technology.
Hawke's hard drive contains a full set of information on how to build a blast furnace, and it has been modified so that no coal is needed, as long as there is enough energy to make steel.
To build the blast furnace, Hawke had even built a crane robot. A crane robot is a very big thing, no more than a small robot like the Saturn I-VII. It took five days, thousands of tons of high-quality steel and more than half a month to build it.
After building the foundations and laying the various pipes, such as the inlet, the slag outlet and the air inlet, Hawke began the construction of the blast furnace.
It was only when construction began that Hawke discovered a problem. It was difficult to find suitable insulation on Titan, at least in the area that Hawke had already explored. After half a day of thinking, Hawke gritted his teeth and simply ditched the insulation and went straight to an air-cooled system.
The wind on Titan was more than 150 degrees below zero, and the air on Titan was dense, denser than on Earth. Hawke tested the air-cooling system and was delighted to find that it was perfectly adequate.
One polished steel plate was lifted by a crane-type robot and placed in its approximate position, then another robot arm lifted a small robot to push the plate into the correct position, and once the welding was complete, the next piece was started, and so on.
Because the steel furnace had not yet been built, Hawke's steel output now depended entirely on the few special small machines he had brought from Earth. Although these machines could make steel without coal after Hawke's modifications, the output was not as good. In the face of the increasing demand for steel, Hawke's output was a bit pathetic.
For some time now, Hawke had experienced what it was like to wait for a pot of rice to fall. The huge demand for steel is a boiling pot of water, and if you put in rice, you can soon make a sizzling rice soup. But Hawke's steel production was like an unproductive rice field, only willing to produce rice grain by grain, making people anxious to wait.
It took a month of work before the steel blast furnace was completed. Looking at the huge furnace, which stood 60 metres high on the flat earth of Titan, Hawke sighed.
This steel-making blast furnace combined the functions of both iron and steel making. After iron ore went in, it was first reduced to pig iron, and then the pig iron would enter another set of processes, and after various smelting, it would come out as steel.
As for its output, Hawke made an estimate that if ordinary steel was produced and there were enough raw materials, it could reach something like a thousand tonnes per day. If the best quality steel that Hawke could produce was produced, it would only be able to produce ten tons per day.
However, the construction of the base frame required a large amount of ordinary steel, and at most some chromium-nickel alloy steel for the exterior of the base to withstand the extremely cold temperatures on Titan.
The construction of the steel blast furnace was completed, and at this point the construction of the base really began.
Hawke did not intend to build the base in the iron ore mine, but rather in a place about five thousand metres away. The terrain and geology there was more suitable for a large base than here.
Hawk first commanded the fire-breathing robots to spray the entire area of about one kilometre, clearing away all evaporable materials, then commanded the engineering robots to dig numerous trenches, pouring the foundation, and then commanded the other robots to produce large sheets of steel plates, which were then transported over and started welding.
Yes, Hawke was planning to build a base made entirely of steel. There was no concrete, masonry or other traditional building materials on Titan, but there was plenty of steel.
With the completion of the No. 1 steelmaking blast furnace, Hawke's steel production capacity has been greatly enhanced, to the extent that he has started working on three sides, with the robot production line running at full capacity, while building the No. 2 steelmaking blast furnace on one side and the base on the other.
The Upper Capital District, next to Lake Weilan, is a hot scene.