Homo sapiens.

"Okay, Mr. Chairman."

The convoy was driving slowly on the road.

Juba City is a highland city with an altitude of about 500 meters, and the temperature is relatively suitable. At least compared with other low-altitude cities in the area, it is not too hot to be outdoors.

After the power of Homo sapiens entered here, it invested a lot of infrastructure.

Due to the latecomer advantage, many new technologies developed by Homo sapiens in the later stage are reflected in the infrastructure construction of this city.

For example, the green carpet produced by genetic recombination technology almost covers the entire surface of the city's buildings, making Juba City look almost emerald green.

This kind of green carpet can absorb water molecules in the air through photosynthesis. Its fleshy stems and leaves are similar to succulents and have a strong water storage capacity.

The green carpet can adjust air humidity, oxygen and carbon dioxide concentration, absorb harmful gases, and can keep the indoor temperature between 26 and 28 degrees Celsius.

And because the entire city is covered with green carpets, the outdoor temperature in the entire Juba City is maintained between 20 and 35 degrees Celsius.

Just now Li Qingye felt a scorching heat wave at the airport, that was because there was no large-scale green blanket in this area to regulate humidity and temperature.

Li Qingye could see the streets and alleys along the way through the car window.

In addition to the locals, there are also a lot of East Asians with clear skin, or brown Southeast Asians, and white North Africans.

The minibus walked around the block, and then came to the outskirts of the XC district.

"Chairman, we are here." Mapel said as he opened the car door.

After Li Qingye got down, he saw a huge factory, and there was a large station on the side of the factory.

But the station is not on the ground, but in mid-air, and the track is also in mid-air.

This is the product of Merroy Air Rail Group - composite overhead railway.

Li Qingye entered the production base.

Fan Haibo, the person in charge of the factory who received the notification, ran over sweating profusely: "Whoa... Chairman, welcome to our factory for inspection. I am Fan Haibo, the factory director."

"Don't be nervous, I'll just take a look. I heard that you are building the Meroy Southern Plateau Railway. How is it going?"

Fan Haibo, who secretly breathed a sigh of relief, hurriedly replied: "Chairman, we have already built an 86-kilometer experimental line, and the current operation is in good condition."

Immediately afterwards, Fan Haibo introduced the technology of their factory in detail.

The construction and operation of this overhead railway are somewhat different from traditional railways.

Specifically speaking, the material performance is strong, and only with sufficient material performance support can you play this kind of overhead railway.

Its construction process is very interesting. First, a hollow pipe with a diameter of 10 meters is synthesized using a biosynthetic aluminum-silicon material. The strength of this material is 3.27 times that of ordinary steel.

After the one-time synthesis of the pipeline, a construction airship transformed from a transport airship was used to pull the 8400-ton, 300-meter-long pipeline into the sky.

According to the conditions of the soil and rock formations below, randomly adjust the flight height, aim at the target area, and then throw the pipe directly from a high altitude.

Under the influence of the earth's gravity, this huge pipe will be inserted into the ground at a depth of 240-280 meters in an instant.

In the wall of the pipeline, there is a small pipeline system called "capillary". The construction personnel can inject special genetically modified bacteria to integrate the pipeline with the underground rock soil and enhance the comprehensive load-bearing capacity of the column.

Usually a node will be driven into 4 to 6 hollow pipes.

Next, according to the height of the overhead track, the factory will customize a batch of hollow pipes that are smaller in diameter than the ground pile pipes and just fit into the inner diameter of the ground pile pipes. However, both ends of this hollow pipe are sealed.

Also use the airship to insert a smaller hollow pipe into the ground pile pipe.

Due to gravity, the small pipe will squeeze the soil and rock in the pile pipe, causing the soil and rock in it to become more and more compact.

Of course, the small pipe has a limit ring, which can prevent the pipe from dropping too much.

After completing the construction of the columns, the next step is the modular node equipment, which can connect the four columns.

Normally, the distance between each node will be about 10 kilometers, and the part between nodes is connected.

It is a special nano-alloy previously used in the Dandelion project. The cables made of this alloy connect two nodes in a group of 4.

The diameter of the cable is only 3.4 cm, and its load-bearing capacity is very strong.

Builders then lay lightweight alloy panels and rails on the cables.

The rails can run high-speed heavy-duty railways, and under the rails, suspended trains can be used to form dual-purpose rails that carry goods on the top and carry passengers on the bottom.

In addition, because the material performance is good enough, the arrangement of 4 horizontal parallel rails between two nodes is only the minimum utilization rate.

If the route in this area is busy, you can also consider adding three-dimensional lines. The maximum layout is 4 upper and lower layers, and each layer has 4 horizontal rails, a total of 16 rails.

Moreover, each rail can be used up and down, which is equivalent to running 32 tracks.

The reason why the Merroy Air Rail Group came up with this kind of railway.

On the one hand, it is because there are too many nature reserves in Africa. To build a railway on the ground, it must pass through nature reserves and wild animal habitats.

On the other hand, it is because the infrastructure in Africa is too bad. It is not only costly but also very troublesome to build ground roads and railways.

For example, there are vast deserts, tropical rainforests flooded twice in three days, and a large number of uninhabited mountains and hills.

As for the underground railway, the company is of course also working on it, but it is more afraid of the super large mantle plume and the Numia aquifer underground in Africa, so it is more cautious about the underground railway project.

After much deliberation, the Merroy branch decided to engage in lower-cost overhead railways.

Of course, this cost is for the Homo sapiens company. If it is other forces, the cost of the overhead railway will be higher than that of the ground railway.

Chapter 471 The Furious Construction

87 kilometers of overhead railway.

Along the way, 4 cities, 13 farms, and 7 mines are connected.

This kind of railway has another huge advantage, that is, the construction speed is very fast, as long as the pipelines, cables, node modules, track alloy plates, and corresponding construction airships are prepared in advance.

In the case of sufficient materials, there is no problem in laying hundreds of kilometers a month.

After all, this set of construction plans saves foundation laying, concrete pouring and maintenance, which require a relatively long process.

The core factors limiting the speed of overhead railway construction are actually the production time and scale of modular components and the number of construction airships.

At present, the Meroe Air Rail Group has a total of 37 supporting factories in the South Meroe area, with 8.7 employees and 6 construction airships.

After Fan Haibo introduced the situation, he suggested: "Chairman, a new node will be built today, and it will start in about 30 minutes. I wonder if you are interested in watching it."

"Oh? Yes." Li Qingye nodded.

"I'll arrange the train right away." Fan Haibo blushed with excitement.

Li Qingye, Mapel and his group passed the factory area, came to the elevator dedicated to passengers, took the elevator directly to the top of the station.

The station is actually the entire node. The Juba station has a maximum height of 183 meters and a track running height of 50 meters. In the area of ​​50 meters, there are special loading and unloading equipment for loading and unloading containers.

The passenger area is below the freight area, where there are several suspended passenger trains produced by the Merroy Air Rail Group itself.

"Quite spacious."

"Yes, Chairman, the gauge we use is relatively large."

Homo sapiens' railway pipe gauge is 2 meters. In order to ensure that the load railway has sufficient width, the width of the alloy plate below is 6 meters.

Therefore, the width of the carriages of the above-loaded freight trains is usually 4 to 4.2 meters.

The width of the suspended passenger train below is 6.2 meters, because the track of the suspended passenger train is essentially that layer of alloy plate.

It adopts a suspension method to ensure that the train will not fall, so the passenger train compartment must be wider than 6 meters.

The platform of the station is a fully sealed high-strength floor-to-ceiling window, which is to avoid strong winds and rainstorms.

Fan Haibo arranged a special tourist train.

"Chairman, this way please!" Fan Haibo and several security personnel entered the compartment first.

Then Li Qingye, Sanjibada Leyal, Mapel and others walked in.

Since it is a tourist model, this train is designed with two floors and only three carriages.

The upper layer of the carriage is a soft sleeper, shower room, and toilet, and the lower layer is a sightseeing restaurant.

Fan Haibo took Li Qingye directly to the sightseeing restaurant. The floor of the restaurant is made of fully transparent materials. Of course, this is one-way transparent, and the inside cannot be seen from the outside.

After a while, the train started slowly.

Compared with the commuter type passenger train, the speed of the sightseeing type is slower, about 40-120 kilometers per hour. If it is a pure commuter type, the speed can reach 80-160 kilometers.

"This train uses nuclear batteries, right?"

Fan Haibo nodded: "The chairman's eyes are like a torch. In order to increase the speed, our trains all use nuclear batteries, but they are not cobalt-60 nuclear batteries, but carbon-14 nuclear batteries."

Li Qingye immediately thought of the key point: "Is it using gold-based electric heating materials?"

"That's right, thanks to the gold mines in the Chad branch."

As for the gold mine of the Chad branch, Li Qingye just went to inspect it a few days ago.

Previously, the geological prospecting department of the company discovered several gold deposits in the volcanic area in the north of Chad, which were buried at a depth of about 450-800 meters, with reserves of thousands of tons.

Therefore, the Chad branch concentrated its efforts and mined one of the rich mines. Currently, it can produce 5 to 7 tons of gold per month.

The gold is used in the manufacture of electrothermal materials, and the Meroy Air Rail Group is only able to use gold-based electrothermal materials to generate electricity under the credit of the Chad branch.

In fact, there are a lot of gold mines in Africa, especially those veins buried below 200 meters, which are basically undeveloped.

As for the super gold mine in Antarctica, Homo sapiens is also secretly mining it. The Antarctic branch can now produce 30-40 tons of gold every month.

Of course, in order to avoid sudden changes affecting the geomagnetic field, gold mining in Antarctica only extracts gold, and there is no large-scale mining of the larger iron and nickel components.

Although the reserves of gold mines in Africa are not as good as those in Antarctica, they can also alleviate the company's huge demand for gold.

Trains that rely on their own power generation reduce the need for specialized power distribution and transmission systems.

If the traditional electrified train scheme is adopted, it is necessary to arrange cables along the line and prepare a set of special power distribution equipment.

One disadvantage of this is that once the power transmission system fails or is attacked, it may cause the entire line to be paralyzed.

The electric self-sustaining train does not have this shortcoming, and with the surging electric energy of the nuclear battery, it can further increase the speed of the train.

"How do you solve the invalid work of the nuclear battery during the rest period?"

"We use molten salt heat storage and inbound power transmission to solve the drawbacks of nuclear batteries' ineffective work."

"Molten salt heat storage? Inbound power transmission? A good idea." Li Qingye knew how they solved the problem as soon as he heard these two terms.

After half an hour.

The sightseeing train arrived at Quanshui Station, 87 kilometers away.

The construction site is 8.9 kilometers to the west of Quanshui Station, and the elevator goes up to the highest level of Quanshui Station, that is to say, the top of the sightseeing tower.

In the sightseeing room on the top of the 181-meter-high tower, there is also a long-distance telescope brought by Fan Haibo, which can see the situation 8.9 kilometers away.

"Chairman, in 5 minutes, the first ground pile hollow pipe at node 10 will be released."

at the same time.

A construction airship at the bottom of the stratosphere is hanging a huge pipeline. The construction workers are using laser positioning equipment to slowly adjust the orientation of the pipeline according to the pheromone and magnetic field anchor points marked by the spotter.

In fact, the position should not be off by tens of meters, but the construction workers who are striving for perfection are still adjusting very carefully.

He didn't press the release switch until he aimed very accurately.

In an instant, the clamps that fixed the pipeline bounced off, and the 8400-ton huge pipeline descended faster and faster. Even the strong winds in the troposphere could not change the direction of the pipeline.

The whistling sound came from a distance.

Li Qingye looked at the picture taken by the drone, and then turned his head to look at that node through the telescope.

next second.

boom!Under the support of the acceleration of gravity, the weight is instantly inserted into the fragile stratum. The pipe is inserted about 240 meters underground, and a small shock wave is triggered.

In the next half an hour, the remaining three ground pile pipes were cast down one after another, and inserted into the four predetermined positions of the nodes very precisely.

clap clap clap!

Li Qingye clapped his hands: "Yes, it seems that your technology is worthy of further promotion."

"It is our honor to be recognized by the chairman." Fan Haibo was very happy.

After all, getting Li Qingye's approval means that the overhead railway of the Merroy Air Railway Group can get the support of the head office instead of relying on the Merroy branch alone.

Li Qingye finished his investigation in Zhu Dan on the return sightseeing train after eating the local special peanut stewed beef with spinach and sorghum pancakes.

Next stop, Darfur.