This way, during this interstellar voyage, Tom only needed to bring enough deuterium, without the need for so much food or the construction of massive planting bases.

Time still flowed by little by little, and in the blink of an eye, over two hundred years had passed.

At this moment, Tom's distance from the Sun had already reached about nine light-years.

From this distance, the Sun showed no special characteristics. It had truly merged into the vast sea of stars, becoming an ordinary, slightly dim, and inconspicuous star.

Several more light-years of travel awaited Tom.

At this distance, Tom's fleet entered an interstellar dust cloud.

Such interstellar dust clouds are quite common in interstellar space, varying in size. They are simply invisible under normal circumstances.

The density of an interstellar dust cloud is higher than that of ordinary interstellar space, which also means a higher frequency of dust collision events.

Individual interstellar dust collisions are not a problem, but if they occur too frequently, even an aerospace carrier weighing hundreds of millions of tons will have its course affected, leading to a slight deviation from its target.

And in interstellar navigation, a miss by a hair's breadth is a miss by a thousand miles.

If it were the Bluetoth, they would have to maneuver within the nebula, adjusting and maintaining their course to prevent too large a deviation, which could lead to insufficient fuel for later adjustments.

It was precisely for this reason that the Bluetoth Fleet had "illuminated" that nebula, which was then detected by Tom.

However, this nebula was not a concern for Tom.

Deviation is deviation; I have enough fuel anyway, and I can adjust later. Maintaining silence now and avoiding illuminating the nebula can also more effectively prevent detection by that Mechanical Disaster.

So Tom made no moves, allowing countless particles from the interstellar dust cloud to collide with his spacecraft, slowly and subtly altering the fleet's course.

After traveling through the interstellar dust cloud for a year, covering approximately 350 billion kilometers, they finally passed through this dust cloud.

Ahead, Altair was becoming increasingly bright.

Turning back, Tom quietly looked at the nebula he had just passed through, but he only saw the vast, clear cosmic sky and countless stars; he saw nothing else, as if that nebula did not exist at all.

It was too sparse, its density too low, almost completely transparent, and simply invisible to the naked eye.

Its matter density was even lower than the vacuum specifically created by people in laboratories during Earth's national era.

But why is such a place with extremely low matter density still called a nebula?

The reason is, of course, simple: because the matter density in other places is even lower.

The matter in interstellar space is just that sparse.

But even though it is so sparse, it is the mother of all stars.

Perhaps one day in the future, under the influence of certain violent physical processes, such as a supernova explosion, this nebula will begin to collapse inward, its density increasing, eventually condensing into a star.

The solar system was born from such a nebula.

That endless dust condensed into the Sun, into major planets like Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and into countless asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, and so on.

Such processes are still continuously unfolding in the universe today.

When a star ages, the dust that makes up the star will be ejected by the star, forming a nebula again, waiting for the next opportunity to condense into a macroscopic celestial body.

Thousands of stars cycle like this, endlessly.

Through observation of this nebula, Tom's knowledge of cosmic macroscopic evolution increased significantly.

But at this moment, Tom was more concerned with another matter.

Regardless of the future fate of this nebula, whether it can form a new star or even give birth to life, at least at this stage, it caused Tom some trouble.

After dispatching a large number of clones and robots to conduct a series of precise inspections on the armor of the leading spacecraft, Tom smiled bitterly.

"This nebula has reduced my spacecraft's armor performance by at least ten percent... It still needs to be repaired, otherwise, they might not even be able to withstand the overload during deceleration, and the entire spacecraft might directly fall apart."

Motion is relative. If one's fleet moves at a speed of 12,000 kilometers per second, it is equivalent to the dust molecules in this dust cloud colliding with the spacecraft's armor at a speed of 12,000 kilometers per second.

Under such high-speed impacts, the particles that make up the spacecraft's armor—their atomic nuclei, chemical bonds, etc.—may be directly broken, leading to a series of property changes, and even elemental changes.

A hydrogen atom might accidentally acquire a proton, thereby becoming helium.

An iron atom might be shattered, turning into a lithium atom or a beryllium atom.

Iron oxide might be decomposed into oxygen atoms and iron atoms.

Thus, the originally integral spacecraft armor would become like a worm-eaten wooden board, with decayed areas appearing, ultimately leading to a decrease in overall performance.

This kind of thing was actually happening continuously even before entering this nebula. It was just slower because the matter density outside the nebula was lower, but now that they had entered the nebula, this process was accelerated.

In just one year, armor performance plummeted.

Tom pondered to himself,

"Perhaps the reason why the Electroweak Civilization, a second-tier civilization, cannot achieve very high fleet speeds is not just limited to energy acquisition and propulsion methods."

The fleets of the Electroweak Civilization generally do not exceed five percent of the speed of light.

Previously, the Bluetoth Fleet's speed was three percent of the speed of light. Tom's fleet was a bit faster—about four percent of the speed of light.

If the speed is faster, more fuel will be consumed for acceleration, which might lead to insufficient fuel for deceleration in the future.

This is certainly one reason, but now it seems that the extreme weakening of spacecraft armor performance due to interstellar dust collisions is also an important factor.

A mere collision at four percent of the speed of light can lead to such serious consequences; if the speed is faster, the consequences will inevitably be even more severe.

Don't forget, Newton's classical mechanics do not apply at high speeds; relativity must be introduced. When speed increases, the increase in impact force is not linear but exponential.

Perhaps a mere one percent increase in speed could lead to a hundredfold increase in impact effects.

In this situation, the spacecraft might even fall apart directly after flying for not long.

"The Bluetoth said that the fleets of the third-tier Strong Nuclear Civilization can reach speeds as high as seventy to eighty percent of the speed of light. How do they solve the problem of dust collisions at such high speeds?"

A mere fleet speed demonstrated the power of the Strong Nuclear Civilization to Tom.

Tom felt increasingly certain about the correctness of his choice to leave the solar system and flee.

Such a powerful civilization was definitely not something he could contend with at his current stage.

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