Chapter 16 - Construction
Time to enter space, I guess? I think I've done everything that needed to be done here, not that there was much to begin with. I have decided to leave the mana collectors I made and placed on this planet behind, the additional mana they harvest will be insignificant soon anyways.
The only thing left now is actually leaving the planet and entering space. I will have to get far enough away from this planet before I begin construction as that is probavly going to take a while. I simply don't want to have to care about falling back down or anything similar.
Last night, I also finished observing space for any dangerous stellar objects anywhere close to me. From my amateur observations with my hastly constructed mana telescopes, I concluded that there isn't any life threatening stuff like black holes or anything similar within my observation range. Additionaly, the chance of actually flying straight towards a dangerous spot is so abysmally small it's not even worth mentioning, even when considering distances measured in lightyears.
Which I won't ever get close to reaching, I only have a year and change left after all.
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It took me about 2 hours to get far enough from the planet, so that I can safely start construction. Surviving in space is no problem with mana. Actually, I'm almost immortal in environments filled with mana. The only think that could still really kill me is getting obliterated. I just don't really know whether I can regenerate myself with mana. Although it should theoretically be possible and probably actually is as well, I don't have the probably very much needed medical and biological knowledge to fix up my body.
Well, I don't plan on getting injured in the first place. Withe my mana protecting me, the difference in amounts of damage between injuring my body and anihilating my body is actually incredibly small. My body has no special resistance. If my mana protection fails, then it's over.
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Worries for another time, let's get building. The first thing I want to create is the funnel, the probably most important part of the entire ship. Building it first is better for me since it allows me to base the size of the rest of the ship on this part instead of having to conform the funnel size to the already built ship.
Actually, I think I will have to either build multiple ships or upgrade this one later. Right now I simply don't have the mana to create something as big as I want to. The size that I can afford to build right now should be a funnel with a diameter of ca. 1000km to 1500km at most. The special and dense mana needed to construct it takes a lot of mana to create. Luckily, although the funnel has a large surface, it technically doesn't have a very large volume due to it basically being a circle deformed into the 3rd dimension.
Fortunately, the funnel is an extremely simple shape to form and doen't require much filigran control. This means that instead of focusing on carefully controlling smaller amounts of mana, I can instead controll vast amounts of mana at the same time to condense into the desired funnel shape.
I didn't take me long until the funnel was built succesfully, maybe 3 or 4 hours. In the end I decided on a diameter of about 1200km. I simply don't have the mana to build a larger one, I still need to build the rest of the ship.
The next thing I should probably start constructing is the main hull of the ship. Starting at the rim of the funnel, I begin condensing the walls. To reduce the mana consumption without majorly impacting the stability, I chose to slim down the body a bit so that the radius of the ships main body is smaller than the funnel's and gradually aproaches that value as it gets closer to the rim of the funnel.
As the hull aproaches the end of the ship, it starts curving inwards before straightening out again, now with a vastly smaller radius then the main section of the ship. This part will be the 'thruster' of the ship, generating the thrust to get this thing moving.
Before designing the interior, theres still an important element missing, namely the stabilizing fins.
I was thinking of angling the fins ever so slightly to generate a bit of rotation along with the thrust to further stabilize it's flight path through the non-empty space.
I really hope all this works out, I was studying computer science and not physics after all.