From cannon fodder to sweeping across thousands of stars

There is not much difference in the business models between the second-hand ship trading markets of the Federation and the Star Dragon Empire.

The larger the market and the stronger the financial backers, the more good ships can be found.

Moreover, like the Empire, the Federation has opened up military ships of the light cruise and below level for private companies to purchase.

The biggest difference between the two is the model of military-grade ships on the market.

The imperial market is basically filled with retired ships of the Royal Navy, while the warships in the federal market are basically from the federal navy.

Although in the early years, when the relationship between the two countries was relatively good, the other party's ships occasionally appeared for purchase in the second-hand ship trading market of both parties.

However, the number of such transnational military ship transactions will not be large, and in the current environment, those who have bought ships from the other camp do not dare to drive them around.

Amber opened the star map and looked at the updated battle front situation.

The word "front" is actually not very rigorous. After all, the star map is not two-dimensional. However, this term is used by various countries from ground operations, and there is no other special vocabulary to refer to it.

There are eight galaxies directly 'bordering' between the Federation and the Star Dragon Empire, and five of them are currently at war.

The remaining three galaxies have not yet been affected by the war due to their location.

Amber checked the recent channel information and found that there were actually many civilian ships operating on the regular passenger and cargo channels in these three star systems.

Although the galaxy's garrison fleet has strengthened its defenses and increased inspections of ships approaching various planets and space ports, at least air transportation has not stopped.

So Amber finally chose the largest second-hand ship trading market among these three galaxies.

When I clicked on the market trading platform, I found that due to the war, the price of ships was almost 40% higher than before.

Although the ships of the Federation have always been much cheaper than the ships of the Empire, the purchasing power of Federation credits is also higher than that of the Imperial Golden Dragon.

But with this kind of price increase, the price is quite painful to watch.

The price of a regular destroyer basically fluctuates around 10 million credit points. If converted into an Imperial Golden Dragon, it would not be much cheaper than Amber's purchase price of the Dragoon class at that time.

"Sooner or later, these profiteers will be hung up on street lights."

Amber browsed the trading platform angrily, and then suddenly saw a newly listed 'Stork-class' command ship.

This kind of professional command ship derived from the Raven-class destroyer will generally exist as the command ship of the destroyer escort detachment in the fleet.

The fleet of Atlas Private Military Company will definitely be dominated by destroyers and frigates in the early stage.

The existence of such a command ship is of great help to the coordination of fleet navigation and operations.

"The price is not much more expensive than the Raven level. Is the merchant who placed the order doing charity?"

Amber clicked on the details page of this command ship and found that this was a 'new ship' that had just been retired for almost half a year. For some reason, it had escaped the Federal Navy's recall and restart of decommissioned ships.

It wasn't until Amber continued to scroll down that he finally understood why the price of this thing was about the same as that of an ordinary Raven.

"As expected, he is still a profiteer. The entire command module has been dismantled, and he is still titled as a command ship."

Amber curled her lips and expressed her deep disdain for the actions of the merchant who placed the order.

Although Amber was a little attracted to this command ship, she finally gave up the idea of ​​being taken advantage of.

You can consider waiting for a light cruiser with more complete functions to be used as the formation command ship/flagship in the future, and don't consider spending this wasted money now.

So Amber finally placed an order for a conventional Haiyan-class vessel.

And he even thought of the name of the ship.

Ares, the ancient Greek god of war.

Although the Federal Navy is currently installing a large number of more advanced and more functional Jackdaw-class advanced destroyers, many old models of Raven-class and Petrel-class ships in the fleet are constantly being retired.

However, compared to the Raven class, which has more fire channels and stronger attack capabilities, it can do any dirty work. The Petrel class, which serves as a generalist in the fleet, is obviously more in line with Atlas' needs at this stage.

The main body of the Hermes, the Dragoon class, is originally the class with the strongest firepower among the current human military destroyers.

For Atlas, adding a more functional ship will still be more cost-effective.

Buying a ship is not like buying groceries. It is affected by factors such as information transmission distance. It may take almost a month for the trading market to confirm Amber's ship purchase requirements and review the ship purchase qualifications before sending a reply.

So Amber still had more than a month to spare after placing the order and paying the deposit.

During this time, whether it was him, Lilith, or everyone else under Atlas, they all had a full schedule of work.

Amber herself and Baninger took the time to continue training the first and second batch of Roma candidates.

The psyker's intuition that could not be explained by science told him that these Roma were likely to be needed in the field in the near future, so the training pace must be accelerated.

On the other side, Isabel was not idle either.

In addition to her most important job - communicating with Amber, this former female spy from the Imperial Naval Intelligence Department returned to her old job of collecting intelligence.

The main direction of intelligence collection is the movements of the major political forces in the Star Dragon Empire.

With the help of the Irons family and Jacques Cole, the work progressed smoothly.

Then came the Hermes in the asteroid belt and the miners at the base of operations.

The latter's work did not change much, anyway, they just mined on the asteroids.

Stimulated by the welfare of Atlas Mining, these miners burst out with enthusiasm far exceeding their previous work under the Timler family.

After receiving the message from Amber and being told that the Hermes might be needed for long-distance voyages in the near future.

He also had to re-arrange the training plan for the crew and compress the last part of the training time as much as possible.

Finally, there was Lilith.

In addition to being stuffed with a bunch of learning tasks related to industrial production and logistics supply by Amber, this strong artificial intelligence also put 50% of its energy on a new project.

That is to study the psychic entanglement communication crystal sent by Alanita, and then try to conduct scientific research on the "quantum entanglement communication" that humans have not been able to make progress at this stage.

After all, in Amber's memory, Lilith's final form after a lot of iterative evolution is quantum life.

It can be considered a professional match.

If Atlas is the first to master quantum entanglement communication, a communication method that almost ignores distance, Amber dare not imagine how far it will develop in the end.

However, compared with this task, Lilith has actually been troubled by another thing recently.

Although she will not betray Amber under the constraints of the meta-instruction, and will not hold back on Amber on principled issues.

But under the interference of her own "emotions", she still struggles whether she should tell Amber about this thing that bothers her.

That is, one of her "clones" is lost.