155: Chapter 155 There are always more problems than solutions; don't ask where the problems come from.

Readers are in the discussion area, chatting about the charm of fantasy novels.

Li Jianguo placed his resignation report on the desk and pushed it toward President Zhang.

President Zhang glanced at it but didn't pick it up. He lifted his teacup, took a sip, and then spoke slowly.

"Old Li, it's not that I want to lecture you, but you're nearly fifty. Why are you still making such a fuss?"

"Those overseas private enterprises want young people who can pull all-nighters and have the stamina. What can you do there? Be their consultant?"

Li Jianguo remained silent.

"Fine, everyone has their own ambitions." President Zhang picked up a pen, signed it with a flourish, and pushed the resignation certificate over. "The doors of Shenyang Aircraft Corporation will always be open to you. If you can't make it out there, come back anytime."

He paused and added a sentence.

"But let me give you the ugly truth first. Once you come back, your previous title and benefits will be gone. You'll start from scratch."

Li Jianguo took the resignation certificate, turned, and left.

As he reached the door, President Zhang's voice came from behind him, not too loud, but just enough for him to hear.

"Some people just don't know their own worth. Do they really think they can build a fifth-generation fighter just because they won an award?"

Li Jianguo's footsteps faltered for a moment.

His knuckles turned white as he gripped the resignation certificate.

He didn't look back.

Walking out of the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation building, Li Jianguo stood at the entrance and looked up at the flag for a long time.

Then he got into his car and didn't look back again.

Only one thought remained in his mind: If I don't produce something worthwhile, I will never return to this place in my life.

One month later.

DYB North America R&D Center.

The meeting room was filled with smoke.

Three whiteboards were covered in dense writing, listing all the bottlenecks in the F-22 production line.

Li Jianguo stood before the whiteboards, going through them item by item.

"For the avionics system, Lockheed's flight control source code is fully encrypted."

"Without original factory authorization, it cannot be modified, upgraded, or integrated with any non-original weaponry."

"For the radar system, Raytheon's AN/APG-77 core modules are subject to export controls."

"They are on the embargo list; replacement parts cannot be purchased."

"As for the engines, the maintenance parameters for the Pratt & Whitney F119 are all classified. Without guidance from original factory engineers, the core engine cannot even be disassembled."

He put the pen down.

"President Fu, that's the situation. The core components are all held in the hands of several major America companies."

"When they sold us this production line, they never intended for us to actually use it."

A dead silence fell over the meeting room.

Old Zhang lowered his head and smoked.

Old Wang stared blankly at the whiteboard.

Li Jianguo stood there, his palms drenched in sweat.

Whenever he reported difficulties at Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, the leaders would always slam the table and say earnestly: 'Difficulties must be overcome! If the conditions don't exist, create them! The company pays you salaries, not to bring us problems!'

"'Exercise your subjective initiative.'"

"'Believe that difficulties can be conquered.'"

Li Jianguo subconsciously prepared himself for a scolding.

After listening, Fu Haoran remained silent for a few seconds.

"Engineer Li."

Li Jianguo looked up.

"What is your recommendation?"

Li Jianguo was stunned for a moment.

In twenty years, no one had ever asked for his recommendation.

Leaders always gave direct orders, and he was responsible for execution.

He took a deep breath.

"Bypass them."

"Radar, avionics, engine control systems—bypass the America supply chain entirely."

"Redesign them using domestic industrial-grade chips. Initially, performance will be slightly worse than the original; detection range might be ten to fifteen percent shorter, and avionics integration will be lower."

"But the advantage is complete autonomy. We will have the final say on subsequent upgrades and modifications without having to answer to anyone."

After he finished, the meeting room was quiet for two seconds.

Fu Haoran nodded.

"Then bypass them."

He stood up and scanned everyone present.

"Everyone, I'm going to make this clear today. While you are here, you don't need to worry about money, channels, or resources. And you certainly don't need to fear taking responsibility."

"You only need to tell me what people, what equipment, and what technology are needed to solve these problems."

"I'll handle the rest."

No one spoke in the meeting room.

Li Jianguo stood there, his throat tightening and his eyes suddenly stinging.

It had been twenty years.

The blueprints he had spent countless all-nighters drawing ended up signed with a leader's name.

The credit for projects that won National Science and Technology Progress Awards was snatched away by others.

The technical solutions he proposed were directly rejected by leaders with a single phrase: 'impractical.'

No one had ever asked him 'What is your recommendation,' and no one had ever told him 'I'll solve the difficulties, you just focus on the technology.'

He gripped the circuit board in his hand, his knuckles turning slightly white, with only one thought in his heart: This time, I must succeed.

Fu Haoran picked up the circuit board on the table; it was the signal processing module removed from an F-22 radar assembly.

"What is this?"

Li Jianguo snapped back to reality: "The radar signal processing module."

"Open it."

Li Jianguo opened the casing, revealing a mass of chips and capacitors densely soldered onto the circuit board.

Fu Haoran pointed at the chips.

"Can these chips be manufactured domestically?"

Li Jianguo hesitated for a moment: "Some can, some can't. High-end military-grade chips have high manufacturing process requirements that the domestic industry hasn't broken through yet."

"Who said we have to use civil consumer-grade chips?" Fu Haoran smiled.

"What if we use high-end industrial-grade chips—the main control chips in domestic ATMs, or automotive-grade chips—what do you think?"

"That's the logic." Fu Haoran picked up a pen and drew a simple schematic of a protective shell on the whiteboard. "We don't need to modify the chip itself. We add a custom metal shielding shell with a built-in cooling module and an anti-electromagnetic interference coating, specifically designed to handle the g-forces and electromagnetic environment of a fighter jet in flight."

"An F-22 avionics system using original Lockheed chips costs forty million USD. If we use domestic high-end industrial ATM chips with custom protective shells, the cost per avionics set can be compressed to within two million RMB."

"Forty million USD versus two million RMB. Although the performance is worse than the original, it wins on stability, cost, and lack of regulation. Even if problems arise during subsequent debugging, it won't hurt to replace them. Is it worth it?"

Li Jianguo was instantly enlightened and nodded vigorously: "It's worth it! It's absolutely worth it!"

His previous thinking had been boxed in by the idea that replicating the F-22 required original-grade chips, forgetting Fu Haoran's emphasis on using the most pragmatic methods to solve the thorniest problems.

ATM chips operate at high intensity in banks every day; they are durable and stable. With a protective shell, they could fully adapt to the F-22's flight environment. This neither deviated from the replication goal nor perfectly bypassed the America chip blockade.

"Besides, with chips, a new generation comes out every three years." Fu Haoran pushed the circuit board back to him. "Once our supply chain is running smoothly and the protective shell process is optimized, the performance of high-end industrial chips in three years might not necessarily be worse than Lockheed's original stock."

"By then, the F-22s we replicate will not only have lower costs than the original, but their reliability could even exceed it. We won't be the ones chasing others anymore."

Fu Haoran pushed the circuit board back in front of Li Jianguo.

"You are responsible for the design. I'll handle the supply chain issues."

He paused.

"The private factories we've acquired in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, as well as the retired senior experts from Shenyang Aircraft Corporation and Chengdu Aircraft Corporation—whoever you need, just list their names, and Jimmy will handle all the coordination."

Li Jianguo took the circuit board and remained silent.

Old Zhang stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

Old Wang withdrew his gaze from the whiteboard and sat up straight.

No one spoke, but the atmosphere in the meeting room had changed.

...

After the meeting ended, Fu Haoran sent for the Tech-Priest Kallen.

Fu Haoran placed a portable hard drive containing the complete set of F-22 electronic blueprints on Kallen's workbench.

Kallen's mechanical bionic eye flashed with red light as his Mechadendrites connected to the hard drive. A few seconds later:

"My Lord, the plans organized by these people are very interesting."

Fu Haoran followed up: "Do you think the plan is feasible? Can it be implemented in the Hive City world?"

"The silicon-based chip portion? No. The Hive City does not have this kind of mass-production capability."

"But this underlying logic can be used as a reference." Kallen's speaking speed increased. "Using the Forge's vacuum tube logic arrays, combined with photonic crystal circuits, and using biological neurons cultivated in petri dishes as wetware, we can fully replicate all the functions of this avionics system."

"It will be a bit larger, about this big."

His Mechadendrites gestured in the air, outlining a cube about half a person's height.

"But it's blast-resistant and interference-resistant, ten times stronger than that pile of fragile silicon chips in the original."

The corner of Fu Haoran's mouth twitched.

Kallen paused, pulled out several hand-drawn blueprints from under the workbench, and pushed them in front of Fu Haoran.

"My Lord, there's one more thing."

The blueprints depicted mortars modified from Seamless steel pipes, warheads from metal canisters, and directional mines from cylindrical metal containers.

"I've already attributed all these designs to Gear Boy Kamm." Kallen's mechanical eye flickered, his tone dead serious.

"If my Adeptus Mechanicus colleagues ever find out, I'll say it was just a low-level apprentice messing around. I've already exiled him to the Hive City's Underhive, never to set foot in the Forge again."

He paused, chanting three times in his processor: The Omnissiah is my witness, this has nothing to do with me, Kallen.

Fu Haoran was silent for two seconds.

"Whatever makes you happy."

...

The border of Sijar Hive City.

Three in the morning.

A shrill air-raid siren dragged Colonel Cole out of bed.

This was immediately followed by deafening explosions.

"What's going on?!"

"Colonel! The Void Shields didn't trigger! Something came straight through!"

Before the words could finish, a series of explosions erupted within the fortress.

Half of the power station's cooling tower was blown away, the water treatment plant's filter pool exploded into a fountain, and a corner of the barracks roof collapsed.

Cole rushed to the observation tower. As he raised his binoculars, he almost crushed the eyepieces.

In the night sky, hundreds of dark, cylindrical objects were in freefall from a high altitude.

No engine trails, no acceleration—they just drifted down leisurely. Their terminal velocity wasn't even subsonic.

The Void Shields didn't even react.

"Intercept! Intercept them!"

Anti-air cannons fired frantically.

Lasers and projectiles showered the sky like rain, occasionally blowing one up into a ball of fire.

But there were too many falling objects; they were everywhere, and it was impossible to intercept them all.

Three minutes later, the bombardment stopped.

The power station was paralyzed.

The water treatment plant was scrapped.

A third of the barracks had collapsed.

When the casualty report was handed to Cole, he took one look and slammed it onto the table.

Seventeen people, all logistics and maintenance personnel.

Cole hadn't even recovered when, at the same time the next morning, it happened again.

This time, the objects were even smaller.

Trailing faint exhaust flames, they flew over from the eastern ridge. Their terminal velocity was deliberately kept low, so the Void Shields once again failed to trigger.

The water plant's backup pump blew up.

The power plant's backup lines blew up.

The barracks' mess hall blew up.

Cole sent men to track down the launch site.

The armored convoy hadn't even made it five kilometers out of the fortress before the lead chimera armored personnel carrier exploded.

Buried in the dirt on both sides of the road was something unknown that exploded as soon as an armored vehicle rolled over it.

Shrapnel pierced the side armor of the carrier, and a whole vehicle of Planetary Defense Force soldiers was wiped out on the spot.

Just as the following convoy stopped, a dozen people scrambled out of the roadside fields.

They tossed a few dark metal canisters at the convoy and immediately bolted back into the desert.

By the time the armored convoy reacted, the people were long gone.

They left behind a field of craters and the smoking wreckage of the personnel carrier.

A week.

An entire week.

They came promptly every morning at dawn, specifically targeting power, water, and barracks, vanishing immediately after the blast.

Convoys sent out during the day to hunt them would hit mines as soon as they left.

The lead vehicle was guaranteed to explode.

After the explosion, people would crawl out of the fields to finish them off.

They'd hit and run, impossible to catch.

Cole stood by the window of the command post, watching the black smoke rising in the distance.

This was already the seventeenth attack this week.

His unit's casualties exceeded two hundred, with 53 dead and 179 maimed. The surviving soldiers were so distracted they couldn't even stand guard properly.

"Why didn't the Void Shields trigger?!" he roared.

The Translator and the Tech-Priest exchanged a few garbled words, and their expressions changed.

"Colonel... the Void Shield's trigger threshold is supersonic. These things are falling too slowly; the Void Shield determines they aren't a threat."

"Not a threat?" Cole pointed at the still-smoking barracks outside. "You call this 'not a threat'?"

Another five days passed before Cole's patrol finally found a guerrilla launch site on the ridge, capturing an unexploded round and a crude steel pipe launcher.

A metal canister.

It had welded fins, a simple fuse, and remnants of some kind of marking on the body.

Cole stared at the metal canister for a long time before ordering it to be dismantled.

It was filled with explosives and metal fragments.

"What is this?"

No one recognized it.

The Tech-Priest studied it for an entire afternoon, scanning it repeatedly with his Mechadendrites and searching through the Imperium's weapon database.

Finally, his mechanical eye flickered wildly, and he spat out a string of binary code.

The Translator braced himself and interpreted, "He says... the prototype of this thing is a civilian fuel container called a 'Gas cylinder.' Those shells falling from the sky are these."

"Those buried in the ground are civilian cooking appliances called 'Pressure cookers'."

Cole fell silent.

"What about those launchers?"

The captured launcher was carried in. Several metal pipes were welded together, outrageously crude.

The Tech-Priest scanned it again, the binary code spraying even more furiously.

"Seamless steel pipes, civilian water pipes."

The Translator paused.

"Colonel, the Tech-Priest says... these weapons haven't undergone any sanctification rituals and have no machine spirit prayers."

"To dare launch explosives using a rack welded from water pipes, and to use cooking appliances filled with explosives as shells..."

"This is the ultimate desecration of the machine spirit."

"With such profane junk, even after they explode, the machine spirit won't even let out a single wail."

Cole stared at the Tech-Priest for five full seconds.

Then he slammed his fist against the wall.

He had been fighting for over a decade and had never encountered this kind of tactic—no direct engagement, no fighting for positions, no opportunity for a decisive battle.

"Just explosions, using civilian fuel cans, cooking appliances, and racks welded from water pipes to drop things on his head."

He would rather the enemy engage in a direct battle, even with equal forces and heavy casualties, than be slowly tortured like this.

The adjutant handed over the latest reconnaissance report.

"Colonel, reconnaissance aircraft have found traces of guerrilla activity in the abandoned mining tunnels to the east. They're using abandoned pipes under the Hive City to crawl directly beneath the fortress walls."

"That Pressure cooker mine at the barracks gate yesterday was planted through those pipes."

Cole took the report and read the first line.

"How many more of these things do they have?"

The adjutant hesitated.

"According to intelligence from spies, these civilian fuel cans, cooking appliances, and water pipes are everywhere in Alpha Hive City."

"They're sourcing materials locally. The production..."

"What is the production volume?"

The adjutant didn't dare say.

Cole leaned against the wall and slowly sat back in his chair.

A month ago, his troops' morale was high, thinking they would crush Alpha Hive City.

Now, the soldiers in the barracks didn't even dare go outside. They slept clutching their guns at night, their faces falling at the slightest sound of an explosion.

Outside the window, another batch of munitions rose from the ridge, trailing faint exhaust as they drifted leisurely toward the fortress.

They were so slow one could almost follow them with the naked eye.

The Tech-Priest began cursing in binary again: "01001111 01101100 01110101 00100001"

The Translator paused. "He says this is a desecration. By the Omnissiah, these heretics are worse than trash."

Cole clenched his fists and asked bitterly, "Just how many of them are there?"

The adjutant opened his mouth but didn't dare speak.

The intelligence from the spies stated that currently, they've identified over one million armed insurgents engaged in guerrilla warfare.

Cole didn't wait for an answer.

Outside the window, another batch of "civilian supplies" drifted slowly toward them.