108: Chapter 108 The Hidden Door Fifteen Years Ago: Grandpa Left a Contingency Plan for the Engine!

Taklamakan Desert, Shennong Base, Bunker No. 3.

5:40 PM that day.

The low-frequency hum of the "Kuafu" reactor filled the entire underground space, like a giant heart beating beneath the desert.

Su Che sat in front of the console and pulled up the system panel.

[Mission Name: The Sky Is Not the Limit — Adaptive Variable Cycle Aerospace Engine]

[Mission Reward: 8000 Skill Points, unlock the core power technology system of the Nantianmen Project, 5000 Exchange Points.]

[Current host has accumulated 8000 Skill Points. Redeem?]

Five thousand points.

He had a total of eight thousand in his hands.

Spending five thousand in one go would leave him with three thousand, enough to redeem other auxiliary technical data.

Su Che rubbed the stubble on his chin and stared at the number for three seconds.

"Redeem."

[Ding! 5000 Skill Points consumed. [Adaptive Variable Cycle Aerospace Engine] core technology system redeemed.]

[Core technologies unlocked: Cross-medium combustion control technology, aerospace instantaneous variable cycle technology, high Mach number thrust vector control technology, high-temperature alloy tolerance technology.]

[System Prompt: Can provide the complete blueprints for the Adaptive Variable Cycle Aerospace Engine along with core supporting technology and material lists. Required Skill Points: 800. Redeem?]

"Redeem."

[Ding! 800 Skill Points consumed.]

[System Prompt: Detected that the "Aerospace Instantaneous Medium Switching Valve Group" in the [Variable Cycle Mechanism Design Scheme] has not yet been realized in reality. Can be redeemed directly. Exchange points: 400.]

"Redeem."

[System Prompt: Detected that the "High-Temperature Ceramic Matrix Composite Formula" in the [Thrust Vector Nozzle Blueprints] has not yet been realized in reality. Can be redeemed directly. Exchange points: 300.]

"Redeem."

[Current host has accumulated 1500 Skill Points.]

From eight thousand to fifteen hundred.

Six seconds.

Su Che leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath.

Then, he closed his eyes.

In his mind, a three-dimensional engineering diagram, vast enough to be suffocating, unfolded.

It was not just a blueprint.

It was an entire industrial cathedral.

The main structure of the engine was a flat ring with an outer diameter of 4.2 meters and an inner diameter of 1.8 meters. The front section was a variable-geometry intake, the middle section was the core engine—composed of a six-stage high-pressure compressor and an annular combustion chamber—and the rear section was that most critical component: the tri-modal adaptive nozzle.

Turbofan mode, ramjet mode, rocket mode.

Three completely different operating states integrated into a single engine, achieving millisecond-level switching through a set of variable cycle valve groups.

Su Che opened his eyes, pulled over a tablet, and exported the core parameters of the blueprints.

Niobium-tungsten alloy turbine blade operating temperature: 3200K.

Maximum combustion chamber pressure: 90 atmospheres.

Thrust vector deflection angle: plus or minus 90 degrees.

Maximum thrust: 880 kN per unit.

He stared at the number "880 kN" and tapped his fingers lightly on the desktop.

The maximum thrust of the Eagle Sauce F-135 engine was 191 kN, which was already the most powerful single military aviation engine on Earth.

The one provided by the system had a single-unit thrust that was more than four and a half times that.

Moreover, it was not a traditional aviation engine at all.

It could take off from a runway, climb to the edge of the atmosphere, cross the continent at a speed exceeding Mach 11, and then cut directly into low Earth orbit.

"This is no mere engine," Su Che muttered to himself.

"Good grief, this is overturning and rebuilding the entire aerospace flight system."

He pulled up the material list and scanned it.

[Core Material List]:

[Niobium-tungsten alloy (NbW-7 type)... for turbine blades and high-temperature structural components]

[Carbon fiber silicon carbide (C/SiC)... for combustion chamber inner walls and nozzle thermal protection]

[High-temperature superconducting magnetic bearings... for variable cycle valve group core support]

[3nm quantum chip... for flight control and intelligent engine coupling control]

[Five-axis linkage precision machine tool... for core component machining]

He had already asked Lieutenant General Peng Zhenbang to arrange for the niobium-tungsten alloy and carbon fiber silicon carbide.

As for quantum chips, "Candle Dragon" was already capable of mass production.

The five-axis linkage machine tool? The one he had "grown" himself was in the factory at the "Kaitian" base.

The problem was not the materials.

The problem was—how to build it.

Su Che flipped through the complete machine blueprints provided by the system, looking page by page, his speed slowing down more and more.

When he reached the chapter on the variable cycle valve group, he stopped.

The core of the valve group was a precision linkage mechanism driven by twelve micro-hydraulic cylinders, capable of completing a full-stroke switch within 0.3 seconds.

He had seen the mechanical model of this structure before.

Not in the system blueprints.

It was in his grandfather's notes.

Su Che stood up abruptly from his chair and walked to the military supercomputing terminal nearby in two strides.

He called up the Southern Gate general database and entered the search keywords: "variable cycle," "valve group," "hydraulic linkage."

0.4 seconds later, the search results popped up.

[Experiment No. 812: Variable cycle mechanism response delay exceeded 500 milliseconds, unable to achieve cross-medium instantaneous switching... Experiment failed.]

That was it.

He had seen this record when he previously unlocked the Southern Gate database.

At the time, he had only noticed the word "failed."

Now, he opened the full attachment of this record.

In the attachment, besides the conventional experimental data, there was a handwritten note.

He recognized the handwriting; it was his grandfather's.

The note contained only one sentence:

[The root cause of the valve group response delay is not in the mechanical structure, but in the control algorithm. Traditional PID control cannot handle the non-linear perturbations under tri-modal coupling. A completely new intelligent control kernel capable of real-time prediction of flow field changes is needed. — Su Changshan, Note.]

Su Che stared at this line of text, his breathing becoming rapid.

Fifteen years ago, his grandfather had already precisely pinpointed the fatal flaw of this engine.

It wasn't that the materials weren't good enough, nor that the structure was flawed.

It was that the "brain" wasn't good enough.

In that era, there were no quantum chips, no super AI; even neural networks were still just an academic concept.

They were using traditional PID control algorithms to drive a variable cycle valve group that needed to make hundreds of millions of flow field predictions at a millisecond level.

It was like trying to run deep learning on an abacus.

It wasn't that they couldn't do it.

It was that it was doomed to fail.

But his grandfather hadn't stopped at "it can't be done."

Su Che continued to flip down.

At the very bottom of the attachment for Experiment No. 812, a hidden encrypted folder was tucked away.

The folder was named: "Backup Plan-X."

He entered the Southern Gate master password, and the folder opened.

Inside was only one file.

A hand-drawn, extremely rough sketch of the control system architecture.

On the core module of the sketch, four characters were written:

[Quantum Prediction].

Su Che froze in front of the screen.

Fifteen years ago.

Quantum computing only existed in the papers of physicists.

Yet his grandfather had already drawn up an engine control architecture based on quantum prediction.

He didn't have the capability to realize it.

But he had hidden the key to this door in the data graveyard of 999 failures.

Waiting for someone later to dig it up.

"Old man," Su Che said to the screen, his voice very soft.

"You are truly ruthless."

He didn't remain excited for too long.

He turned, walked back to the console, and laid out his grandfather's "Backup Plan-X" and the complete machine blueprints provided by the system side-by-side on the screen.

The two sets of blueprints were separated by fifteen years.

One was so rough it looked like a stick figure drawing by an elementary school student, while the other was so precise that every bolt was marked with a torque value.

But their underlying logic fit together perfectly.

His grandfather's sketch was the prototype for the "Intelligent Control Module" chapter in the system blueprints.

Su Che chewed on his fingernails, his eyes full of calculations.

The processing power of the 3nm quantum chip was sufficient to support real-time flow field prediction.

The Quantum Computer he had cobbled together earlier could provide the massive parallel computing required to train the control algorithm.

And the fifteen years of failure data from "Dragon Vein" happened to be the perfect "negative sample library" for training this algorithm.

What should be done and what shouldn't be done were all lying there in those 17.8 PB of data.

The puzzle was complete.

"Hiss—" Su Che gasped, not because of excitement, but because he suddenly realized a problem.

The materials were still on the way.

Shipping the niobium-tungsten alloy from the capital to the Taklamakan Desert, even using a military transport plane, would take until tomorrow at the earliest.

There was only one thing he could do now.

Write the algorithm.

Recompile the "Quantum Prediction" architecture left by his grandfather using the language of the quantum chip and run the control model.

Su Che sat back at the console, opened the programming environment, and placed his ten fingers on the keyboard.

"Colonel Zhou Qihang." He called out without lifting his head.

Zhou Qihang stood at attention.

"Help me tell Teacher Lin not to wait for me for dinner tonight."

He paused.

"Just have her bring my quilt over; it's cold in the bunker."

Zhou Qihang acknowledged and went out.

In the bunker, only the sound of keyboard clacking and the low-frequency pulsation of "Kuafu" remained.

Su Che's fingers tapped faster and faster, the code on the screen flowing like streams merging into a river.

Forty minutes later.

Lin Waner appeared at the bunker entrance, carrying a military cotton quilt and an insulated lunch box.

She placed the lunch box on the edge of the console without speaking, simply folding the quilt and draping it over the back of the chair.

Before leaving, she took out that silver-white portable milk tea machine from her pocket and placed it next to the keyboard.

"Remember to drink it."

Su Che's hands stopped for a second, then continued tapping.

"Mm."

Lin Waner left.

The blast door of the bunker closed, cutting off the last bit of light from the desert dusk.

Su Che wrote for another four hours.

Eleven o'clock at night.

A burst of urgent encrypted communication alerts popped up from the military terminal on the left side of the console.

Sender: Lieutenant General Peng Zhenbang.

Mark: Highest Priority.

Su Che opened it with one hand and scanned it.

The content was only two lines.

["Dragon Vein" underground base emergency call.]

[Your grandfather... has woken up.]