162: Chapter 162 Nanoscale Coordinate Locking, the Phoenix Eye Opens!

Alien civilization voyage timer, Day 30.

7:40 AM.

Pangu Laboratory, Level B2.

Su Che crouched under the console to pick up a data cable.

Last night, the interface of the encrypted terminal had come loose, and the cable end had slid off the edge of the desk, getting stuck in the gap between the metal desk leg and the wall.

When he yanked the cable out, it brought along a clump of dust and two peanuts.

The origin of the peanuts was unknown.

Academician Qian Zhenhua, wearing cloth shoes, walked over and tossed the stack of reports in his hand onto the console.

"The full-parameter simulation of the optical axis is finished."

Su Che stood up, patted the dust off his trousers, took the report, and flipped to the last page.

The convergence curve graph took up half a page.

Under extreme solar wind conditions after adding the Wiener process random perturbation correction term, the self-calibration convergence time widened from 0.12 milliseconds to 0.18 milliseconds.

The accuracy didn't drop. It was within 0.004 arcseconds.

"The oscillation amplitude under extreme conditions is within the controllable range."

Academician Qian Zhenhua pulled out a red ballpoint pen from his pocket, holding the cap in his mouth, and poked the tip of the pen at the inflection point of the curve.

"It will jitter a bit at this position, but it automatically converges after twelve sampling cycles, without affecting the navigation output."

Su Che folded down the corner of that page and closed the report.

"The first segment of the serial link is connected."

The pen cap in Academician Qian Zhenhua's mouth dropped to the ground.

He bent down to pick it up, his knee cracking once again.

The old man picked up the pen cap, capped it, stuffed it back into his jacket pocket, said nothing more, and turned back to the optical group's workstation.

Su Che entered the key parameters from the report into the configuration file of the core algorithm.

For the second segment of the serial link, he had to wait for Academician Li Zhengyang.

...

Alien civilization voyage timer, Day 31.

1:10 PM.

Academician Li Zhengyang got up from behind the folding table much faster than usual.

Carrying his thermos, he bypassed three rows of workstations, walked up to Su Che, and slapped a sheet of printed paper next to the keyboard.

A number on the paper was circled twice with a thick black marker.

"The sixth-order solar radiation pressure perturbation correction coefficient."

Academician Li Zhengyang's vocal cords were a bit hoarse.

These past few days, he basically lived behind the folding table, with his sleeping bag and piles of papers stacked together, making it hard to tell which was his pillow.

"The symplectic integrator continuous simulation ran for ninety-three hours, and the energy conservation deviation remained stable at ten to the power of minus fifteen."

He twisted the lid of his thermos, and this time it actually caught, locking tight with a click.

"For the long-period orbital perturbation of the Moon, the prediction accuracy after the sixth-order coverage is four orders of magnitude higher than that of the third-order."

Su Che picked up the paper and scanned it.

Storing the number in his mind, he pulled over the keyboard and typed it into the last empty slot of the core algorithm's parameter table.

"The regression testing will start tonight."

Academician Li Zhengyang gave an "mhm."

He turned and took two steps, muttering to himself, "The integrator recommended by Wen Bo is indeed very useful."

Over in the material testing area, Wen Bo didn't even look up as he flipped a page of the testing report.

"Learned it in an elective course."

Liu Huaqiang's progress had wrapped up even earlier.

The end-to-end latency test for the signal link closed its window at 10:00 AM.

The latency data for the twenty-four simulated links was neatly arranged, all kept under 0.05 milliseconds.

The middleware of Pangu OS separated the kernel scheduling and the Quantum Communication protocol stack cleanly. Zero packet loss.

All four lines had fallen into place.

Sitting in front of the main console, Su Che poured Academician Qian Zhenhua's optical axis parameters, Academician Li Zhengyang's perturbation coefficients, and Liu Huaqiang's signal link calibration values one by one into the core algorithm's unified configuration database.

Thirty-six sets of full-parameter regression testing.

At exactly 7:00 PM, the testing started.

The virtual Earth-Moon system in the background of the Mirror World was fully loaded.

The Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and twenty-four virtual satellites across six orbital planes were all loaded with the final version of the parameters.

Groups 1 to 12: Baseline positioning, no perturbations.

It ran for forty-five minutes.

The deviation of the twenty-four satellites' output coordinates from the preset standard values: ±0.06 nanometers, meeting the standard.

Groups 13 to 24: Single perturbations injected one by one: solar wind, cosmic rays, sudden temperature changes, communication delays, and satellite decoherence.

It ran for one hour and twenty minutes, all meeting the standards, with accuracy within ±0.09 nanometers.

Groups 25 to 36: Composite extreme working conditions.

Superposition of multi-source perturbations.

The harshest was Group 36, where five interference factors were injected simultaneously, four satellites were forced into decoherence, and the solar wind intensity was cranked up to three times the highest recorded historical limit.

Lin Waner brought a bowl of wontons at 9:30.

The bowl was placed in an empty space thirty centimeters to his left, with chopsticks resting on the rim, angled perfectly to be within easy reach.

Without making a sound, she set down the bowl, turned, and left.

Su Che's eyes never left the screen.

He only remembered to eat after the wontons had gone cold; the wrappers had gone soft, and the soup was no longer hot.

11:47 PM.

The thirty-sixth group of testing finished running.

A summary table popped up on the main screen, with thirty-six green "PASS" icons arranged in six columns.

Output accuracy under the worst working conditions: ±0.11 nanometers.

Nanometer-level, steady as a rock.

Su Che pushed the empty bowl aside.

The algorithm verification ended here.

But space-based navigation was not a pure software system; no matter how beautifully the code ran, if the satellites didn't go into space, it was just armchair theorizing.

He picked up his encrypted handheld device and dialed Jiuquan Launch Base.

"Lieutenant General Peng."

"Chief Engineer Su," came Lieutenant General Peng Zhenbang's voice.

"Twenty-four navigation satellites will be deployed in three sorties tomorrow. I'm pushing the orbital parameters over to you now."

"Received! That batch of verification-model Quantum Communication satellites from the arsenal has had their star trackers and memory chips integrated according to your list, with three redundant backup sets fully complete."

"First sortie is at 6:00 tomorrow morning."

"Guaranteed to be executed."

The communication ended.

Su Che put down the handheld device and walked to the folding bed behind the console.

The folding bed was a new one brought by Qin Lan; its frame was crooked, and the mattress was so thin that he could feel the metal crossbars through it.

When he lay down, every bone in his body creaked.

...

Alien civilization voyage timer, Day 32.

6:00 AM.

The footage from Jiuquan Launch Base was projected onto the monitoring wall of Level B2 through an encrypted link.

The cargo bay of the luan bird verification ship was stuffed with eight refrigerator-sized, silver-grey satellites.

Su Che sat in front of the console, a steamed bun broken in half and held between his fingers.

In the footage, the luan bird soared into the sky, the deep blue glow of its Anti-gravity generator illuminating the Gobi Desert around the launch pad.

Eleven minutes later, it reached the predetermined orbit.

The cargo bay doors opened, and the eight satellites were ejected. The micro-thrusters on their backs ignited one by one, sliding them into their designated positions along their respective orbits.

At 9:30 AM, the second sortie completed its deployment.

At 1:00 PM, the third sortie wrapped up.

Twenty-four Quantum Communication navigation satellites were evenly deployed across six orbital planes of the Earth-Moon system.

Su Che typed the network activation command into the terminal.

The main screen display switched.

On the space map of the Earth-Moon system, twenty-four light points lit up simultaneously.

Each light point radiated thin, pale blue lines toward the other twenty-three.

Two hundred and seventy-six entanglement channels were established synchronously across hundreds of thousands of kilometers of vacuum.

A quantum spiderweb blanketed the entire Earth-Moon system.

The in-orbit calibration program started automatically.

The star trackers collected stellar spectral data, the quantum entangled state self-calibration protocol took over optical axis synchronization, and the pointing lock for the twenty-four satellites was completed within 0.19 milliseconds.

Calibration accuracy: 0.003 arcseconds.

It was even 0.001 lower than Academician Qian Zhenhua's simulation expectation; the thermal noise in the actual space environment was actually a chunk smaller than the simulated value.

A three-dimensional coordinate grid popped up on the navigation output terminal.

The Earth, the Moon, the space Dry Dock, the luan bird verification ship, and the twenty-four satellites themselves—the absolute positions of all objects in the Earth-Moon system refreshed in real time.

The numbers were precise to the ninth decimal place.

±0.08 nanometers.

Liu Huaqiang pulled up a chair and sat next to Su Che, crossing his arms over the back of the chair and resting his chin on them.

He stared at the flickering coordinate grid for over ten seconds.

"A hundred-thousand-ton ship sails out, flying anywhere in the Earth-Moon system, and the positioning error is less than one-ten-thousandth of a human hair."

Liu Huaqiang's tone carried a flatness that only comes after pulling too many all-nighters.

"If Ying Jiang saw this, they could dismantle GPS and sell it as scrap metal right away."

Su Che didn't reply.

He finished verifying the last set of in-orbit data calibration results; all parameters met the standard.

In his mind, a mechanical voice popped up right on time.

[Ding! Main research and development task 'A Hundred-Thousand-Ton Blind Man Doesn't Deserve to Go to Space!' has been completed!]

[Full-link in-orbit verification of the Space-Based Quantum Star Map Navigation System passed!]

[Twenty-four satellite networking successful! Global positioning accuracy reached ±0.003 arcseconds / ±0.08 nanometers; fault-tolerant recovery for four decoherent satellites took 0.19 ms; end-to-end signal link latency is 0.04 ms; all thirty-six sets of full-parameter regression testing fully PASSED!]

[Task Reward: 100,000 Skill Points!]

Su Che closed the panel in his consciousness.

The fourth core system of the hundred-thousand-ton-class luan bird had been established.

Power, takeoff and landing, self-repair, and navigation.

Four pillars had been driven into the foundation.

He looked up and scanned the screen in the very center of the monitoring wall.

Four hundred kilometers above.

The keel truss of the Dry Dock was nearly complete, and the outer shell of the enclosed final assembly cabin was sixty-seven percent paved.

Five hundred robots shuttled through the metal jungle, the white flashes of plasma welding torches rising and falling.

The massive man-made structure hung above the curve of the Earth, its outline already clearly recognizable from large optical telescopes on the ground.

Su Che stuffed the half of the cold steamed bun into his mouth, chewed a couple of times, and swallowed.

The luan bird now had eyes.

But it wasn't enough to just see where it was in deep space.

It also had to see where the enemies were.