203: Chapter 203 Four-way collision, Su Che turns the tide with a single sentence!

sentry ship arrival countdown, day 95.

Pangu Laboratory, B2 level, 7:40 AM.

Su Che finalized the third of the five interface engineering files, opened the fourth, and left the cursor blinking in a blank area.

Zhao Mingyuan's Cognitive Graph had finished its second iteration of cold start.

One billion sets of adversarial scenarios weren't enough, so he added another five hundred million, steadily consuming nineteen percent of the main god ai's computing power pool.

"The second iteration has produced results."

Zhao Mingyuan pushed his swivel chair to the edge of the main console and flipped over the notebook on his knees.

"The Cognitive Graph autonomously generated one hundred and seventeen tactical variants in the simulated battlefield that weren't in the near-Earth version, forty-three of which are swarm-level cooperative tactics."

"False positive rate?"

"1.2 percent."

Su Che didn't respond.

1.2 percent was excellent for ground drones, but it was a failing grade for deep-space combat. With one hundred Xuannv drones deployed simultaneously, each with a 1.2 percent chance of a false positive, it was almost guaranteed that at least one would make a wrong decision.

"I added an adversarial verification mechanism to the evolutionary learning algorithm," Zhao Mingyuan said, clearly having done the math himself. "Before each Xuannv makes a decision, it broadcasts the plan to the three nearest wingmen. The three wingmen independently verify it using their own Cognitive Graphs, and it only executes if it passes with at least two votes."

"Communication overhead?" Su Che looked up.

"Each verification occupies an additional 0.3 percent of channel bandwidth."

Zhao Mingyuan pushed the data to the public big screen and turned to look at Academician Qian Zhenhua.

Academician Qian Zhenhua leaned out from behind the stack of screens on the east side and stared at that 0.3 percent for a few seconds.

"0.3 percent multiplied by three hundred units, then multiplied by the average decision frequency per second, the total channel bandwidth occupancy will reach 14 percent."

Academician Qian Zhenhua spun his pen vertically on the desk twice.

"My layered networking protocol has reserved 12 percent redundant bandwidth. It's short by two points."

"Can we squeeze it in?" Zhao Mingyuan asked.

"There is no 'squeeze it in' option in communication protocols."

Su Che pulled the data from both sides onto the main screen and placed them side by side.

"Zhao Mingyuan, change the adversarial verification from three wingmen to two."

"Two? What if the two have conflicting opinions?"

"If they conflict, go with the initiator's own judgment."

Zhao Mingyuan paused in surprise.

"Doesn't that just mean..."

"It means leaving the final autonomy to each Xuannv," Su Che recalculated the channel bandwidth. "With two-wingman verification, bandwidth occupancy drops to 9.3 percent, which Academician Qian's redundancy can handle."

Academician Qian Zhenhua put his pen back into his chest pocket.

"9.3, that works."

Zhao Mingyuan grabbed a handful of goji berries, clenching them in his palm without putting them in his mouth, and stared at the screen for five seconds.

"Alright, two-wingman verification plus autonomy as a fallback. I'll polish the false positive rate for one more round."

2:00 PM.

Academician Sun Qiwen came out of the U-shaped array area, leaving his enamel mug on Wen Bo's workstation, clutching three pages of printed paper in his hand.

He walked up to Su Che without a word and slapped the three pages down next to the keyboard.

Su Che picked them up. It was the total power consumption budget table.

The power requirements for all four lines were summarized on the same sheet for the first time.

Zhao Mingyuan's Cognitive Graph had a peak power consumption of 47 kilowatts. Academician Zhang Weide's flight control plus star map calibration had a peak of 31 kilowatts. Academician Qian Zhenhua's swarm communication had a peak of 22 kilowatts. Wen Bo's stealth avionics fusion had a peak of 38 kilowatts. Adding the engine, life support backup, and weapon standby, the total peak power consumption—

Su Che looked at the total twice.

The design output limit of the scaled-down fusion power module was 120 kilowatts. The total peak demand was 153 kilowatts. It exceeded the limit by 28 percent.

Academician Sun Qiwen stood by, hands stuffed into his work uniform pockets.

"The four lines run fine individually, but they explode when put together."

Su Che flipped the three pages to the second page and scanned through the items.

"Which line can be cut?"

"None of them can be cut. The Cognitive Graph's computing power cannot be reduced; if it drops, the false positive rate will go up."

Academician Sun Qiwen shook his head and continued, "The flight control's star map calibration cannot be turned off; if it's off, there will be attitude drift. You guys just compressed the communication bandwidth a round ago, and Wen Bo is already at the minimum configuration for stealth."

Su Che put the paper down.

"Then we won't cut the requirements; we'll change the power supply."

"120 kilowatts is the physical limit of the scaled-down fusion reactor. If we push it any higher, the superconducting coils of the confining magnetic field will overheat, and the reactor core will trigger a protective shutdown."

"The limit is calculated based on existing cooling conditions."

Su Che pulled up the thermodynamic model of the scaled-down fusion reactor. "What if we changed the cooling fins from passive radiation to an active heat pump cycle?"

Academician Sun Qiwen stared at the model intently.

"Active heat pump... the cooling efficiency could more than double. If the core temperature is kept down, the margin for the confining magnetic field will open up, and the output power can be pushed higher."

"Pushed to how much?"

Academician Sun Qiwen took a pencil stub out of his pocket and calculated a set of numbers directly on the back of the printed paper.

"160 kilowatts, conservatively estimated."

"153 demand, 160 supply, a margin of 4.5 percent."

"It's enough, but there's zero room for error."

Su Che went over the framework of the heat pump cycle plan in his mind.

"You put out a version of the active heat pump plan tonight. Tomorrow, I'll do the aerodynamic joint debugging with Academician Zhang Weide. The heat pump's cooling pipelines need to run along the inside of the wings, which intersects with the flight control's control surface kinematics."

Academician Sun Qiwen put the pencil stub back into his pocket and turned to retrieve his enamel mug.

sentry ship arrival countdown, day 93.

The B2 level entered the phase of four-line joint debugging. This was the most painful stage. All four lines were green lights when verified individually, but everywhere turned yellow when combined.

The electromagnetic shielding layer of the stealth film conflicted with the antenna radiation window of the swarm communication.

Wen Bo's stealth required full-band signal lockdown, while Academician Qian Zhenhua's communication required opening windows to transmit in specific narrow bands.

The two stood in front of the public big screen for half an hour, each insisting on their own parameters.

"Opening a window is equivalent to opening a mouth on the stealth layer; one scan from the enemy radar and they'll see it."

"If I don't open a window, those three hundred pieces of scrap metal of yours will be three hundred deaf mutes, and swarm coordination will be zero."

Su Che walked over from the main console and stood between the two.

"Open the window, but don't keep it fixed."

Both looked at him simultaneously.

"Make the communication window a frequency-hopping mode, changing the frequency band every 0.1 seconds, and compress the window opening time to microsecond-level pulses. The enemy radar will only be able to intercept microsecond-level signal fragments on any single frequency band and won't be able to piece together a complete signature."

Wen Bo was the first to react.

"Frequency-hopping windows... the shielding control logic of the stealth layer will have to be rewritten."

Academician Qian Zhenhua pulled his pen out of his pocket.

"The communication protocol side will also have to be changed; the synchronization calibration accuracy for narrow-band frequency hopping needs to be at the nanosecond level."

"Two days each, and on the third day, we combine and jointly debug."

The two exchanged a glance and returned to their workstations.

sentry ship arrival countdown, day 91. 1:00 AM.

On the B2 level, only Su Che and Zhao Mingyuan still had their screens lit.

Zhao Mingyuan was running the full-link integration test for the Cognitive Graph and the flight control module.

Three hundred virtual Xuannv drones were simultaneously executing cross-orbit maneuvers in the main god ai's simulated deep-space battlefield.

The maneuver instructions issued by the Cognitive Graph were fed into the flight control underlying layer written by Academician Zhang Weide, and the quaternion calculation translated the instructions into engine thrust sequences.

The first two hundred and ninety-seven were all green. The two hundred and ninety-eighth turned yellow.

The Cognitive Graph requested an extreme, large-angle deflection maneuver, and the quaternion calculation in the flight control underlying layer experienced a numerical jump when the deflection angle approached one hundred and eighty degrees.

"A variant of gimbal lock," Zhao Mingyuan took a screenshot of the data. "Theoretically, quaternions don't have gimbal lock, but Academician Zhang Weide's calibration loop has a numerical blind spot near one hundred and eighty degrees."

Su Che pulled up Academician Zhang Weide's flight control source code and flipped to that section of the calibration loop. The problem was on line 3,207.

The sampling point density of the star map calibration's interpolation algorithm decreased during reverse flight, causing an almost ten-millisecond blank window in the attitude reference at the moment of the 180-degree flip.

Ten milliseconds. In deep space, ten milliseconds of attitude loss meant that at the density of a three-hundred-drone swarm, at least two would collide.

Su Che added a patch to the source code, increasing the sampling rate during reverse flight by eight times and using stellar features from the opposite star field in the star map as an auxiliary reference.

Ran it once. All three hundred were green.

Zhao Mingyuan leaned back, putting both hands behind his head.

"What's left?"

Su Che pulled up the joint debugging progress chart. Power budget passed, communication integration passed, stealth frequency-hopping joint debugging passed, flight control numerical blind spot repaired. One last piece remained. Academician Li Zhengyang's high-order directed energy component and the airframe's fire control integration.

"Fire control connects tomorrow morning."

"Tomorrow is the 90-day countdown." Zhao Mingyuan didn't move.

Su Che closed the joint debugging panel.

"There's enough time."

sentry ship arrival countdown, day 90. 10:00 AM.

Academician Li Zhengyang connected the deep-space beam drift compensation algorithm of the directed energy component to the fire control bus of the Xuannv Solar System version. The main god ai ran the final round of full-system joint debugging.

Three hundred virtual Xuannv drones, deep-space full-domain autonomous decision-making, cross-orbit ultra-high maneuvers, massive swarm coordination, high-order stealth avionics fusion, and directed energy strikes. All five capabilities were online simultaneously.

On the main screen, three hundred fighters dispersed across different orbits in the simulated Solar System. After receiving signals from the imaginary enemy, they autonomously formed groups, kept frequency-hopping communication synchronized, executed cross-orbit maneuvers without attitude drift, and the directed energy weapons accurately hit virtual targets three million kilometers away. All green.

Liu Huaqiang stood on the east side, took his pencil from behind his ear, and wrote two characters in his notebook: Xuannv. He drew half a checkmark after it.

"I'll finish it when the full unit is produced."

Su Che sealed the joint debugging log into the encrypted storage. The twelve-day R&D cycle was more than half complete. The remaining hardware included scheduling production for the Zhulong machine tools, producing the scaled-down engine components, mounting the stealth substrate, and final assembly and testing of the unit.

Su Che switched to the public big screen and typed a line of text to push to Zhou Dehai's holographic projection.

["Over at Zhulong, how much is left for the production scheduling of the Xuannv Solar System version's full airframe components?"]

In the projection of the Kaitian Base, Zhou Dehai leaned in to look at the production schedule behind the production line.

"Most of the core components are finished, the scaled-down engine is undergoing final hot testing, and the stealth substrate cutting and molding is still a bit behind."

Su Che closed the dialog box. In the corner of the main screen, the countdown number for the sentry ship's arrival ticked quietly. 90.

The swarm's brain had grown, and its teeth had been sharpened. Now, it was time to give them a body.