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What did Ryan mean by releasing this video right now?
Everyone understood.
"What is this arm that's too big to even fit on the screen? I thought I was seeing things."
"No more arguing, I'm bowing to The Mech Expert. I thought a mech that big couldn't be built, and now the arm's already finished."
"What's going on, little buddy?"
"This is Crimson Typhoon's arm? Wasn't the project only just announced?"
"I suddenly get it. This is how it works around here. You complete the second-tier result first, then announce the first-tier result. Except this time The Mech Expert refused to follow the publicity script and just spilled the whole thing."
"The audacity. Layers within layers."
"Think about it carefully. You think the announcement is layer one and The Mech Expert is layer two and you're on layer three. What if they're actually on layer five?"
"This man is a thousand-layer cake of strategy."
"Looking at this mechanical arm, I think my fear of enormous objects is about to flare up."
"I now believe this project can actually succeed."
The comments under the video refreshed rapidly. Before long, the section had been overrun by a crowd of stunned onlookers.
They didn't understand the project's technology. Their earlier criticism had mainly been worry that the project was a pipe dream, as unrealistic as a perpetual-motion machine. Because by ordinary reasoning, a mech over seventy meters tall, was that something that could be built right now?
The general level of education was high. Ask any high school student to think about what fields of technology a mech like that would require, and they could list off a whole pile. Never mind that plenty of skeptics online were stirring the pot, broadcasting their own takes.
As for the people who believed in the project, they simply couldn't produce evidence to prove its feasibility. The doubters could cite all kinds of mechanical principles to prove a heavy mech like Crimson Typhoon was unworkable. But the believers weren't Ryan, and they didn't have a system. How were they supposed to produce technical proof that Crimson Typhoon was sound?
Proving something was difficult. It required all kinds of complicated, multi-step demonstration. Refuting something was easy. It required only the phrase "I don't believe it."
After the Storm arm test footage was released, the public criticism of the project slowly diminished.
The project now had a physical component that had been successfully tested. It could no longer be called a pipe dream. At the very least, it wasn't a scam to siphon off funding.
At the same time.
Inside various foreign intelligence agencies.
They, too, obtained Ryan's test footage at the first opportunity.
They'd always paid close attention to Ryan, and they regarded him with a mix of love and hatred.
Love, because they could always extract some intelligence from him.
Hatred, because that intelligence was completely public. After their superiors saw the public intelligence, they would demand that the agents obtain more, deeper intelligence. And yet, whether through hacking or on-the-ground "field visits," they could hardly obtain a shred of valuable intelligence. They could only perform "reading comprehension" on the public material, and they were frequently blamed for it as a result.
If it were possible, they would have preferred that Ryan stop releasing these damaging videos.
The agents downloaded the released footage and watched it, and afterward the conference room was silent for a long time.
The massive mechanical arm in the footage was genuinely awe-inspiring, full of power and an industrial heft.
Ryan's filming technique was as terrible as ever. But when filming an object that large, sometimes simply getting it into the frame was enough. (Though, admittedly, the cinematographers at the national broadcaster were rare geniuses who transcended even that limitation.)
"Is their project really a deep-submergence project?" someone asked.
Someone immediately countered: "How could it be? What deep-submergence project needs a mech this big? This has to be a disguised military project."
But.
The people present exchanged glances. "A mech this big has no military value either."
Everyone present had some military common sense, so naturally they didn't believe that, under current warfare conditions, a mech could deliver value exceeding its cost-effectiveness.
"Then. Could it really be the way they describe it? Set up purely as a test of technology and an accelerant for industry?"
"You're suggesting we copy their announcement word for word and submit it as our collected intelligence report on the boss's desk?"
"We'd be reassigned to scrubbing toilets by tomorrow."
Hearing that, the intelligence agents present were ready to tear their hair out.
What, exactly, was the true purpose of this project?
The group exchanged a look and pulled out pen and paper. Time to do the problem set.
While the various intelligence agencies labored over their reading-comprehension exercises, the new base had already broken ground at high speed.
The engineering corps expanded once again.
This time, they weren't only building a new base.
Under the new engineering plan, the corps had decided to completely redevelop the entire controlled zone, to the specification of a small science city. First they'd build the dormitory buildings and the new base, and afterward they'd construct living and entertainment facilities elsewhere in the zone.
The base had built dormitories before, but the capacity wasn't enough for the new personnel coming in. They had to build more.
The preliminary projection was that the eventual project headcount would exceed ten thousand. So they had to build the dormitories and the lifestyle and entertainment facilities to cover most of these people's needs.
Truckload after truckload of building materials was hauled in from outside the base, and truckload after truckload of people rushed in from outside.
In under five days, the foundations for the new base and the new dormitory buildings were laid. Construction was formally underway.
The groundbreaking ceremony even made the news. Unfortunately, Ryan didn't attend.
Because he was in the middle of his symposium.
He was finally feeling the pressure of a large project.
Even though he'd handed most of the miscellaneous affairs off to Patricia to manage, the remaining technical meetings were enough to keep him busy.
Technical teams and research teams had already been assigned to him, though they hadn't moved into the base yet. Communication between them ran largely through online meetings.
For an ordinary project, there might not have been this many technical meetings. But Crimson Typhoon was different. Ryan was the only one truly familiar with the project's technical documentation. So whenever a technical team or research team hit a problem they couldn't solve themselves, they had to bring it to Ryan in a meeting.
In addition, per Ryan's requirements, the Crimson Typhoon project used a build-while-testing approach.
Its series of components had been arranged for production back when the base broke ground. Whatever tests could be done at the factories were done there, and whatever couldn't be done was consolidated at the base.
Which meant that when the factories ran into problems, they also had to consult him.
The production of this project's various parts involved more than half of the country's industrial manufacturing capacity. From something as small as a screw or a bearing, to something as large as an armor plate or the cockpit itself, all of it was being produced bit by bit in furnaces at factories spread across the country.
Crimson Typhoon couldn't be built in a day, though.
Most of the parts production needed time, never mind that for some components, the production machinery had to be upgraded first, or even the industrial structure adjusted.
Through all of this, Ryan could only hold meetings and wait, while playing around with his newly written artificial intelligence on the side.