For 30 advance/early chapters : p atreon.com/AutumnXd
The meetings never ended. Ryan spent the next two months in meetings of every kind. The conference room in Patricia's office was nearly becoming his second dorm.
During this stretch, he didn't even have time to follow the Winter Paralympics. He only knew that Prism Sciences prosthetics had been presented in an extremely positive light through the fitted athletes, earning widespread praise worldwide.
After all, they were helping a vulnerable group, and the prosthetics didn't contain any hidden chips. That kind of thing was hard to smear. Prism Sciences ran its media outreach in parallel, and the public reception was essentially one-sided in their favor.
But the meetings over this period weren't held for nothing. While the new base was under construction, with site conditions not yet permitting technical and research personnel to move in, Ryan resolved a great many problems through the meetings.
For instance, drawing up a plan for future deep-sea exploration. Since the project was officially a deep-sea exploration project, it naturally needed a detailed deep-sea exploration plan.
As for when the plan would be executed, or whether it would be executed at all, that didn't matter. They could sort it out whenever Crimson Typhoon could actually be airlifted to the deep sea.
Second, with a deep-sea exploration plan in hand, there had to be deep-sea exploration tools.
Otherwise the mech would stand in the ocean, spread its three arms out like it was practicing martial arts, then extend three alloy serrated sawblades spinning at six thousand revolutions per minute.
And someone wanted to tell people this thing was going to the deep sea to do scientific research?
It would be more believable to say it was going down there to catch fish.
So they still had to fit Crimson Typhoon with some of the tools commonly needed for deep-sea exploration. Multi-parameter environmental sensors, pressure-maintaining water samplers, sample baskets for biological and geological collection, and so on.
But this raised the problem of seal technology. Adding all of these items meant adding corresponding control interfaces from inside the mech, and once the sealing on any of those interfaces wasn't done properly, it would affect the entire mech.
That would require a major modification to the mech's seal system.
But modifying the seal system would in turn affect the mech's construction. Many of the mech's components were already in production, and some had even been finished. Once a modification was made, those finished components might be scrapped.
And if a major modification were made, would the mech's seal system develop new vulnerabilities?
That was a question no one dared to guarantee an answer to. Even Ryan couldn't fully calculate whether, after descending to seven thousand meters, a heavily modified seal system would hold.
After several days of meetings, Ryan proposed a solution everyone considered viable.
Externalize the deep-sea exploration equipment. Build a separate device capable of operating all of it, integrating the equipment inside that device.
Crimson Typhoon would only need a single new control interface to operate the device, and through it, the equipment inside. Then, when it needed to descend into the deep sea, it would simply carry the device on its back into the water.
This way, only one control interface was added. The seal system modification was minimal, and no new vulnerabilities would appear.
That day, Ryan had just joined the meeting when he saw the people on the other end of the video grinning, unable to hide their delight.
The meeting's subject was the vector engine, and the people on the other end were the country's vector engine research team.
Yes, the same vector engine used on fighter jets.
He was clearly building a mech, so how did it end up connected to vector engines?
There was, in fact, a connection.
On Crimson Typhoon's back were three parallel retractable giant thrusters. Their main purpose was to increase the mech's movement speed.
When using a slashing combat maneuver, for example, controlling the jets of the different thrusters provided the mech with additional acceleration for its swings and turns.
Beyond that, on land, the three thrusters could also accelerate the mech's running speed, and could even provide the mech with extra lift, allowing it to jump higher.
These three enormously useful thrusters were, in fact, three giant vector engines, engines whose nozzles could deflect in different directions to produce thrust in different directions.
And these were three three-dimensional vector engines. Compared to two-dimensional vector engines, which could only deflect up and down, the nozzles of three-dimensional vector engines could deflect in multiple directions, up, down, left, and right.
Once extended, their nozzle diameter reached five meters, a height nearly equal to the overall height of some aircraft. The size was genuinely terrifying.
But that enormous size bought equally terrifying thrust. Each of these three vector engines produced an astonishing seventy tons of thrust.
It was precisely because of that thrust that they'd been fitted onto the mech.
In the conference room.
"I've got some good news, Chief Designer. Want to hear it?" The speaker was an expert on the other end named Liam. He was only thirty-eight this year and had contributed considerably to the country's aviation engine research.
Ryan leaned back in his chair. One look at Liam's expression told him this meeting wouldn't be much trouble.
He smiled too. "Let me guess. The vector engine test run was a success?"
Over the past two months, they'd built an engine sample according to the blueprints. The last test run had failed due to an accident, so this time it had presumably succeeded.
The other side held up a thumbs-up. "Correct. We completed the engine's test run yesterday. Everything went normally throughout, and the thrust hit the expected figures. Seventy tons, no problem at all."
"Everything was exactly as you designed it. Incredible," they marveled.
Ryan returned a thumbs-up. "Your work contributed to this success too."
Liam shook his head and glanced at his colleagues with a laugh. "None of us would dare claim credit in front of you. The biggest credit is all yours. We're just along for the ride, picking up a bit of experience."
"Anyway, enough about that. Have you given any thought to naming this vector engine?"
"Naming it?" Ryan blinked. He genuinely hadn't considered it.
"Sure," Liam said. "An engine this big, and you don't even give it a name? It might keep getting developed in the future, growing into an entire engine series."
Liam projected a photo of the engine test run onto the meeting. On the test platform, an enormous engine spewed a scorching yellow exhaust plume backward, the distortion in the air clearly visible.
Looking at the photo, Liam was moved by it too.
The engine's thrust was, without question, off the charts. But its drawback was equally obvious. Its current size was too large. To actually fit it onto an aircraft, you'd either have to shrink the engine or enlarge the aircraft. All of that would have to wait for future research and refinement. There was no rushing it now.
Ryan thought it over and decided Liam had a point.
"Since it's the engine on Crimson Typhoon, then it'll be called Storm. And the engine series developed from it down the line will be called the Storm Series."