I started with a ship full of max-level veterans, and I'm just a complete noob.

Jiang Ming took the slip of paper, spread it out on the tin workbench, and pressed his index finger on the line for the 261st hour and 14th minute.

283.7.

He didn't speak, but his gaze went back a few lines, scanning the data line by line starting from the end of the 260th hour.

284.

Old Sun walked around the testing rack, still wearing his cotton gloves, and craned his neck over Jiang Ming's shoulder to look at the data.

"Did you drop it?"

"It fell off but came back."

Xiao Zhao flipped out the record sheet at the back and continued, pointing to one of the places and saying, "Look here, at the 17th minute of the 261st hour, it returned to 284, and then remained stable until the 37th minute of the 261st hour, when it jumped to 283.6 again, and then returned to the previous level two minutes later."

Jiang Ming's index finger moved slowly along the data sequence, stopping between two jump points, and his lips moved silently.

twenty minutes.

The interval between the two jumps was almost exactly twenty minutes.

He straightened up, pulled out the worn-out pencil from his breast pocket, drew two short vertical lines in the blank space of the record sheet to mark the jump position, and wrote the interval time next to it.

"Keep taking notes, read it once per minute."

Xiao Zhao had already turned and run back, his footsteps sounding particularly crisp in the quiet workshop.

Old Sun took off his cotton gloves, moved closer to Jiang Ming, and asked in a low voice, "The same problem as Number Three?"

"Same roots, but different appearances."

Jiang Ming folded the note paper, tucked it into his notebook, and turned to the page he had previously marked.

The degradation of Ethylene O3 over 150 hours was a continuous decline, dropping from 284 to 281, a decrease of 3 microamps in four hours, and it never recovered.

B04 is different.

It jumps, then goes back to its starting position.

Jiang Ming stared at the words "300 hours" that he had circled in pencil for a few seconds, then tapped the edge of the paper with his pencil.

He estimated the exposure window for 04 to be between 280 and 310 hours, but symptoms actually appeared as early as 261 hours later, though the symptoms were much milder than expected.

Intermittent.

It is not continuously conducting.

He closed his eyes, and the mechanisms described by the female pioneer during the psychic session surfaced in his memory.

Under the influence of a prolonged high-temperature electric field, calcium, magnesium, and iron ions migrate along the grain gaps of the coating to the nickel substrate interface, forming conductive hot spots. This causes a surge in local current density, which ablates the coating.

In case 03, impurities accumulate to a critical level, conductive hotspots connect to form a sheet, and current continues to leak.

What does the intermittent jitter that Zero Four is currently exhibiting indicate?

The amount of impurities reaching the interface is not enough, and only one or a few isolated hot spots are formed each time. The heat conduction causes the current to drop, but the normal operating electric field inside the coating immediately pushes part of that impurity back into the depths of the grain boundary.

The hotspot disconnected, and the current was restored.

It's like a door being pushed open a crack, and then a spring pulls it back in. But as the force pushing the door increases little by little, there will eventually be a moment when the spring can't hold on any longer.

A cycle lasts twenty minutes.

This is the natural oscillation rhythm determined by the dynamic balance between impurity migration and electric field repulsion.

Xiao Zhao ran back with a new record slip in his hand: "261 hours and 57 minutes, jumped again, 283.5, recovered in two minutes."

The amplitude of the three fluctuations, from 0.3 to 0.4, and then to 0.5 microamps, is slowly increasing.

The spring is loosening.

Old Sun rubbed his hands together and asked directly, "Does it need to be shut down and the coating replaced, like on Unit 3?"

"You know better than I what changing the coating means."

Jiang Ming closed his laptop, his voice low but his pace quick: "Disassemble the tube, acid wash the substrate, redo the electrophoresis, perform step sintering, reassemble the tube and evacuate the gas, at least twelve hours, and reset the 500-hour timer to zero."

Old Sun fell silent.

Starting the 500-hour life test from scratch means that the delivery time of ethylene oxide 4 will be delayed by more than ten days.

The delay lines at the front, in conjunction with A02 and A03, can at most hold out until the enemy's station finishes up. If the B-type tubes can't catch up, it's as if the line breaks down.

Moreover, less than two days after the defense, Zhou Changlin's conclusion clearly stated in black and white, "It is recommended to continue the implementation."

If Xu Chongwen were to proactively report a shutdown and rework right now, he could come up with a whole new story out of it.

"Keep going," Jiang Ming said.

Old Sun looked up at him.

"The pipes keep running, and so do the workers, but we must find a way to push the impurities back while the pipes are running."

Old Sun's brows furrowed, and he had half a sentence stuck in his throat.

Jiang Ming had already walked to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and drawn a very simple cross-sectional diagram on the blackboard.

The nickel substrate is at the bottom, and the coating is on top. The grain boundaries between the coating grains are marked with dashed lines, and several small dots represent impurity ions distributed in the middle of the gaps.

"During normal operation, the anode is under positive high voltage, and the direction of the electric field inside the cathode surface coating is from the substrate to the coating surface."

"This field pulls impurities downwards, creating hotspots at the interface."

He drew a downward arrow on the diagram.

"If at some point I apply a very short reverse pulse to the cathode, the electric field inside the coating will reverse in microseconds, pointing from the coating surface toward the substrate."

The arrow flips upwards.

"Impurity ions are pushed back at this moment, back into the grain."

Old Sun's hand stopped in the action of unbuttoning the button, his thumb stuck in the second buttonhole.

"The tube has a lit filament, and the anode is under high voltage. Are you going to reverse the voltage to the cathode?"

"Pulse width is two to five microseconds."

Jiang Ming wrote numbers on the blackboard: "The heat capacity of the filament is so large that voltage fluctuations at the microsecond level are nothing to it, but the cathode coating is only eight micrometers thick, and the ions inside the coating can move nanometer distances at the microsecond scale."

What's the use of moving one nanometer at a time?

"One shot per minute, sixty shots per hour, each shot pushes one nanometer, and sixty nanometers can push impurities from the interface back to the depths of the grain boundary."

Jiang Ming put down the chalk and turned around: "The key issue is the pulse amplitude. If it's too large, it will break down the coating; if it's too small, it won't push the ions forward."

Old Sun finally unbuttoned the jacket, letting the front hang loosely: "Do you know what size I need?"

"I want to calculate it."

Jiang Ming walked back to the corner of his workstation and sat down on the old stool supported by only one leg.

He closed his eyes.

Deep within my consciousness, the bronze-colored cover emerged, the four characters "通古达今" (meaning "understanding the past and present") engraved on it radiating a warm light.

……

[Spiritual Dialogue Initiated]

[Deceased Person: A Pioneer in Precision Instruments and Vacuum Systems Engineering]

[Remaining credit limit for today: 4/5]

Without exchanging pleasantries, Jiang Ming directly handed over the data on intermittent jitter and the concept of reverse pulses.

"What is the approximate activation energy of calcium and magnesium ions migrating through the body-centered cubic grain boundaries of the nickel substrate? This determines the minimum field strength required for my reverse pulse."

After a moment's hesitation, the other party responded in a calm tone, as if reviewing experimental records.

In the grain boundaries of iron group transition metals, the activation energy for the migration of basal earth ions is typically between 0.6 and 0.9 eV.

Converted to the 8-micrometer coating thickness direction, the minimum required electric field strength is about 200 volts per centimeter, and the upper limit should not exceed 500 volts per centimeter, otherwise the coating dielectric will break down.

The corresponding applied pulse voltage is between 15 and 40 volts.

A pulse width of one to ten microseconds is sufficient to meet the ion response time requirement.

"What about frequency?"

Matching with the natural cycle of the jitter is most effective.

Each time an impurity attempts to migrate back to the interface, it is pushed back by a pulse.

The psychic visions vanished.

When Jiang Ming opened his eyes, the pencil in his hand had already written three lines of numbers on the blank page of his notebook.

The reverse pulse amplitude is 15 to 40 volts.

Width is two to five microseconds.

Frequency: once per minute.

He turned the notebook over and held up that page to Lao Sun and Xiao Zhao.

"I need a small transformer that can output narrow pulses at the microsecond level, with a step-up ratio of about 1:3 to 1:5, and the primary side can be powered by a dry cell battery pack."

Old Sun tilted his head and looked at the circuit structure on the sketch for two seconds. His gaze moved from the oscillator to the pulse transformer symbol and stopped.

He stood up, took a step toward the door, then turned back and said, "On the third shelf on the west side of the scrap yard, there's a radar trigger from one of those Soviet-era obsolete models."

"Last year I wanted to take it apart and use it as an igniter, but I was scolded by Director Zhang and didn't do it."

"I've checked the core of the pulse transformer inside; it's not rusted through."

After saying that, he stepped out of the door, his footsteps fading into the distance on the concrete floor of the corridor.