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

Office of Research Lab 502, 10:00 AM.

When Wu Hanzhang pushed the door open, he was holding a telegram in his hand, the corner of which was already crumpled.

Fang Xudong was squatting next to the magnetron, checking the waveguide aperture dimensions with a vernier caliper, when he heard the door open and looked up.

Seeing Wu Hanzhang's expression, he stopped what he was doing.

"They replied from Shenyang."

Wu Hanzhang slammed the telegram paper on the long table, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose vigorously.

Jiang Ming walked over from the other end of the worktable, his gaze falling on the telegram paper, scanning it line by line.

The telegram was a formal rejection letter issued by Ivanov, the head of the Soviet expert group, in the name of his technical veto power.

After being translated by the Foreign Affairs Bureau, it was forwarded to Beijing as an urgent telegram, with copies sent to the Military Industry Bureau and Materials Department of the First Ministry of Machine Building.

The letter was extremely direct in its wording.

The gist of the translation is that China currently has zero research foundation in the field of microwave electronics and does not have the conditions to independently manufacture centimeter-wave multicavity magnetrons.

High-purity oxygen-free copper was a valuable military reserve material provided by the Soviet Union to China, and it should not be wasted on unrealistic scientific fantasies.

After reading the last line, Jiang Ming put the telegram back on the table.

Fang Xudong had already stood up and walked over.

He put the calipers aside, picked up the telegram and read it twice. His lips moved, but he didn't say anything.

The room was quiet for a while.

Wu Hanzhang put his glasses back on, his voice a little hoarse.

"I've already asked Mr. Qian, and he said that Ivanov only values ​​technical skills, not personal connections, so a letter of recommendation is useless."

Fang Xudong put down the telegram and ran his fingers back and forth along the edge of the table.

"Engineer Wu, Ivanov wasn't just spouting nonsense."

Wu Hanzhang looked at him.

Fang Xudong pushed up his round-framed glasses and slowed down his speech.

"Indeed, no one in China has independently developed multi-cavity magnetrons. We don't even have a single usable vacuum induction melting furnace right now, let alone the complete set of process parameters for oxygen-free copper refining."

"He blocked us because he felt that giving us copper would be a waste."

"Unless we can prove that we know better than him how to use this batch of oxygen-free copper."

Wu Hanzhang took off his glasses and wiped them again, his movements revealing his suppressed frustration.

"Then tell me, how do you prove it?"

Fang Xudong didn't reply, but turned to look at Jiang Ming.

Jiang Ming stood by the table without moving, his gaze still fixed on the signature on the telegram.

Below the three words "Ivanov" is a string of Russian abbreviations and the old stamp number of Leningrad Polytechnic University.

Leningrad Polytechnic University.

Vacuum metallurgy.

He had seen some fragmentary information about this person's lineage in a parchment notebook.

More importantly, when tracing back the lineage of Zhou Changlin in the Tongtianlu, the name of the Leningrad Electrical Engineering Institute briefly flashed by.

"I'll think about it when I get back."

After Jiang Ming finished speaking, he picked up his tool bag from the table and turned to walk into the inner room.

Fang Xudong called out to him from behind.

"Jiang, what are you planning to do?"

Jiang Ming had already reached the door of the inner room and glanced back.

Give me an afternoon.

The door to the inner room closed.

Jiang Ming pushed the latch in and checked again to make sure the curtains were properly drawn.

The confidential compartment was small, with an iron bed against the wall and a locked toolbox under the foot of the bed.

At the bottom of the box were kraft paper notes and electron microscope photographs; below that was the activation point for the Tongtianlu (a type of ancient Chinese encyclopedia).

He sat down by the iron bed, dragged the toolbox to his lap, unlocked it, and opened the bronze cover at the bottom.

The four characters "通古达今" (meaning "understanding the past and present") engraved in seal script gleamed with a dark copper-green hue in the dim light.

Jiang Ming closed his eyes, his consciousness sinking into the name card interface of the Tongtian Record.

[A Directory of Connections]

[Entered: 4/10]

[Zhou Changlin, Trust Level: Trusted, Connection Status: Normal]

He traced Zhou Changlin's lineage back to its source.

Zhou Changlin's mentor was Professor Alexeyev of the Vacuum Metallurgy Group at Leningrad Polytechnic University.

He passed away in 1952, and the node was activated in gold.

Among Alekseev's fellow students, there was a name that made Jiang Ming stop looking.

Sergei Pavlovich Kozlov.

He was the director of the Special Metallurgy Laboratory at the Leningrad Electrical Engineering Institute and died of heart disease in 1953. He specialized in the theory of impurity segregation in vacuum induction melting.

During Ivanov's postgraduate studies at Leningrad Polytechnic University, he took a course on special alloy refining taught by Kozlov at the Institute of Electrical Engineering.

They belong to the same school of thought and share the same theoretical foundation.

Jiang Ming initiated a psychic dialogue.

[Spiritual dialogue, deceased figure: Sergei Pavlovich Kozlov]

[System prompt: Kozlov, 1898-1953, special metallurgist, specializing in impurity segregation in vacuum induction melting]

[Current conversation duration: 0 minutes/30 minutes]

In the space of consciousness, a middle-aged man in an old suit sat in front of an experimental table, with a thick stack of manuscripts spread out in front of him, the pages already yellowed.

Jiang Ming got straight to the point.

"Professor Kozlov, you mentioned the issue of thermodynamic constant correction in your 1951 internal paper regarding the displacement reaction of trace sulfur elements with carbon in a graphite crucible during vacuum induction melting of oxygen-free copper."

Kozlov looked up, his eyes behind his glasses holding the scrutiny typical of a scholar.

"Have you read that article?"

"I'd like to confirm a value. In the thermal brittleness calculation formula Ivanov used in Shenyang, was the constant value for the eutectic point of the sulfur, oxygen, and hydrogen phases too large?"

Kozlov was silent for a moment, then tapped his finger on the edge of the manuscript.

"Young man, you've hit the nail on the head. Ivanov is using my old data from 1948, when we hadn't yet realized the effect of carbon activity on the graphite crucible surface on sulfur solubility."

"In 1951, I re-performed the thermogravimetric analysis and found that the constant should be reduced by about four to five percent; the actual value was 4.2."

Jiang Ming's fingers silently wrote numbers on his knee.

"If this constant is corrected, how should the smelting process be adjusted?"

Kozlov adjusted his glasses and pulled out a chart from the pile of manuscripts.

"Two key steps."

"First, the deoxidation time of the graphite crucible needs to be extended. The exact duration depends on the type of furnace, but the direction is correct."

"Secondly, a trace amount of high-purity nitrogen can be introduced at the end of the refining process to backflush the dissolved sulfur into the slag phase."

Jiang Ming pressed further, "And the results?"

"The yield rate will increase from around 60% to over 85%. The concentration of bismuth grain boundary segregation will decrease by at least one order of magnitude."

Jiang Ming memorized these numbers and then asked several more questions about the details of the boundary conditions of the partial differential equations, until there were only three minutes left in the conversation.

"Thank you, Professor."

Kozlov looked at him and suddenly smiled.

"You don't seem like someone who works with vacuum tubes."

The psychic dialogue has ended.

Jiang Ming opened his eyes, his consciousness returning to the iron bed in the confidential compartment, his back already soaked with sweat.

Just as he was about to close the Tongtianlu interface, he caught a glimpse of the network diagram above the Name Posts Library.

The node for Theodore von Kármán is still in a gray, sealed state.

But the pattern on the chain seemed a little fainter than before, with very subtle ripples at the edges, as if something was approaching from a distance.

Jiang Ming stared at it for two seconds without giving it much thought.

He closed the cover of the Tongtianlu (a book about astronomy), locked the toolbox again, and pushed it back under the bed.

Then he went to the small desk in the inner room, opened the drawer, and took out a stack of rough manuscript paper and a dip pen.

Unscrew the ink bottle.

The pen tip was dipped in blue-black ink.

Jiang Ming wrote a Russian title at the top of the manuscript paper.

Suggestions on the revision of the sulfur, oxygen, and hydrogen three-phase eutectic constant in the formula for hot brittleness of oxygen-free copper in vacuum induction melting.

The pen tip scratched across the paper.

Lines of Russian formulas and derivations flowed from his pen, the handwriting compact and neat, every thermodynamic symbol and subscript clearly written.

After finishing the first page, he pulled the paper out and put it aside, then continued writing the second page.

The light outside the window moved from the morning to noon, and then from noon to the afternoon.

Jiang Ming never stopped writing.