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

The oil lamp flickered on the wooden table, its flame tilting to the right and being stretched into a thin line by the sudden swaying of the carriage.

Jiang Ming pressed down on the corner of the photo on the table with his left hand, and held a magnifying glass close to the light with his right hand.

The train had been traveling west for a full twelve hours. The rain outside the carriages had long since stopped, but the wind seeping in through the gaps in the metal sheets was getting drier and drier, carrying a smell of yellow earth and coal smoke mixed together.

The photo shows a piece of enemy magnetron debris captured in Northwest China two weeks ago. It had been creased twice when it was sent back to Beijing from the front lines, but the details of the inner wall of the anode were still discernible under the light.

He moved the magnifying glass to the cross-section of the anode cavity wall and stopped.

The cross-section of the copper wall is neither smooth nor has it been processed in a typical rough manner.

The pits are distributed in a regular pattern, with extremely small pores and uniform spacing, like a honeycomb that has been flattened and embedded in a metal surface.

Fang Xudong peeked over from the haystack opposite him.

"Poor processing; surface roughness was not controlled."

"No." Jiang Ming handed over the magnifying glass, pointing his finger to a magnified area in the lower right corner of the photo. "Look at the distribution of the holes. The periodicity is too strong. The spacing is about 0.3 to 0.5 micrometers, and the depth is consistent. This is not out of control; it was intentional."

Fang Xudong took the magnifying glass and squinted at it under the light for more than ten seconds.

The carriage jolted again, and he braced himself against the edge of the table with one hand to keep his balance, his glasses almost touching the surface of the photograph.

"Even if it was intentional, what was the purpose?"

"Suppress the multiplication of secondary electrons." Jiang Ming pulled out a blank sheet of graph paper from the side pocket of his toolbox and spread it out. "When the inner wall of the anode is operating at high power, it will be bombarded by electrons. Secondary electrons will be released from the copper surface. These secondary electrons will be accelerated by the radio frequency field and then collide with the wall again, forming an avalanche. The heat generated by the avalanche is concentrated at a depth of tens of micrometers on the surface, which accelerates the evaporation rate of the cathode coating and shortens its lifespan."

He picked up a pencil and drew a cross-sectional diagram on graph paper.

"The function of the honeycomb pores is to trap secondary electrons in the pores, causing them to collide and consume energy without being able to escape, thus increasing the equivalent damping coefficient by two to three orders of magnitude."

Fang Xudong put down the magnifying glass and stared at the diagram for a few seconds.

"I haven't seen this idea in Soviet literature. Where did you learn about it?"

Jiang Ming did not answer immediately.

He looked down at the diagram he had just drawn on the graph paper, and a door in his mind was being pushed open.

The sound of wheels rolling over the seams of the rails grew distant.

Deep within my consciousness, the bronze-covered booklet opened on its own.

[The Complete Record of Connections]

[Cumulative Contribution Points Settlement: Yuanlei-1 domestically produced magnetron successfully ignited, +200; Dual-balanced mixer frontline verification restored communication, +200; High-power pulse modulator successfully hand-built, +100; Breakthrough in submicron base of dual-diffused silicon triode, +100; Frontline frequency band deployment crisis response contribution, +50]

[Total contribution points: 890/800, reaching the threshold for promotion to Jinshi level]

[From Xiucai (a lower-level scholar) to Jinshi (a higher-level scholar), currently in the process of advancement]

The page flickered violently, the engraved characters on the bronze cover changed from dark gold to red gold, the paper changed from yellowish to ivory white, the border of the name card column expanded, and the blank space increased from ten to twenty squares.

[The Imperial Examination Scroll has been activated]

[Maximum number of names: 20]

[Depth of lineage tracing: Back 10 generations, a complete academic system]

[Spiritual Communication: 10 times daily, 1 hour per session]

[New Features: Academic Integration, Premonition of Genius]

[Genius Premonition: Can trigger directional inspiration in ordinary academic problems that are not life-or-death situations]

The page continued to scroll, stopping at the network diagram.

Qian Xuesen's golden name card extends upwards, while the von Kármán node remains a gray seal, but a small crack has appeared on the seal chain, through which a faint warm light shines.

[Von Kármán Node Status Update: Gray Seal (Crack). Unlock Hint: The host must establish a direct technical communication with this living person to complete the unlock.]

Jiang Ming confirmed the list of new functions in his mind and then began to trace the network.

The depth of the ten generations of the imperial examination allowed him to touch upon the deep nodes of the German electromagnetic academic system for the first time.

Following a horizontal branch of his research, he found a late professor of vacuum electron physics at the Technical University of Berlin, Heinrich Fleischer, born in 1878 and died in an air raid in 1944, who specialized in the suppression of electron emission from anode surfaces and the damping effect of porous metals.

A psychic connection is established.

Fleischer's voice had a heavy German accent, and his way of thinking was extremely rigorous; he would derive every formula from first principles.

Within thirty minutes, Jiang Ming obtained crucial information: the secondary electron capture efficiency of the porous anode is proportional to the square of the aperture aspect ratio, and when the aspect ratio is greater than three, the capture rate exceeds 95%.

More importantly, the preparation process: Fleischer recorded in his laboratory notes in 1939 that anodizing the copper surface with oxalic acid solution, controlling the voltage between 40 and 60 volts, and the time between 20 and 40 minutes, can self-organize a periodic array of nanopores on the surface. The pore size is determined by the voltage and the depth is determined by the time.

After the spiritual communication ended, Jiang Ming opened his eyes. The carriage was still shaking, and the oil lamp was still flickering.

Fang Xudong is still waiting for his reply.

The entire process took less than two seconds in the outside world.

"Professor Qian taught us a course on the interaction between electron beams and solid surfaces at Caltech. There was a derivation problem in the final assignment about the relationship between secondary electron yield and surface microstructure," Jiang Ming said as he began writing formulas on graph paper. "I found this approach very interesting when I did it, and I've kept it in mind ever since."

The pencil tip left slightly undulating marks on the paper as the train carriage shook.

He wrote down the formula for secondary electron yield, introduced the pore depth-to-width ratio parameter, derived the analytical expression for the effective damping coefficient, and then wrote down the process parameters for chemical anodizing below: oxalic acid concentration of 3%, temperature of 0 to 5 degrees Celsius, anodizing voltage of 45 volts, and time of 30 minutes.

Fang Xudong leaned over and looked at it for a full two minutes, from the first line of the formula to the last line of the process flow.

The carriage jolted again, and the oil lamp on the table almost fell over.

"Xiao Jiang," Fang Xudong said, steadying the lamp base, his voice carrying an indescribable tone, "even with the train swaying like this, you still managed to deduce the unpublished German formula?"

"It's not from Germany, it's Mr. Qian's homework." Jiang Ming folded the graph paper and stuffed it into the side pocket of the toolbox. "The process parameters still need to be verified in the front-line laboratory. The temperature and time may need to be fine-tuned."

Fang Xudong did not ask any further questions.

He opened the notebook, wrote a line on the last page, closed the notebook, and tucked it back inside his cotton coat.

The oil lamp flame steadied again, casting two shadows on the wooden wall of the carriage, which rose and fell back and forth with the swaying of the train.

The sky outside the train window was completely dark. The train had been running for a full twelve hours since daytime, and the scenery on both sides of the tracks had changed from farmland on the North China Plain to undulating loess plateaus.

Jiang Ming leaned against the car wall and closed his eyes. His mind was not on the honeycomb anode, but on the crack in the Von Kármán node on the Tongtianlu interface.

A direct technical communication.

Theodore von Kármán is now in Pasadena. Although the international mail route was not smooth in 1955, the academic exchange of technical papers was not completely interrupted.

If I can return alive after things are over at the front.

He suppressed the thought to the deepest part of his consciousness and pulled his attention back.

The frequency of wheels hitting the rails is decreasing.

The train's speed is decreasing, gradually dropping from a constant cruising speed of 60 kilometers per hour to 40, 30, and 20.

The scenery flashing past the car window became recognizable, no longer a blurry shadow, but a gravel beach of Gobi Desert flattened by the wind, with the outline of low mounds cutting through the gray-black sky in the distance.

The wind picked up.

It wasn't the wind generated by the train's movement, but a natural wind blowing in from outside the carriage, dry and rough, carrying the fine sound of sand and gravel rubbing against metal, seeping in through the gaps in the sliding doors and hitting my face.

The crew-cut clerk opened his eyes from his half-asleep state, his hand unconsciously reaching for his waist.

Old Sun also sat up and listened for a while.

"Sandstorms," ​​Old Sun said. "We've reached the Gobi Desert."

Through the cracks in the car window, the howling of the wind and sand from the direction of Aksai could already be faintly heard, like a wild beast trapped in the desert roaring in the distance.