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

The next morning, Jiang Ming sat in a rattan chair in the corner of the archives room on the third floor of the Fifth Hospital, with the compilation of Jiuquan's annual space exploration records spread out on his lap. The pencil in his hand pressed down on the draft paper, and a large scallion pancake from Northwest China was placed next to the paper, the oil already soaked through two layers of fibers.

The rattan chair was old, and every time he bent down to retrieve data, the back of the chair would make a soft creaking sound. The vacuum tube fan on the wall dispersed the heat from the paper and also carried the smell of fried dough throughout the entire archive room.

Jiang Ming had been calculating since dawn, and his pencil had been sharpened to a shorter length. The thirty-six sets of summer wind direction records from Jiuquan were divided into three columns: low-altitude, mid-altitude, and terminal. Each column corresponded to the lateral deviation coefficient in the Soviet parameter package.

Wu Hanzhang pushed open the door with his shoulder, holding an enamel lunchbox in each hand, the lids still stained with rice water spilled from the cafeteria window.

"If you keep pressing down on this fried dough, this draft paper will be sent directly to the kitchen as a menu."

Wu Hanzhang placed two bowls of millet porridge on the table, then pulled out a stack of receipts from his canvas briefcase, his face even more somber than the layer of rice oil on the surface of the porridge.

"The workshop is waiting for three vacuum gauges and a batch of high-pressure mica sheets. The purchase list has been stuck in the finance department for two days. They insist that you sign the reimbursement form. They won't release anything if even one name is missing."

Jiang Ming took the Hero brand fountain pen, first checked the purchase number, then verified the recipient and technical purpose, confirmed that two of them corresponded to the diffusion furnace control cabinet, and then wrote his name on the last page of the document.

Wu Hanzhang took the receipts, still muttering that the finance department treated military research projects as ordinary maintenance. Jiang Ming pushed the millet porridge to him and placed the slide rule in the center of the draft paper.

"After the radar preamplifier's wiring is returned to the factory, I had Da Liu separate the input end and the heating circuit to prevent high-frequency signals from getting caught in the power supply ripple. Once the mica sheet arrives, we'll make a shielding layer first."

This remark drew Wu Hanzhang's anger back to the technical aspects. He broke open a fried dough stick, ate it, and asked about the grounding arrangements for receiving the 24 gigahertz signal from the front. The finance department temporarily withdrew from his attention.

Jiang Ming lowered his head again and substituted the historical wind directions of Jiuquan from June to August into the ballistic model one by one. He first calculated it according to the Soviet side's smoothing side slip coefficient, and then replaced it with the piecewise function of the Chinese side that retained the inflection point.

The first set of data falls under normal southwest wind conditions, and the difference between the two trajectories is still near the manual calculation tolerance. However, when the wind direction turns to the northwest, the dispersion of the landing points given by the Soviet model begins to narrow.

Jiang Ming drew lines under the numbers with a pencil, then retrieved another sounding record from the same month of the same year, recalculated the altitude, wind speed, and sideslip angle, and found that the results still changed in the same direction.

The more chaotic the actual wind field, the more orderly the trajectory calculated by the smoothing parameters. The stronger the monsoon shear, the closer the impact point dispersion is to the bullseye. This contraction has exceeded the range that statistical fluctuations can explain.

He broke down the piecewise integral and calculated the low Mach inlet, the critical section of crossflow separation, and the final rudder effect attenuation zone separately, quickly producing three sets of residuals with opposite signs on the paper.

After the slope of the Su Fang matrix is ​​smoothed out in the critical section, the controller obtains a false stable region, and subsequent integration pushes the yaw error that should have been expanded into the artificially reduced correction band.

The overall team member in charge of data verification came over with a notebook, copied the two sets of discrepancies into a unified table, and checked the last digit with an abacus.

"Engineer Jiang, the difference here is 0.7%, and the difference in the other group is 0.9%. When calculating by hand, the product is large, and rounding up or down by one place can cause this kind of deviation."

Jiang Ming handed the slide rule to him, his fingertips landing on the third set of results.

"Look at the direction of dispersion. All three groups are shrinking. The rounding error will be distributed to both sides. It will not just go in one direction."

The clerk pushed the cursor back up, a hint of hesitation on his face, but still filled in the reason column as "difference in calculation accuracy".

"The team already discussed this last week. Everyone is now focused on the frozen nodes. If we trace the source of the parameters, it will take up at least one more round of mainframe time."

After he finished speaking, he took the form and went to find the next accountant, walking much faster than when he came, clearly unwilling to leave his judgment at Jiang Ming's desk any longer.

A week ago, Jiang Ming's preliminary results had quieted the team for a while. Several engineers in the overall team reviewed the original summary and also admitted that the smoothness of the matrix exceeded the normal level of the wind tunnel.

However, with project milestones looming over everyone and the Soviet consultants repeatedly emphasizing their experience at the test range, most people were more inclined to attribute the problem to differences in tabulation habits and data processing.

After listening to their conversation, Wu Hanzhang put the lid of his lunchbox back on, picked up the piece of paper with "Miscellaneous Job" written on it, and read a few lines.

"You suspect they knew in advance which section would cause problems, so they fixed that section?"

"At this point, we can only confirm the pattern; the motivation still needs to be supported by the original calculation traces."

Jiang Ming retrieved the maximum wind shear record collected by the radiosonde last month, fed the perforated paper tape into the small decoding machine next to him, and the gears gripped the perforated tape, continuously outputting the height data.

He copied down the three layers with the greatest sudden changes in wind speed, converted them into the sideslip angle of the projectile, and then calculated them independently offline, completely bypassing the intermediate correction table provided by the Soviet side.

As soon as the low Mach segment crosses the critical point of crossflow separation, the residuals reverse direction. The model that retains the true inflection point expands the dispersion with wind shear, while the Soviet model continues to contract to the right.

The two tracks were separated on the paper, with the distance between them increasing from several hundred meters to more than two kilometers. Jiang Ming rechecked the upper limit of integration and then cross-derived the results using the recalculation format left by Ren Xinmin.

The rattan chair stopped making noise, and Wu Hanzhang put down his lunchbox. Although he couldn't read the entire ballistic equation, he recognized the range boundary markings at the ends of the two trajectories.

"If live ammunition is brought in, will the bullets still land in the safe zone?"

"The controller will believe a modified curve, and the harder the control surface works, the greater the error accumulated in the terminal phase."

Jiang Ming pinned the maximum wind shear record to the draft paper and was about to mark the third set of sideslip angles when the door was pushed open from the outside.

Comrade Song walked into the archives room carrying a brown briefcase. He first glanced at the Sky Compilation on the table, then placed the briefcase next to Jiang Ming.

"The security department called and asked you to come over immediately. Your personal belongings will be stored as Class A items, and the desk will be sealed by me and the data clerk."

Wu Hanzhang stood up with the purchase order in hand, and the anger he had just suppressed surged back onto his face.

"The finance department needs signatures, the physics institute needs control cabinets, and the Fifth Academy is calling people to the security department. How many parts can he break down in a day?"

Jiang Ming folded the loose reports in half, locked them together with the sounding records in a metal drawer, and handed the key to Comrade Song, who then sealed it in a small bag.

Wu Hanzhang stared at him for a moment, then stuffed the purchase order back into his briefcase, turned around and went to the finance department of the Fifth Hospital. Before leaving, he left half a fried dough stick and told Jiang Ming not to use food as a paperweight anymore.

The security office's cubicle was separated from the data building by only a courtyard. On the table were copies of Soviet documents, original records of the Jiuquan radiosonde, and large-scale time results just delivered by the overall team.

Jiang Ming closed the door and crossed out each of the red circles that had been drawn in the Soviet documents for easy verification, then rearranged each parameter revision in chronological order.

The first version of the summary retained the minor fluctuations in the critical section, the second version reduced the fluctuations, and the third version of the complete parameter package changed the residual reversal region into a continuous smooth curve.

All three versions of the modification are aimed at reducing the dispersion, and only apply to the sideslip angle range that is most easily triggered by the Jiuquan monsoon, which has exceeded the boundaries of ordinary data cleaning.

An officer from the security department handed over a report from the external meteorological observatory, stating that the active monsoon season in July would arrive early, and Jiuquan might experience continuous upper-level jet streams and stratified wind shear in the coming days.

The time allotted for large-scale aircraft operations also needs to be allocated to the engine, overall system, and telemetry groups. The time that China can use for independent security boundary verification is compressed into two nighttime windows.

Jiang Ming recalculated the deviation ratio between the three versions of parameters and wrote the shrinkage ratio, corresponding height, and end-segment magnification factor on a narrow piece of paper.

He folded the narrow piece of paper and stuffed it into his pocket. The first piece of evidence that the calculation had been manipulated had finally transformed from a doubt into a verifiable chain of numbers.

As he walked out of the security office, the fatigue from continuous calculations returned to his shoulders and back. He got into the waiting jeep and told the driver the location of an old pastry shop in Dongdan.

"Go around and buy two catties of old-fashioned pastries, half of which is red date paste and half of which is walnut paste, so that the people on the bus can share some."

As soon as the driver pulled up to the building, a jeep with a security license plate blocked the way. Director Wang got out, holding an interrogation report delivered from Xi'an.

He walked to Jiang Ming's car window and opened the back door directly.

"Don't go back to the factory yet. That fake maintenance worker in Xi'an has spoken up. The wiring he provided has already infiltrated the secure compound."