Live Stream 1980: Netizens Teach Me How to Make a Rocket by Hand

With the number of attendees finalized, the meeting quickly moved on to the specific manufacturing schedule.

Chief Engineer Gao touched his bald forehead and said:

"Professor Qian, with the three-person plan and the three-cabin configuration, the design drawings are essentially scrapped and started from scratch."

"The piping, electrical circuits, and life support systems all need to be rewired."

"According to the old rules, it takes at least half a year to build a prototype for testing."

"If a mistake is made, rework and modification will extend the cycle by at least two years."

That's the experience gained from working on projects during impoverished times.

They meticulously draw and refine every detail, creating a single prototype that they can't bear to throw away if it breaks.

Investigate slowly, fix slowly, and use time to earn money.

After calculating in his mind for a long time, Chief Engineer Gao finally said:

"The implementation time of Project 851 will probably be more than 10 years."

Lin Xi walked to the front, facing these weathered and experienced aerospace backbones.

"Dear seniors."

Lin Xi's tone was gentle, but her eyes were extremely sharp.

"As the deputy leader of the overall team of Project 851, I'll be here today to give you all a rundown."

He placed his hands on the table:

"From now on, our spaceship manufacturing will all use standardized interfaces, and all parts will be modularized!"

"Life support, attitude control, and communication systems are all made into pluggable, independent modules."

"During the testing phase, if a problem occurs, don't use a multimeter to check the circuit board. Just remove the faulty module, replace it with a spare, and continue!"

Chief Engineer Gao was stunned:

"You're not going to fix it if it's broken?"

"Should we replace the entire module?"

"How much would that cost to prepare materials for?"

"Based on standardization and modularization, I'm going to fight an unprecedentedly prosperous battle for everyone!"

Lin Xi raised his voice, throwing out the industrial iteration logic that shocked the era.

"For example, with posture control systems, there's been endless debate, and no one is sure which solution to use."

"It's okay!"

"As long as the technical department can produce three reasonable sets of drawings (A, B, and C), we will utilize the machine tool consortium's production capacity to manufacture and test them all in parallel!"

"Let's let the results speak for themselves!"

A collective gasp filled the conference room.

Li swallowed hard, feeling like his mind was going blank:

"Build three sets in parallel?"

"This...this is such a waste!"

"Don't be afraid of it exploding, don't be afraid of things breaking!"

Lin Xi looked at them and said, word by word:

"Failure is a shortcut to success."

"What we need is a closed-loop system with rapid iteration, not endless theoretical discussions on paper that take a year to revise!"

Lin Xi straightened up:

"As for funding, if it's not enough, Red Star Technology will cover it."

The veteran experts' faces flushed red, and their eyes gleamed.

They've spent their whole lives melting down scrap metal and re-threading screws. When have they ever seen such a wealthy and extravagant way of threading screws?

"Good lad..."

Old Qin rubbed his reddened eyes and let out a long sigh.

"I've dedicated my entire life to scientific research, and I've never fought a battle this rich!"

The atmosphere in the conference room shifted dramatically from its initial tense and oppressive tone to one of boiling excitement.

But after the initial excitement, the veteran engineers always manage to pinpoint the Achilles' heel.

Chief Designer Chen, responsible for the spacecraft's power supply and data management, raised his hand to quell the noise:

"Deputy Team Leader Lin, the modular and parallel solutions are indeed impressive."

"But I have to pour cold water on that."

Lin Xi's attitude was respectful:

"Mr. Chen, please go ahead."

Old Chen sighed:

"Spaceships often have hundreds of thousands of parts and hundreds of thousands of circuit signals."

"The system is several orders of magnitude more complex than the satellites we've destroyed in the past."

"Even if you replace the faulty module, someone still needs to investigate and figure out exactly what went wrong with it, right?"

Old Chen looked at Lin Xi and poured out his grievances:

"Hundreds or thousands of microcircuits and sensors, even if there is only a very short signal spike, can cause the entire system to collapse."

"Detecting the fault is not difficult; the difficulty lies in 'locating the fault'."

"Our current method is to rely on the human eye to look at the waveforms on the oscilloscope and to hold the probes and measure them one by one on the board."

"It was lucky that the investigation lasted for several days."

"It's common to be stuck in a rut for several months."

"The time required for this kind of zeroing out and troubleshooting is the biggest constraint on our iteration progress."

These words were like a needle, puncturing the balloon of excitement.

Several veteran engineers who had experienced model reset nodded repeatedly, their faces regaining their seriousness.

They know it all too well.

In the reset process, 80% of the time is spent not repairing, but searching.

Old Qin frowned:

"Old Chen is right. When a large system malfunctions, even a small problem can have far-reaching consequences."

"If we can't find the root cause of the problem, no matter how many spare pods we build, launching them will be like setting off fireworks."

In the live stream, the chat was flooded with comments.

[Holy crap, finding bugs in 100,000 parts by manually measuring with probes? That would take forever!]

[Hardware and low-level code debugging are inherent flaws of this era.]

[Add an external debug system to the spaceship! Create a hardware logic analysis and status monitoring bus!]

[Yes! Real-time capture of physical layer level signals. With the current digital chip capabilities of Tianjin Radio Factory No. 2, building a multi-channel status acquisition system is entirely feasible!]

A glint of light flashed in Lin Xi's eyes.

He had to transplant the debugging logic from modern software engineering into this era.

Lin Xi snapped out of her reverie, met Chief Engineer Chen's worried gaze, and smiled slightly.

"Mr. Chen, you're right."

"Relying on manpower to locate faults among 100,000 parts is indeed like finding a needle in a haystack."

He turned around, picked up the chalk, and wrote two lines heavily on the blackboard:

Hardware-level logic diagnostics and independent acquisition bus.

"Since we can't investigate by humans, let's let the spaceship investigate on its own."

Chief Engineer Chen was taken aback and leaned forward:

"The spaceship can check itself?"

"right."

Lin Xi tossed aside the chalk and gestured with her hands in the air in front of her.

"We need to mount an independent diagnostic network in addition to the spacecraft's power supply network and data flow path."

"It's like giving a spacecraft a 24/7 medic."

"This system does not interfere with the operation of the spacecraft under normal circumstances."

"But it will collect the voltage, current and command timing of all key modules in real time."

"Once an abnormal glitch occurs, it will instantly capture the physical layer data stream before and after the fault occurs and generate precise code."

"Point out the root cause of the problem directly, where the circuit is broken and the sequence is disordered."

The meeting room was completely silent.

For seasoned experts accustomed to analog circuits and manual testing, this fully digital and automated logic monitoring concept sounds like a pipe dream.

Old Qin's voice even changed slightly:

"Kobayashi, can we really build this thing right now?"

Lin Xi's gaze was firm:

"Red Star Semiconductor's existing digital chip and architecture capabilities are sufficient to secure the deal."

"As long as everyone standardizes the interface protocol."

"Leave the rest to me."

He looked into those eyes filled with shock and anticipation, and his tone softened.

"Seniors, please give me three days. I need to go back to Tianjin."

Lin Xi tidied up the documents on the table.

"When I get back, I'll bring you a practical implementation plan."

"Let our spaceship learn to find its own problems!"