Chapter 17: Copycat is also a technical job (Part 2)
In short, after obtaining a batch of physical objects and introduction instructions for the civilian version of the Ark reactor, and confirming that this thing can operate normally in its own world, the Chinese government on the other side of the time and space channel immediately organized an expert research team to deal with the Ark reactor. The reactor was reverse mapped.
Reverse mapping has always been a specialty of China, a big country with counterfeit goods. This is how all kinds of counterfeit goods were created from the beginning.
In fact, counterfeiting various counterfeit goods is also a very demanding technical job. Don't look at the "Made in China" after the reform and opening up and there are so many counterfeit goods, and think that counterfeit advanced technology products are very simple. matter. In fact, those counterfeit goods such as domestic mobile phones and domestic tablet computers are not simple gadgets such as handicrafts or small hardware parts, but end products involving an entire industrial system. If you don’t have enough technical accumulation, even if you put all the complete sets of drawings and samples in front of you, you probably won’t be able to copy them!
If all modern technology products were so easy to copy, China's computer industry would not be able to produce competitive "Chinese chips" after decades of painstaking efforts, and China's aviation companies would even use black chips such as black chips. There are a lot of famous brand samples such as Eagle and Sibei, but no results can be achieved after more than 20 years of tossing. This is under the condition that there is no technological generation gap between the two.
As for India, a "future power", it is even more of a joke when it comes to imitation of knock-off products. Their Arjun tank is a knock-off of the "IWC" technology. However, after thirty years of hard work, in the end they only came up with an embarrassing product. It's such a god-like product that not even our own army is willing to purchase it. There is also Japan's "Shin" fighter jet. After so many years of work, it still only exists in the dreams of the Air Self-Defense Force.
Even the former Soviet Union, which claimed to be technologically advanced, tinkered with the same tank engine and used it from World War II until the 1980s.
Why is this happening? Could it be that scientists from backward countries are so stupid that they can't even understand technical information? The truth is of course not the case. Technical principles only let people know what to do. Only core data can let people know how to solve specific problems.
These core data represent repeated practical operations, countless funds, blood, tears and even deaths. They are the accumulation of experience in industrial civilization in developed countries over many years. Take metallurgy as an example, different production operation sequences, ore raw materials from different origins, different response plans, wrong or right failure summaries... These are the tuition fees for implementing technology from paper, and everyone must Gotta hand it in, there are almost no shortcuts. But with these core data, a new industrial civilization can be quickly rebuilt on the ruins. It is precisely by relying on these data accumulated from generation to generation that the Germans can quickly rise from the ruins after World War II. The re-established industrial system is still world-class in terms of advanced nature. And if it starts from scratch like China, even with the technology aided by the Soviet Union, there will be a series of acclimatization problems in actual operation.
The Ark Reactor that Wang Qiu and the others obtained is simply a high-tech product from another world. Not only does it surpass Wang Qiu and the others in terms of technical level for twenty or thirty years, but even the regulations of various technical standards are completely different. Different, you can imagine how difficult it is to create a copycat.
For example, obtaining the material formulas of various alloy components used in the Ark reactor alone involves thousands of experiments. Only through these experiments can all factors affecting production be confirmed and the These data are presented in the form of function change curves, which is the embodiment of core data. As long as there are basic standards and this function change curve, special changes can be designed according to specific material conditions, thereby ensuring that the performance of the alloy material of the alloy component is up to standard. And this is just the core data of an alloy material. Various other parts, from electronic components to heat dissipation materials, each contain related industrial chains. Each industrial chain has its own set of core data, regardless of Without any one of them, an identical Ark reactor cannot be produced.
However, in order to solve the energy crisis of the entire country and nation once and for all, the central government has also become ruthless, almost at all costs, gathering elite soldiers and generals from all aspects to conduct research and research on the Ark reactor. According to Political Commissar Guo, he "showed the spirit of selling his pants, going hungry and picking abacus beads to build an atomic bomb", and started a vigorous "Counterfeit Ark Reactor Battle."
In any case, the Ark reactor that Wang Qiu and the others obtained at the Stark Industries Building Exhibition in Manhattan, New York City, Marvel World, is after all just a civilian product for the general market. The first consideration is not advancement, but cost control and convenience on a large scale. production needs, so the technical content is not too high to be exaggerated. There is no need for vibranium (the raw material of Captain America's shield) or Adamantium alloy (Uncle Wolverine's weapon in X-Men) or the like in the materials. It is so high-end and classy that it makes people want to scratch the wall. thing.
Therefore, under the research pressure of the "nation-wide system", there is still a huge investment of funds regardless of the cost, and with the help of Wang Qiu and others, they managed to collect some otherworldly technologies through public channels in the Marvel world, such as libraries or academic journals. According to the data, the copycat scientific research team organized by the central government has made quite good progress on the subject of copycat Ark reactor. They first completed the reverse mapping as quickly as possible, and then frantically conducted countless experiments. They quickly understood the various technologies contained in it, and then completed the imitation work of one component after another. Even if it is impossible to imitate perfectly, substitutes with similar functions have been found. In addition, the central government has also lowered the standards for copycat tasks - Stark Industries can make the Ark reactor as small as a palm, but the copycat scientific research team organized by the central government does not have such exaggerated requirements. An Ark reactor as large as a car or even a large truck can be considered a basic success.
But the problem is that at one of the most critical links, China's copycat scientific research team has encountered insurmountable difficulties.
"...To put it simply, your current research work has encountered a bottleneck, and you cannot synthesize Tony with the current technical level. In Stark's new Ark reactor, the one used to replace the palladium plate is in the original element It is said to be a clean and pollution-free new element that does not exist on the periodic table, so I hope we can find a way to contact Iron Man and obtain the old Ark reactor technology using palladium?”
Wang Qiu blinked in confusion, "...but why is the old-fashioned Ark reactor technology using palladium needed instead of a method of producing new elements? Isn't there a risk of poisoning if palladium is used? Just like "Iron Man 2" "Like in the movie?"
"...Sigh, the method of producing new elements is now the magic weapon and food cost of Stark Industries. How can it be sold to outsiders? Moreover, compared with the uranium and plutonium in modern nuclear fission reactors, What's the point of that little palladium? It's not as toxic as a depleted uranium bomb from the Yankees! In fact, who else would put the Ark reactor into his body so desperately?"
The researcher who came to report the situation to Wang Qiu, with severely swollen eye circles, sighed feebly and said, "...But we don't even have a clue how to synthesize this new element! In addition, we also bear the responsibility. Can't afford the terrible cost of mass-producing new elements..."
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Since Mendeleev of Russia discovered the periodic table of elements in the 19th century, elements in the periodic table that had not been discovered at that time have been discovered one after another. With the discovery of element 92, uranium, all naturally occurring elements on earth have been collected. If later scientists want to make new discoveries, they can only "create" new elements that do not originally exist in nature based on the laws of this table.
On the periodic table of elements, the characteristic of the "residents" after element 92, uranium, is that most of them are very unstable, and most of them are "residents" that are prone to decay. They do not exist in nature. To be precise, they are not found on the earth, or they occupy the "room" for a very, very short time. Some of them even change into another "in the blink of an eye". An element "slip" away!
Therefore, from elements 93 to 118 after uranium, except for neptunium (Np), plutonium (Pu) and californium (Cf), which exist in trace amounts on the earth, all others have not been discovered on the earth so far. Elements can only be discovered or produced by artificially creating conditions.
So, how can humans create a new element that does not exist in nature? First, two elements must be carefully selected so that the sum of their atomic numbers equals the number of atoms in the new element. Then put them into a particle accelerator. Let their atomic nuclei accelerate and collide with each other at a very high speed. Some of them are smashed into pieces, but some particles stick together and "synthesize" into a new nucleus. This is the birth of a new element.
Take the experiment of synthesizing element 112 (Cn) at the German Heavy Ion Research Center GSI as an example. Scientists managed to turn zinc atoms with atomic number 30 into ions, put them into bundles, and then injected them into GSI's 120-meter-long particles. In the accelerator, it is accelerated in a straight line to a speed almost close to "1/10 the speed of light", and directly hits a thin target made of lead with atomic number 82. The result of the high-speed collision of two atoms is that most of them were smashed, but a small amount of them fused together to form new atoms, which is element 112 Cn with atomic number 30+82=112.
Relying on this method of producing new elements, scientists finally filled in all the blanks in the periodic table sequence from 1 to 118 at the end of 2015, and are currently ambitiously trying to synthesize the heavier new elements that follow - it seems Everything is no longer a problem, but the trouble is, do you know that a large cyclotron particle accelerator capable of synthesizing new elements costs hundreds of millions of dollars?
The earliest cyclotron in human history was only twelve centimeters in diameter, small enough to be lifted by hand. To build such a machine, you need an electron beam tube that is evacuated, magnets that can be used to bend the charged particle beam, and a radio frequency oscillator or radio frequency cavity that accelerates the particles. But the problem is that such a small accelerator cannot get particles to speeds high enough to produce new elements.
The cyclotrons currently used by scientific research institutions in various countries are usually large and giant, and their cost is at least equivalent to building a church. For example, the European Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most energetic cyclotron particle accelerator in the world. It is located on the border of France and Switzerland. Its English name is LHC (Large Hadron Collider). It is a circular accelerator buried 100 meters underground. Its circular tunnel is 27 kilometers long, so it takes more than 4 hours to complete the entire journey. The various supporting test instruments range from several thousand tons to tens of thousands of tons, and the total amount of metal used exceeds that of a Yamato battleship. If you are in it, it will be reminiscent of the starship engine in science fiction movies.
The construction cost of such a big thing is naturally high. The total construction cost alone is as high as more than 10 billion U.S. dollars, and the annual maintenance and operation costs are also more than 1 billion U.S. dollars. The power consumption when running is comparable to that of a city! It consumes more than 10% of the electricity in the Geneva region of Switzerland. It was also extremely squeamish and would always break down. Once, the cooling system had a problem and it was forced to shut down for several months for repairs.
The cost of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier "Nimitz" is only over 700 million US dollars... Such a thing is more expensive than an aircraft carrier in combat!
Well, if it is to solve the energy crisis in China or even all mankind, it seems that it is worth spending such a huge amount of money. Not to mention that China is much richer now. Even when it was too poor to eat, no Or would you rather be a trouser than make an atomic bomb? Therefore, if the investment expenditure is just too high, the central government still has the ability and courage to solve it.
What's more terrible is that the real problem is that even if the central government invests huge sums of money and successfully builds an extra-large cyclotron particle accelerator, can the new elements needed for the Ark reactor really be produced? Well, according to experts, the prospects don’t seem promising...
Indeed, anyone who has dabbled in high-energy quantum physics knows that after microscopic particles are shattered using large cyclotrons, at some point enough of the fragments will recombine to form a new atomic nucleus. When it is stable enough, a new element is created. But the problem is that elements with higher atomic numbers in the periodic table of elements have to overcome the huge Coulomb repulsion when nuclear reactions occur through collisions due to the increase in the number of protons in the nucleus, so it is difficult to combine to form new elements with higher atomic numbers. . Therefore, even if a large-scale cyclotron is built without any effort, it is very difficult to create a new element that does not exist on the earth. The success rate is comparable to buying a lottery ticket. According to general experience after World War II, such a thing would only happen once in five or ten years. Such a production efficiency that relies solely on luck is comparable to ancient craftsmen casting "magic weapons" and cannot meet the minimum needs of industrial production.