Chapter 300: with translation of chapter title

Ha Gong Da, the newly completed Ninth System Building, conference room.

"Now, we have three types of airborne radar on hand." Professor Liu said enthusiastically: "No need to say, American technology is truly advanced! Their airborne radar performance far exceeds that of the Mirage 2000 and the Wild Wind Fighter-Bomber, but…… this also means that the difficulty of reverse‑engineering this airborne radar is considerable, after all, many crystal components inside cannot be bought on the market!"

"Professional military‑grade crystal components, of course we can't buy them, but…… we have our own electronics factory, reverse‑engineering them is no problem." Qin Miao said: "As long as we can reverse‑engineer them, not only can we solve the Air Force's urgent need, we can also export for foreign exchange! Then it will surely become another source of profit for our Ninth System."

"Yeah, we can reverse‑engineer the crystal components the radar needs by shaving slices, but this doesn't let us fully master this radar, so……"

Professor Liu paused a moment: "During this period, everyone has two ideas: one thinks we can quickly produce the product via rapid survey‑and‑copy to meet the Air Force's urgent need; the other thinks we should dissect all three radar technologies, fully grasp them, so later modifications will be much easier."

Is it simple survey‑and‑copy, or thorough mastery?

Do we still need to consider this?

Looking at the pairs of expectant eyes, Qin Miao smiled: "No need to say, of course we must thoroughly master the technology! We don't need to worry about schedule—building it in one or two months, domestically there's no suitable fighter jet to serve as our radar test platform. Taking a year to tinker it out isn't late at all!"

Indeed, Qin Miao would never do something short‑sighted for quick gain!

Professor Liu nodded: "Good, now we know what to do! By the way, I heard that the 607 Institute also wants to join in?"

"Yeah, I promised them that if they pass our test they can join; after all, they're all experienced in airborne radar research, and once they come here they can speed up R&D."

"Fine, the radar's specific processing circuitry we can handle, but machining this radar antenna is really giving us a headache! The Eighth System has studied it for a long time and still doesn't know how to machine it……"

"Okay, I'll go take a look."

The Eighth System is the Mechanical Department, also a college Qin Miao often visited; the original Truck Cannon was built there.

The Eighth System Building has also been constructed; the metal cutting teaching and research office occupies half a floor, and inside you can see various advanced CNC machining equipment.

At this moment, several people are scratching their heads.

"Ah, another piece scrapped!"

"Yeah, machining this planar slot radar antenna is absolutely hell‑level difficulty!"

To radiate electromagnetic waves outward, the slit width must be half the wavelength; in the X‑band the shortest wavelength is 2.5 cm, so half the slit is 1.25 cm. Even if the error tolerance is required to be 0.001 cm, Ha Gong Da can achieve it with its advanced machining tools.

The key is, it's not just about cutting a single slit; multiple layers of slits are needed, and the interior must have a cavity structure, after all, the radar waves exit via the waveguide cavity!

"This antenna can currently be machined only by the United States; Europe and the Soviet Union lack this technology. I wonder if we……"

"No, absolutely not! Ha Gong Da exists to research world‑leading advanced technology; if others can do it, we must too; if they can't, we must still manage it! Classmates, let's rack our brains again!"

In university projects, it's usually professors leading students; Professor Yuan has gone to work at a factory, and now the responsibility for this research falls to another senior professor of the Eighth System, Hao Minghui.

Since taking on this project, they've been struggling here for over a month straight, and just the failed machined parts alone number over a dozen placed on the side!

"That's right, failure is the mother of success! If Qin Miao were here, maybe one try would do, we……" Student Tian Chun Guang, who had previously done research with Qin Miao, had just said this when he suddenly stopped talking, astonished at the approaching few people.

"Qin Miao! You've finally come back!"

"Qin Miao, you…… you really are a timely rain!"

Hao Minghui also breathed a sigh of relief; since Qin Miao has arrived, machining this radar antenna is no problem!

"Well, everyone's worked hard; is the process we're currently studying simply to cut grooves directly into the plate?"

"Exactly, what else could we do?"

"What do you think—could we change approach, use CNC machines to fabricate all the parts first, then weld them together?"

"How…… how could that be possible? The welding process will surely introduce error; multi‑layer welding will amplify error layer by layer, so such precision would be worse than our direct cutting precision……"

"So we need to design a dedicated fixture that clamps these parts into place in one go, then use salt‑bath brazing to weld them all at once……"

Everyone's eyes widened—this…… actually seems like a viable method!

Brazing is a method that uses filler metal with a melting point lower than that of the workpiece; heating both the workpiece and filler melts the filler, which flows to fill the joint while the workpiece itself remains solid.

There are many brazing methods; salt‑bath brazing places the assembly in a molten salt bath, heats it by other means to melt the filler, and performs the weld.

It heats quickly, can complete the weld in one go, allows precise temperature control, and is suited for batch production; the only downsides are that equipment must be cleaned after welding and it can't weld sealed workpieces, but none of these matter for brazing the planar slot radar antenna.

"Then when we fix it, do we need to take thermal expansion and contraction into account?" Professor Hao asked.

"Of course, fixture control is also important; at high temperature the fixture might deform the antenna, and the depth and composition of the molten salt in the salt‑bath furnace matter too—we must also dehydrate the molten salt so it doesn't absorb moisture from the air, which would affect weld quality……"

Qin Miao expounded on these processes fluently; it's obvious that in this field he is…… a professional!

"San Shui, tell me what you need, and we'll start work now!"

"Yeah, the rest is easy to say; the key is the fixture—we first need to fabricate a set of fixtures, which must use vacuum adsorption and magnetic adsorption……"

The night grew darker; in the family quarters, Chu Miaomiao was still bent over her book, the food on the table had gone cold, she didn't blame San Shui for not coming back early, she only hoped she could quickly learn something useful to help San Shui.