Chapter 155: Open a Separate Chapter to Explain a Few Things

Open a separate chapter to explain a few things

The reason for delivering one book per day instead of bringing all 28 volumes directly from the future to a single location for Larry King or others to retrieve is that the 2020 timeline had already entered March, when New York was at the peak of the virus outbreak; Lin Ran worried that even the slightest chance of the Chinese version carrying the virus was too great a risk to take.

Second, from the protagonist’s perspective, the daily-delivery method is safer; if all books vanished at once, there’d be no excuse, but if only one vanished, he could claim he’d forgotten where he put it and simply go look for it again.

Finally, the chain is too long: by this point, the Raspberry Pi had already been handed over to China, and for Lin Ran’s line, the highest level of secrecy was mandatory; Larry King wasn’t even suspected until 1980, let alone the protagonist. The reason the protagonist delivered the physical Raspberry Pi was to elevate the level of attention—both toward himself and toward the information he provided.

Everyone is viewing this from a god’s-eye perspective, but from the viewpoint of Americans at the time, the protagonist had never left Red Stone Base; there was simply no reason to suspect him.

For the protagonist, as long as the door exists, how he acts doesn’t really matter.

Yesterday, a reader pointed out that the SCR-584 was exported to Soviet Russia; I checked the historical records:

During World War II, Soviet Russia acquired certain military equipment from America through the Lend-Lease Act, including 49 SCR-584 radars. Later, American engineer Morton Sobell stole parts of the SCR-584 technology and passed them to Soviet Russia.

Soviet Russia used these technologies to develop SON-9 (Fire Pot), SON-30 (Fire Wheel), and SON-50 (Wing Wheel).

Between 1958 and 1959, China imported multiple large radar systems from Soviet Russia, including the SON-9, for use in teaching and research at institutions such as the Beijing Institute of Technology.

The SON-9 systems China received included only the finished equipment, not the core components or technical details; they were provided in a “black box” format—China gained the ability to operate and maintain them, but could not directly replicate or deeply understand their design principles.

By early 1963, after Soviet experts had withdrawn, China began attempting to disassemble the equipment for reverse engineering.

Thus, the improved version of the SCR-584 still holds significant value for China at this moment.