Homo Sapiens

「On the other side.」

Zhang Hao, the acting Chief Technology Officer of Helix Information Technology Company, was also busy with his work.

As one of the few managers who was also a skilled programmer, Zhang Hao’s status within Homo Sapiens Company was even higher than his younger brother’s. After all, his brother, Zhang Wei, wasn’t a member of Spider Web, which clearly put him at a disadvantage.

Zhang Hao currently managed the Security Department’s Information Department while also serving as the CTO for Helix Information Technology Company.

Spiral Body Company had been established six months ago with two core objectives. The first was to operate as a public-facing software design firm for electronic computers. The second was to secretly develop its own software for biological computers.

The application software for conventional electronic computers wasn’t particularly difficult for Zhang Hao, especially the commercial software. The approach was simply to ”borrow” as much as possible from existing commercial products.

Over a hundred programmers were responsible for this, and they had only one task: to imitate other commercial software.

Meanwhile, the core R&D team led by Zhang Hao, consisting of over thirty programmers, was responsible for developing software based on the biological computer architecture.

These thirty-plus programmers were the true insiders at Spiral Body Company. After all, anyone with access to the biological computers had to be implanted with a bio-chip and subjected to other preventative measures to ensure their absolute loyalty.

Although there were differences between biological and electronic computers, their software frameworks were similar. This was primarily to facilitate the rapid porting of useful electronic computer software to the biological computers.

In particular, courses that Li Qingye had single-handedly created by combining the features of electronic and biological computers—such as *Fundamentals of Pseudo-Electronic Software Programming*, *Fuzzy Control Models for Biological Computers*, and *Porting and Adapting Electronic Software*—had been deeply implanted into the minds of Zhang Hao and his team through the bio-chips in their brains.

They could now independently develop some application software for the biological computers.

However, some of the industrial software they had recently been tasked with was giving them a headache.

The main issue was that designing industrial software required a large number of professional researchers and supporting experimental data. This was the fundamental reason why Western industrial software was so powerful—their accumulated knowledge and resources were simply immense.

As for Homo Sapiens Company’s accumulation of industrial data, it wasn’t non-existent, but it might as well have been.

After all, you can’t make bricks without straw.

Zhang Hao was currently stumped. No matter how sophisticated the simulation software was, it still needed support from physical industry and experimental data. He wasn’t an aerodynamicist; he was completely helpless when it came to the aircraft simulation and testing software.

Fortunately, Li Qingye had given him a suggestion.

Now, Zhang Hao had brought five programmers with him to Kulas Town on Panay Island.

When Fang Bai heard that the CTO of Spiral Body Company was visiting, he immediately dropped his work to personally escort Zhang Hao and his team.

After hearing Zhang Hao’s request, Fang Bai understood that they would need to cooperate to overcome certain challenges.

Just then, Paul led them into Flying Fish Company’s wind tunnel testing facility. This was a miniature wind tunnel system that Flying Fish Company had built itself. It had a total of ten mini wind tunnels capable of testing aircraft weighing under ten kilograms.

Fang Bai whispered a reminder, ”Manager Paul, this kind of wind tunnel can only test small drones. We can’t test our large drones here.”

But Paul remained unfazed. He had a nearby Soldier wheel out a cart carrying dozens of boxes. Inside were sparrows, swallows, seagulls, and dragonflies.

”What’s this?” Fang Bai didn’t understand what Paul was doing. Although human fixed-wing aircraft were inspired by animal wings, it was notoriously difficult to collect accurate data from birds in wind tunnel experiments.

Paul placed a sparrow into a mini wind tunnel and gave the order to start it. The sparrow began to soar inside.

The technician operating the wind tunnel then began continuously altering the airflow, wind speed, and air temperature. The sparrow kept soaring until it was exhausted.

Paul removed the sparrow, injected it with a special nutrient solution and a fatigue-relieving drug, then let it recover in a cage.

At the same time, a special fiber-optic signal connector was attached to the sparrow’s head.

Zhang Hao and his team, proficient with the biological computers, quickly read the sparrow’s recent flight data. After combining it with the wind tunnel’s data and synchronizing the timestamps, they quickly discovered many interesting models and data points.

”This is...” Fang Bai was stunned.

Paul finally explained, ”We don’t have a sufficient accumulation of aerodynamic knowledge. The core databases of Western industrial software aren’t public, and using their products risks data leaks. Therefore, we have to rely on ourselves. We’re using birds and insects as test subjects to rapidly accumulate an initial batch of flight data. We’ll test the larger aircraft once the large-scale wind tunnel is complete.”

But Fang Bai asked excitedly, ”Paul, can the sensors you’re using on these birds and insects be installed on an aircraft?”

”...” Paul’s bio-chip began to compute. A few minutes later, he replied, ”Yes, but it would require a special coating and chip support.”

”Excellent! If that’s the case, we can design a large batch of scaled-down aircraft models. While small-scale models aren’t a perfect one-to-one for the prototypes, we can at least accumulate data quickly and eliminate unsuitable aerodynamic layouts.”

Fang Bai had clearly noticed the special sensors on the test animals. Their precision and coverage were so extensive that it was like being able to detect feedback from the entire surface of an aircraft.

The technology was terrifyingly powerful.

Currently, high-precision detection equipment and sensors couldn’t completely cover an aircraft’s surface. They could only measure discrete points, which software then secondarily processed to produce general simulated data.

But these special sensors were accurate down to a few microns and covered the entire surface.

On the screen, Fang Bai saw the sparrow’s flight model. It showed incredibly dense changes every microsecond. After zooming in more than tenfold, he could see the airflow, temperature, lift, and drag for every single region.

Why do human aircraft require so much power? Why can’t they fly like birds?

The reason lies in the difficulty of attitude control for conventional aircraft. To design one with the same precision as a bird, the computational power required for its attitude control would be astronomical.

But this wasn’t an issue for Flying Fish Company, because its parent company could provide chips with terrifying computational power.

With that, a new line of thinking opened up for Fang Bai.

Instead of stubbornly sticking to current aerodynamic layouts, why not dive directly into biomimicry, imitate birds’ wings, and play to their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses?

They could add various small attitude control motors and winglets to the fixed wings, leveraging the advantage of the chip’s computational power.

Those sensors would make the biomimetic design of the wings much easier and would also allow them to quickly gather a wealth of basic flight data.

Zhang Hao agreed with Fang Bai’s suggestion.

After Paul reported it to Li Qingye, he also agreed that it was a good plan.

Although precisely controlled aircraft would increase manufacturing costs, it was a necessary step to extend the range of their loitering munitions.

After all, if they wanted their loitering munitions to be able to strike North America, an increase in aircraft cost was inevitable.

Li Qingye instructed Paul to follow Fang Bai’s proposal: expand the scale of the mini wind tunnels and mass-produce miniature aircraft models to accumulate sufficient data for the flight software.

The high-precision, full-body data collection system made the mini wind tunnels extremely cost-effective, reducing some of the initial investment.

A large-scale wind tunnel was still essential, but the mini wind tunnels would suffice for the time being.