Chapter 40
I’m translating this chapter into HTML-formatted prose and preserving the technical and corporate register. The source has no special UI/comment blocks, so I’m keeping this to narrative paragraphs only, with the chapter title on the first line.CHAPTER_TITLE: Batch-III (3) +21
Geoje Island, Solaris Marine Production Headquarters, Factory Manager’s Office.
“······.”
Factory Manager Go Gwangsoo narrowed his eyes at the drawing spread out before him.
He had spent thirty years building ships, but he had never seen a blueprint this absurd.
“Manager, is this for real?” asked Deputy Manager Park from the production team, sounding dazed. “You want to run steel wires through the inside of the piping? What, are we supposed to rip the pipe apart and fire the gun turret through it or something? I have no idea what the hell they were thinking.”
“······.”
“If you cut grooves for steel wire in there, the friction coefficient kills the flow rate. Whoever designed this has no clue how the field actually works... Should we just send it back? Looks like the ADD guys threw this together from behind a desk and missed the mark.”
Despite Deputy Manager Park’s grumbling, Go Gwangsoo said nothing.
He merely adjusted his magnifying glasses and stared fixedly at the analysis data attached beside the drawing.
Flow-rate graph. Pressure distribution map.
And the vibration and noise analysis results.
This is...
Go Gwangsoo’s gaze changed little by little.
From disbelief to curiosity, and finally to shock.
“Hey, Deputy Manager Park.”
“Yes?”
“When exactly are you going to start pulling your weight, you punk?”
“...What? What’s that supposed to mean all of a sudden? Why can’t I pull my weight? I’m doing great, aren’t I?”
Deputy Manager Park looked offended, but Go Gwangsoo tapped the drawing with a finger.
“Look at the data. The vortices are completely under control.”
“Huh? What do you mean...”
“They made the fluid stick to the wall by spinning it with steel wire, you idiot. They turned turbulence into laminar flow. You still can’t see that insane idea?”
“...Huh?”
Only then did Deputy Manager Park look back at the data, and his mouth fell open.
“Whoever designed this, he’s a guy who lives and breathes fluid dynamics in his head. The one who doesn’t know what he’s talking about is you, punk.”
Go Gwangsoo sprang to his feet.
“The analysis already shows it’ll cut the vibration if we do it this way, so what exactly is impossible about it? Right now, you sound more ridiculous than the design itself.”
“S-sorry! I was just thinking, from a common-sense standpoint...”
“Common sense, my ass. Get the production line moving right now! Modify the molds and go full tilt on three shifts!”
Go Gwangsoo’s roar came crashing down.
The factory began to move.
That night, I’m talking about me? Wait no, the chapter shifts to the next day.
The next morning.
In front of Dry Dock No. 1 at Solaris Marine’s Okpo Shipyard.
“Manager.”
A man in dress uniform approached Go Gwangsoo, who was still in his work clothes.
It was Colonel Choi, the working-level officer in charge of the Navy submarine program.
His face was stiff with tension.
“Please hurry as much as you can. The atmosphere at the JCS is a mess right now.”
“I know. Even if it doesn’t show up on the news, you can smell the sea and tell what’s going on.”
Go Gwangsoo ground out his cigarette with a bitter expression.
If you spent thirty years in a shipyard, you knew better than anyone how the sea moved.
“The Chinese have been poking around the East Sea’s international waters in a really strange way lately. Yesterday, intelligence even picked up a Yuan-class submarine acoustic signature in the deep waters near the Ulleung Basin.”
The Ulleung Basin in the East Sea.
It was a key operating area where deep submergence tests were conducted to verify the maximum diving depth of submarines.
The fact that those bastards, usually so quiet, had started loitering through those deep waters at the very moment the prototype boat was about to be delivered was... an oddly unsettling coincidence.
“...Hah, they really are throwing a fit right under our noses.”
“This Batch-3 has to be put into service quickly if we’re going to have a card to answer back with. Please, Manager.”
There was desperation in Colonel Choi’s voice.
This was one of those issues where delivery schedules became truly trivial, because national defense was on the line and so was the pride of the military.
“Don’t worry. I built this child with my own hands. I’ll send it out to sea on time.”
Go Gwangsoo grimly tightened the chin strap on his hard hat.
And so they arrived inside the submarine’s machinery compartment.
This place was hell by any measure.
Dozens of workers were crammed into the tight space, fighting a war as they installed the steel-wire tubing.
“Ah! Manager! It won’t line up!” shouted the foreman connecting the pipes.
“The flange holes are off by three millimeters! The angle just won’t come in!”
“Move aside!”
Soaking with sweat, Go Gwangsoo crawled into the narrow gap.
Once he got in there and saw it for himself, the situation was even worse.
The pipes already installed had warped slightly from welding heat.
By contrast, the newly brought steel-wire tubes had been machined exactly to drawing, razor straight and true.
They were trying to force a perfectly straight, precision-cut pipe into a line that had already twisted out of true.
“Haa... damn it.”
Go Gwangsoo clutched his forehead.
We built it to drawing, so why the hell won’t it fit?
He wanted to shout that, but this was the reality of the shipyard and there was nothing for it.
“Foreman, what do we do? Should we cut the pipe again and bring it back?”
“Are you insane? If we do that, we lose a week! The Chinese keep causing trouble, the Navy keeps pressing us, and you want us to spend another eternity recutting this?”
There was no time.
There was only one option.
“Bring me the chain block.”
“Huh? You’re going to force the assembly?”
“Then what? Pull it into place and bolt it down first. It’s titanium, so the elasticity should hold.”
At Go Gwangsoo’s order, the workers brought over chain blocks and pry bars.
Is this really the right thing to do?
Go Gwangsoo hesitated for a moment, then shook his head.
There was no other way.
It wasn’t as if they could do an overhaul and cut into the waist of a perfectly good ship that hadn’t even been launched yet.
All that matters is getting the delivery signature first.
They only needed to pass sea trials and hand the boat over to the Navy right now.
If problems came up after that, they could tear it apart and fix it during the one-year warranty repair period.
From Go Gwangsoo’s perspective, surviving that long was realistic.
“Proceed.”
“Understood! Pull!”
With that order from Go Gwangsoo, metal screamed.
Go Gwangsoo bit his lip at the sound.
This is bad... there’s going to be residual stress...
He knew it, but there was no choice.
Right now, getting the ship out of the dock was the priority.
Whenever a problem arose, the fate of the field was to hold your head in your hands and twist your body however you had to until it was solved.
That was when it happened.
Clack.
Someone grabbed a worker’s pry bar by hand.
I gripped the pry bar the worker was holding with all my strength.
“Let go. If you keep working like this, that valve will definitely break within months.”
“···?!”
The worker startled and turned around.
To him, I must have looked like some polished outsider in a suit, wearing a hard hat and nothing else, clearly clueless about life on the shop floor.
Maybe that was why?
The worker’s face hardened.
“Who the hell are you? If we don’t pull this, how are we supposed to line up the holes? They’re off by three millimeters!”
“Don’t force it. This isn’t something you solve by brute strength.”
With familiar motions, I brought up the 3D modeling viewer saved on my tablet.
Then I entered the error data I had just verified with my own eyes and set up the simulation.
I could feel Go Gwangsoo staring at me in a daze, but I focused all my attention on the tablet screen.
And when the simulation setup was finally done the way I wanted it...
“...As expected.”
On the tablet screen, countless vector arrows representing stress distribution hovered over the pipe model.
But what really caught my eye were the spots on the pipe that glowed a furious red in the 3D viewer.
Because the parts had been forced together without quite matching, the stress was fluctuating near its limit.
Harsh, jagged red haze was rising from the pipe joints.
It looked extremely dangerous.
If the submarine began operating and took sustained vibration, the risk would only increase.
Metal with accumulated fatigue would become a time bomb, impossible to predict as to when or how it would tear apart.
I moved my finger over the screen and began inserting a virtual part.
Add a 1 mm shim.
When I added a thin metal plate to fill the gap and adjust the height, the data on the screen changed.
But what my eyes saw was still red.
What if I made it 2 mm?
When I set it that way, the haze bent the opposite way this time and spat out rough sparks.
Too much.
I added a 1.5 mm shim instead.
And at that instant...
The tangled, bloody haze washed away as if it had never existed.
As the vector arrows on the screen aligned themselves neatly, a smooth curve like flowing water appeared in my vision.
Inside that curve, a stable blue flow moved cleanly onward.
There it was.
I lifted my head and looked at Go Gwangsoo.
“Manager.”
“Y-yes?”
“Don’t force the assembly. Use shim plates.”
“I’m not saying I don’t know shims work. But this thing is twisted in three dimensions. If you want to get the angles right and proceed without error, the calculations alone take forever. This isn’t the only pipe we need to handle, either. We’d have to calculate all the other piping throughout the entire submarine too.”
Go Gwangsoo shot back in disbelief.
That was the complaint of a man on the field, sure enough.
I understood that much.
The delivery deadline was breathing down their necks, and there was no time to measure every little thing with instruments.
But.
“1.5 millimeters will do it.”
“...Huh?”
“Put a 1.5 mm shim under the lower support. Then loosen the clamp on the elbow section and rotate it half a degree to the right. It’ll fit cleanly, with no play.”
“No, if we lift this point, that one won’t line up. How are you supposed to tell that by eyeballing it here...?”
One of the workers listening from the side objected.
But Go Gwangsoo, the veteran, was different.
The moment he heard me, his eyes trembled.
“...Wait. Step aside.”
He waved a hand through the air, turning the pipe over in his mind.
“Lift the bottom by 1.5 mm and twist the axis... then cover the upper flange...?”
Go Gwangsoo brightened.
“By putting a shim under the bottom and twisting the axis... then naturally covering the top... you’re distributing the stress?”
“Something like that. More precisely, you’re absorbing the error. Not forcing it.”
Go Gwangsoo let out a sound of admiration.
“Damn... that’s crystal clear! Let’s do it his way! Bring me the shim plates! The 1.5 mm ones!”
“Huh? Seriously?”
“Stop talking and bring them here! That’s the answer! Don’t use force, use your head, your head!”
A worker slid a 1.5 mm shim plate into the gap.
“Angle it half a degree... and lock it!”
With a dull thunk, the tension in the pipe that had been forced into place began to ease.
Then came the click of metal seating properly.
“Oh...? It’s in!”
The worker’s shout burst out.
As if by magic, the holes aligned perfectly.
The stubborn bolt turned smoothly with no resistance at all.
If there had been a problem, that pipe joint should still have been glowing red.
But there was nothing extra there now.
It was fine.
“Hah... you’re a ghost, all right. A ghost.”
Go Gwangsoo clicked his tongue in amazement.
To think I had adjusted it on the spot with a few taps on the tablet, when just measuring with instruments would have taken an hour.
He looked at me with a puzzled expression.
“But who are you? You’re not one of our employees... Are you a new doctor from ADD?”
I took a business card from my inner pocket and handed it over.
“Baek Gunwoo, Executive Director of Hanseo Defense Technical Audit Team.”
Go Gwangsoo froze when he saw the card.
“Hanseo Defense... You’re that ground-systems monster I’ve only heard about in rumors?”
“A monster? Not at all. I’m just someone who handles machines.”
“Hah!”
Go Gwangsoo gave a short laugh, as if he could hardly believe it.
“A man who used to machine tanks is lecturing on submarines now? Well, well. Live long enough and you see everything. Nice to meet you. I’m Go Gwangsoo, the factory manager.”
Go Gwangsoo extended his hand.
I took his rough, callused palm in mine.
It was the hand of a craftsman who had wrestled with steel all his life.
“Then let’s keep going. We’ve got a long road ahead.”
From here on, this was my stage.
I led the way down the submarine’s narrow passage, and Go Gwangsoo followed without a word of complaint.
After moving like that for a while, I stopped.
We were in front of the coupling connecting the cooling-water pump and the motor.
“We need to realign the shaft.”
“What?”
The worker who had been busily at work widened his eyes.
“No, we already centered this with a dial gauge earlier. The error was within 0.05 millimeters...”
“No. It’s out of true.”
I shook my head firmly and manipulated the tablet.
Of course, what was on the screen was just a completely irrelevant drawing with nothing to do with this problem.
In that state, I stared at the joint where the pump shaft met the motor shaft.
Scarlet sparks were flying like mad from that connection.
To the naked eye, it looked perfectly straight.
But I could see it.
Those vicious red sparks were clear proof that the two shafts, misaligned by a hair, were pushing against each other in a tense contest of force.
It was a machine standing still, and yet inside it, something was already screaming as the bearings were crushed to pieces.
If they ran it this way, the bearings would be ground to scrap within ten minutes.
Pointing at the graph on the tablet screen, I offered the lie I had prepared.
“Look at the vibration analysis data here. When I ran the simulation, it showed that every time the rotation speed rises, the shaft center shifts by 0.5 millimeters due to eccentricity. It might look fine right now, but once you factor in thermal expansion, it’s guaranteed to warp.”
“Ah... we didn’t calculate for thermal expansion...”
As the worker trailed off, Go Gwangsoo, watching from behind, clicked his tongue.
“The executive director is right. Put the shims back in and reset the center. Don’t blow a bearing later and have to write a report about it.”
With a strong ally behind me, things were easier.
I moved on again and continued pointing out the next problem.
“Use a torque wrench there. Don’t hit it with an impact driver. Follow the specified torque and tighten it by hand. It’ll loosen under vibration.”
“You heard him! Bring the torque wrench! Tighten it with your hands, not your dumb brute strength!”
At first, the workers had been suspicious, but once the king of the field, Go Gwangsoo, backed me up, they began following orders without complaint.
The cramped, complicated interior of the submarine moved in perfect coordination at my gesture.
I felt like a conductor leading an orchestra.
And then, a few days later.
All the pipe replacement work was done.
“Hoo...”
Go Gwangsoo, drenched in sweat, handed me a canned coffee.
“If not for you, Executive Director, we never would’ve met the schedule. You’re not just a tank monster, you’re a machine ghost.”
“You flatter me. It was possible because your crew was skilled.”
I calmly cracked open the coffee.
“Ha ha, even if it’s empty talk, I appreciate it.”
Go Gwangsoo looked at the repaired submarine with obvious satisfaction.
Nondestructive testing results: zero defects.
Pressure test: passed.
It had been a miraculous week.
“All right, the veins are all connected now...”
Go Gwangsoo’s eyes flashed.
“Time to get the heart beating, right? Let’s move on to sea trials.”
Sea trials.
Just hearing it made my chest tighten with anticipation.
When I nodded, Go Gwangsoo shouted into the radio.
“Prepare to start the engine!”