Stealth Drones and the Silicon Race
It had been a long time since Yoo Jae-won last visited Seattle in the Fantasy Universe. Because both the Android headquarters and the ID High Tech research institute were located there, he used to drop by frequently to check on the progress of various projects. His visits had grown rarer only after high-speed internet became widespread. Once reports, documents, and video feeds could be delivered instantly over the network, there was little need to appear in person.
The reason Yoo Jae-won had come to Seattle today after so long was to present awards. Specifically, he was here to reward the team that had designed and operated the stealth drones which had performed brilliantly in Afghanistan roughly a month earlier.
After leaving Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and riding in the waiting car toward the outskirts of the city, the newly constructed ID High Tech research facility came into view.
“We sincerely welcome you, Chairman.”
Director Andrey was waiting at the entrance and greeted Yoo Jae-won warmly.
“Director Andrey! You did excellent work in Afghanistan.”
Yoo Jae-won returned the greeting with equal warmth, praising the team’s achievements. Officially the stealth drones had been requisitioned by the U.S. military, but in reality it was Andrey’s team that had operated them directly.
“Oh, it was hardly difficult work.”
Director Andrey brushed the compliment aside as if it were nothing. In truth, neither he nor his operators had faced any real hardship. The biggest inconvenience had been the desert climate—scorching days and freezing nights—but they had never felt their lives were in danger. Compared with the harsh conditions of the old Soviet era, which were now fading from memory, this had been far more comfortable. Above all, the greatest satisfaction came from being able to build whatever they wanted without restraint.
Andrey’s own specialty, nuclear research, was advancing through a major project, and his colleagues who specialized in aircraft and jet engines felt the same. Only a few years earlier they had wondered whether making toy-like drones could ever become a serious business, yet when all their accumulated expertise finally produced the stealth drone, even Andrey had been genuinely surprised. Most of all, he had been impressed by the suggestions Yoo Jae-won—whom everyone had regarded merely as a computer expert—had offered regarding stealth shaping and radar-absorbent coatings. Those ideas had delivered remarkable results, reinforcing the notion that a true genius was simply on another level.
“The auditorium is ready for the ceremony.”
Director Andrey guided Yoo Jae-won to the venue. It was a separate gymnasium-like building roughly five minutes’ walk from the main complex. While a typical gymnasium might accommodate one or two basketball courts, this facility was vast enough to hold ten. It had been built not only as an auditorium but also as a testing laboratory for various drones. On windy days it was impossible to fly drones outdoors, so the building had been constructed on a grand scale from the start. It was occasionally used for indoor events like today’s, and was sometimes opened to the public for civilian gatherings in Seattle. Because construction costs had remained reasonable despite its size, it had proven quite practical.
— Chairman Yoo Jae-won is entering. Please welcome him with applause.
When Yoo Jae-won stepped inside, thunderous applause erupted. Handing out rewards was always a pleasant task. Yoo Jae-won believed that teams which delivered outstanding results, such as the stealth-drone group, deserved compensation beyond what they might expect. The total prize money distributed among ID High Tech employees reached five million dollars, divided according to a pre-established allocation formula. The gap between the highest and lowest individual awards was roughly sixfold, yet because the differences reflected actual contributions, there were no major complaints.
After the ceremony, Yoo Jae-won summoned the stealth-drone team separately. The meeting took place in a secure hangar far from the indoor drone test facility. Inside the modest hangar, large enough for a propeller-driven light aircraft, stood the very stealth drone that had freely roamed the skies over Kabul.
Yoo Jae-won had received regular reports throughout the drone’s design phase and had personally witnessed its first flight. The machine was therefore not unfamiliar to him. Still, seeing it now—after it had actually operated in Afghanistan—felt different from watching the test flights.
The fuselage measured 7.4 meters in length with a 4.2-meter wingspan, forming a sharp wedge shape. Equipped with two miniature turbojet engines, it resembled a miniature fighter jet. Yet it carried no missiles and, most importantly, had no cockpit for a pilot. Instead, the space was filled with three mobile-application processors, additional electronics, communication systems, various sensors, and flight-control equipment.
“If we were to build another stealth drone, how long would it take?”
“More than three months,” answered the chief engineer of the stealth-drone team.
A former Boeing fighter-aircraft engineer who had joined ID High Tech after leaving the company, he possessed exceptional hands-on skill, much like Lightning Bolt’s President Bolt. It would not be an exaggeration to say that both the airframe and the intricate internal mechanisms of the stealth drone had been completed under his hands.
“Three months. That would mean thirty months for ten units, correct?”
“No, it wouldn’t take that long. If parts are readily available and we secure sufficient workspace, we can assemble multiple units sequentially. Twenty months should be enough.”
Ten units in twenty months. That was an acceptable figure.
“The Special Operations commander seems completely taken with the stealth drone’s performance. Thanks to that, the U.S. military is very positive about adopting it. They plan to operate ten units on a trial basis and will likely order more depending on the test results.”
According to the letter of intent from the Pentagon, they intended to purchase ten sets at thirty million dollars each. Further orders would be decided after frontline commanders submitted operational evaluations.
“You mean we have to build ten more?”
The stealth-drone team looked visibly startled at Yoo Jae-won’s explanation. The chief engineer’s expression was particularly memorable.
“Er, then what happens to the next project?”
The concern was understandable. The stealth drone had never been the drone division’s main project. ID High Tech’s drone division was currently pursuing two major lines of business. One was the small quadcopter drone, already commercialized and rapidly spreading through film and broadcasting. Aerial photography, once a deliberate undertaking, was quickly becoming commonplace. The other was a large drone powered by the same turbojet engines as the stealth drone—intended, of course, for military use.
“The next project will proceed exactly as originally planned.”
The stealth drone was merely a transitional model on the path toward an unmanned combat drone. That was the ultimate goal.
“An unmanned combat aircraft surpassing the F-22 Raptor will definitely come from ID High Tech.”
The F-22 was classified as an air-superiority fighter, designed with the ambitious aim of dominating every aerial engagement. Lockheed Martin had realized that vision. It was certain that no fighter would ever surpass the F-22 in the foreseeable future. Yet the F-22’s greatest weakness lay in its reliance on a human pilot. Every recorded F-22 crash had been caused by pilot error. Consequently, the era of unmanned combat aircraft was expected to begin around 2030. Thanks to Yoo Jae-won’s regression and the resulting acceleration of technology, he believed that era would arrive a full decade earlier—by 2020.
His plan was to dominate the entire unmanned-aircraft market, and he was steadily executing that strategy.
“The drone division will also receive a large-scale personnel increase. We’ll establish a separate production plant. Please prepare a proposal covering everything from site acquisition to staffing.”
The drone-division chief looked visibly relieved. Building ten stealth drones while simultaneously developing an unmanned combat aircraft would have been physically impossible. With a dedicated factory and additional research staff, the workload could be managed.
“Ah, for the factory, somewhere with lower labor costs like Korea would be preferable.”
“Understood.”
Yoo Jae-won deliberately mentioned Korea. One of the reasons he had launched the unmanned-combat-aircraft program was to strengthen South Korea’s otherwise inadequate military capabilities. With an oversized army, Korea was hopelessly outmatched in naval and air power by its neighbors. The quickest way to close that gap would have been to acquire the F-22, but the aircraft’s technology was so highly classified that even close allies like Israel were denied access. Yoo Jae-won therefore intended to change the rules entirely by rapidly deploying unmanned combat aircraft.
To make the system exportable to Korea, it was essential to avoid applying technologies restricted like those on the F-22 and instead produce a version that could be used without complications. Some might argue there was no reason to choose unmanned aircraft when superior F-22s existed, yet the absence of pilots and the ability to field them in overwhelming numbers were advantages that could not be ignored. The F-22 had been so expensive that even the United States hesitated to mass-produce it, and the potential loss of pilots in accidents, however rare, remained a real risk. In contrast, an unmanned fighter of adequate performance that could be produced in enormous quantities offered a decisive edge.
Afterward, Yoo Jae-won spent several hours with the drone team discussing business expansion and the development of the next-generation unmanned combat aircraft. The discussion would not conclude in a single afternoon. From the outset he had planned to spend roughly three days in Seattle before returning to his home in San Francisco.
That schedule changed when he received a call from Kevin Johnson, president of Android.
— Chairman, samples of the new CPUs and motherboards from Intel and AMD have arrived.
Conveniently, Android had business right next to the ID High Tech research institute. For Yoo Jae-won, who would leap out of bed at the mention of a new computer system, rescheduling was only natural.
Android was currently developing the successor to Android ME, scheduled for release in 2003. The original plan had called for a 2002 launch, but the major update had been postponed to accommodate the new CPUs and GPUs fabricated on the 120-nanometer process. As a matter of routine, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and ATI had each sent samples of their upcoming products.
For a computer to achieve peak performance, the integration of operating system and hardware was paramount. While the focus of optimization depended on the intended use, an operating system could never transcend its physical hardware foundation, and no matter how impressive the hardware, it could not function properly without software support.
Several operating systems existed for such computers. Traditional Unix still held a solid position in the enterprise sector, while Linux was rapidly capturing the low-cost server market. Of course, the Android operating system maintained a firm grip on PCs, professionals, and corporations. Among these segments, PCs remained by far the largest. Modern PCs were already encroaching on high-performance computing and large-scale data-center markets through cloud systems, making their share overwhelmingly dominant.
Naturally, hardware manufacturers wanted their products optimized for the Android operating system. Intel and AMD in particular were locked in a fierce contest over the upcoming 2003 Android release. Intel, which had dominated gaming with high clock speeds, suffered the humiliation of being outperformed by AMD’s dual-core offerings in graphics, animation, music composition, and other professional applications. AMD’s properly implemented dual-core architecture delivered superior performance in workloads that benefited from parallel processing. Yet Intel still held the edge in gaming, and both companies were sharpening their blades for the next round.
Intel had also produced a true dual-core processor, adding Hyper-Threading from the previous generation to create a 2-core, 4-thread product. AMD had further strengthened its existing dual-core design and upgraded its traditional 3DNow! multimedia instruction set while also improving clock speeds that had previously lagged behind Intel. The 120-nanometer process provided both companies with the performance they craved.
Of course, their secret weapons were not omitted. And it was precisely at this point that the two companies’ products diverged most clearly: memory-controller technology. Intel had chosen Rambus DRAM, while AMD had adopted the DDR2 standard.
“Excuse me? Rambus DRAM?”
That was Yoo Jae-won’s reaction when President Kevin Johnson introduced Intel’s trump card. His response was understandably negative. After all, the Rambus DRAM Intel had selected was one of the most spectacularly failed technologies in history.