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The mech's assembly did not go quickly.
Even with an enormous technical workforce, each technician possessing rich assembly experience and superb skill, Crimson Typhoon's first lower leg took nearly a month to assemble.
Most of the components had undergone preliminary assembly at the factories, becoming basic units. On-site, it seemed like all they needed to do was assemble these pre-assembled units into a larger whole. But it wasn't that simple.
To reach the sealing standard for seven thousand meters underwater, the demands on the mech's assembly precision were extreme.
Take the Pioneer submersible as an example. The assembly precision required on its mating surfaces was measured in units called silk, where one silk equaled one hundredth of a millimeter. That precision had to be controlled to within a few silk, and the precision on the window-glass contact surfaces had to reach within 0.2 silk.
That standard, applied to the mech, was not much different.
Although compared to the Pioneer the mech was sturdier and used more advanced seal technology, the requirements on assembly precision were still strict.
And the mech's seal system was more troublesome. The mech's interior had multiple layers of waterproof sealing. If the outer seal layer was breached, the inner layer could take over, ensuring that even if the mech was damaged underwater, it wouldn't immediately flood and collapse.
Crimson Typhoon's single lower leg alone had three seal layers, from inside to outside, from bottom to top. Each layer's sealing carried strict assembly-precision requirements, and some areas could only be assembled entirely by hand.
Standards this strict left the on-site assembly team afraid to so much as breathe too hard, terrified that a breath might cause a deviation during their work.
For this situation, neither Ryan nor Logan had a solution. They could only encourage the technicians to keep at it.
At this moment, Ryan was in the drift lab.
Beside the lab's sync apparatus were the three triplet sets, all undergoing sync experiments.
The lab's sync apparatus had increased to three units, two of which had recently been delivered alongside Crimson Typhoon's components.
Now they needed to select Crimson Typhoon's first batch of pilots. Connection strength and duration were key evaluation criteria.
Reeves was presiding over this selection.
"How are their results right now?" Ryan looked at the nine people in the sync, a staff member standing beside each of them.
Unlike the silent environment of past experiments, the sync experiments now incorporated interference factors. During the experiment, the staff would disrupt the triplets. Maybe playing music, maybe shaking them hard, maybe releasing some foul smell, even placing snakes beside them.
In short, their training was entirely at a military level.
Reeves pulled up the three triplet sets' past performance records for him. A rough glance showed their results were close to one another.
In sync without pressure but with interference, their current sustained duration had reached ten hours, and for ninety percent of that time, the strength held at one hundred percent.
Seeing this data, Ryan was quite satisfied. "Results like these on the mech, maintaining over an hour and a half shouldn't be a problem."
"I think so too."
The triplets' sync experiments concluded here, but they still had to undergo a mechanical connection experiment in Storm Bay, with the final selection based on combined results.
After leaving the drift lab, Ryan walked ahead to Storm Bay.
Here, Frank Cabrera and the others were preparing for the upcoming trial of the triplets.
Ryan called out Cabrera and the lead of another research topic to confirm the progress of their work.
"We've designed the mech's liquid neural connection pathway according to the requirements, and based on the latest data calculations, within the liquid neural pathway, the entire mech's neural pressure can be maintained within one hundred and twenty pressure units," Cabrera said.
"One hundred and twenty units. That's twelve times Scrapper's, about what we expected." Ryan was satisfied with their current progress.
The lead of the other research topic spoke up too. He was responsible for the mech's operating system.
"The operating system is currently written to specification. In yesterday's computer simulation run, no problems were found."
Both of them showed Ryan their recent experimental data.
Ryan didn't dare grow careless. He sat down and confirmed it with them bit by bit. These two research topics were vital components of the mech's operation. If they made an error, the entire mech wouldn't move, and the problem would be enormous.
The data verification took two days before Ryan finished going through all the experimental data with them, confirming there were no anomalies. He also ran the experiments and calculations again, arriving at the same result as the previous time.
Only then did he set his mind at ease and turn his attention elsewhere.
The transport platform in the base was now fully installed.
The transport platform, modified from a space mobile launch platform, now looked a little like a colossal tank.
The platform stood about five meters tall, half its height hidden within the transport corridor. It was thirty-five meters wide left to right, only five meters less than the width of the base's main door.
Its entire body was built from various high-strength steels. What you could see on the surface was steel and nothing but steel. Its own weight alone reached two thousand five hundred tons. Its maximum mobile transport capacity could reach two thousand tons, and its static load capacity was over five thousand tons. Carrying Crimson Typhoon's launches and landings was no problem at all.
The platform's design perfectly realized Ryan's requirements, and the entire process from design modification to completed manufacture had moved at an astonishing speed.
Its structure was relatively uncomplicated, composed mainly of a rigid load-bearing structure, a static hydraulic load-bearing system, and a locomotion system.
Stairs on both sides of the platform led straight to the surface, and inside there was a control room responsible for controlling the platform's movement. At full load, its movement speed was projected to reach twenty meters per minute.
Crimson Typhoon's already-assembled left foot was now fixed onto the transport platform. Using foot clamps specially designed into the platform's surface, the mech's sole could lock firmly together with the platform.
On the transport platform, many large scaffolds had already been erected, with technicians still working on follow-up construction or welding on the left foot.
Meanwhile, in the assembly zone, work on the right foot was advancing rapidly.
After successfully assembling the left foot, the technical crew had quickly absorbed the lessons and improved each process, applying them to the right foot's assembly. This greatly accelerated the right foot's assembly, which was completed in just twenty days.
Next came Crimson Typhoon's hips and waist. This section was entirely large components, and it was the core area of the whole mech, so it could only be assembled by fully mechanical means.
From this step on, the gantry cranes in the assembly zone never stopped. To speed up assembly, Logan even dispatched several hoisting vehicles to the site, responsible for hoisting the smaller components.
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