..Over the North Atlantic Ocean.[.51.]

A large aircraft with a peculiar appearance is sailing north of the English Peninsula...

Apart from the four engines at the root of the wing, the aircraft can no longer see any similarities with its original female aircraft: the Comet 4c passenger plane.

After World War II, Britain took the lead in developing civil jetliners and developed Comet Aircraft. In 1952, when Comet Aircraft was put into operation and became the first commercial jetliner on the world's regular flights, its technology and commerce were relatively successful. At this time, the Boeing 707 on the other side of the ocean had not yet begun test flights.

As a mature passenger aircraft, the fuselage has also begun to be modified. The first one is the Humi Anti-Submarine aircraft. It mainly installs a magnetic detector on the long tail beam at the rear of the tail wing, a search radar is installed on the nose of the machine, and an antenna with an electronic support system is installed on the vertical tail wing. The newly designed non-supercharged belly weapon cabin and system cabin has become a significant difference from the Comet passenger aircraft. The fuselage cross-section is no longer circular, but an obvious double-bubble type. The front end of the cabin is equipped with a search radar, which is larger than the nose of the passenger aircraft. Moreover, the area of ​​the vertical tail wing, the cockpit windshield, and the window have been increased.

Moreover, compared with passenger aircraft, "Hunter" uses the "Spee" engine of Rolls-Royce, which has reduced fuel consumption and increased range. Moreover, when the weight is light, it can also be turned off and only two engines can be left to increase the battery life.

Hunter's improvement is very successful, and the current aircraft is much ugly compared to Hunter. There is a sharp bag at the nose and tail of the aircraft. The new early warning radar of Marconi Elliott Avionics Systems. This strange-looking aircraft is the Hunter A.MK3 early warning aircraft that British Aerospace is experimenting with!

As the first to develop radar, the United Kingdom is naturally unscrupulous in air early warning, and has several airborne early warning projects. For example, the old "Tengganu" and "Shackleton" maritime patrol aircraft, the -3 early warning aircraft in the United States has entered the era of active service. The British found that if they no longer chased, they would be left far behind.

However, the British are no longer the empire of the sun never set. After World War II, Britain was seriously injured. Moreover, the dismissal of the SR-2 project caused serious loss of British technicians. The British sadly discovered that the way the United States had a big plate on its back was unable to achieve its technical strength.

Therefore, the British people developed the arrangement method of using two radars to arrange them in front and back of the aircraft to provide 360-degree scanning to realize their own early warning aircraft project.

However, the military ignored these things, and the technical indicators proposed by the researchers were simply crazy.

It can not only effectively detect maritime targets, but also track low-altitude targets on land from a long distance, and maintain 400 tracking trajectories at the same time. The performance is even more advanced than -3!

"Note. The radar is turned on and ready to enter the predetermined airspace test." In the supercharged chamber in the middle of the early warning aircraft, the project leader, John of British Aerospace.

Although this large passenger plane is very spacious when arranging passengers, the early warning planes now arranged have added a large amount of equipment. Even the arrangement of the radar operating table has become tense. On the side of the necessary aisle, five large monitors are displaying data, and two air combat commanders and two equipment maintenance personnel are already crowded.

And in the small space, there are not even enough beds to accommodate shift changers. They can only sleep on the three-story hot shop like the Navy.

Now, the engineers of the early warning aircraft project are sitting in the supercharged chamber. (In fact, this kind of experiment has certain dangers. A San once developed his own early warning aircraft, but it crashed, resulting in the death of all the electronic experts above, and the early warning aircraft project was terminated.)

With John's words, several operators began to turn the switches on the console in sequence, a row of indicator lights lit up one after another, and the radar waveguide and other components were charged and preheated.

sp; The 4080m electronic computer is started, ready to calculate the data that flows like a tide.

Finally, an engineer on the main console pushed the operating lever up.

Suddenly, the two large S-band pulse Doppler radars in the front and tail radar cover of the early warning aircraft began to emit powerful electronic signals. The universal joint at the bottom of the radar began to rotate, and the radar officially started working!

Radio waves passed through the radome and shot into the surrounding airspace.

At the same time, the screen on the console began to show light spots, those were several targets in the air and ships on the sea.

“The radar is working properly.”

"Data tracking is normal."

“The computer is working fine.”

One by one, he jumped out of the mouth of the operating engineer. John knew that it was normal now, but it was only temporary.

“Continue to follow.”

The plane headed east and continued to fly over England.

When I entered the land, there were more targets on the radar screen. The early warning aircraft scanned the sea surface and was affected by very little clutter. However, when I arrived above the ground, there were more clutter.

sp; The 4080m electronic computer feels that the data to be processed has increased significantly. The pulsed Doppler radar uses the different radial velocities of the target and the interfering object relative to the radar, and the echo signal also has different Doppler frequencies. The target's Doppler frequency spectrum line can be selected by frequency domain filtering method to filter out the spectral line of the interfering clutter, so that the radar can separate and detect the target signal from the strong clutter.

The larger the area of ​​radar detection and the more complex the terrain on the ground, the more echo signals it needs to be processed. In particular, even the signals of many fast-moving cars on the ground are not filtered out, and the data begins to increase surprisingly.

The British side proposed to establish 400 stable tracking trajectories, but this kind of computer only has 1m of memory, and even if it is expanded, it can only add 1.4m to the outside.

sp;4080m electronic computer started full load work.

“The amount of data has increased significantly.”

"Two hundred tracks have been tracked."

"The computer is working at full speed."

"Data overloaded, twenty tracking tracks that have been established have been lost."

"The system has started to overheat..."

Hearing the latter, John showed disappointment on his face, and the nightmare began again. Although the measures were improved, these problems were not ruled out.

The platform of hunting fans is at most 90 tons. How to deal with the problem of heat dissipation after so many electronic devices is stuffed into it, which makes engineers scratch their heads.

Nowadays, the heat dissipation often uses fuel. The fuel circulates and flows in the body, which is equivalent to the refrigerant of the air conditioner, absorbing the heat released by the task electronic system and radar when working at full load and bringing it to the outside of the body to be lost. To ensure that it can work completely normally, the onboard fuel tank must be at least 50% full. However, as the flight progresses, the fuel in the aircraft will gradually be consumed, and now the electronic system is working at full speed, the problem of heat dissipation becomes even more serious.

(This heat dissipation method is the most common. For example, the Concorde supersonic passenger aircraft has a higher temperature due to its high speed and friction with the air. It uses fuel circulation and takes away heat. Modern F-35b also faces similar thermal management difficulties. Due to the increase in the weight of the aircraft, the fuel reserves during vertical landing are forced to decrease, resulting in insufficient oil in the fuel system to absorb the waste heat released by the electronic system. If the ambient temperature is high, the aircraft electronic system will not work properly.)

John shook his head and began to repeat the process again. In fact, if the technology required by the Air Force is not so strict, as long as the computer does not process so much data, for example, for targets that are too low-speed, they are all removed as clutter filters, then the electronic system will not process so much data, and will not exceed the loading work, causing a sharp increase in heat.

However, this is impossible. If the Air Force wants to make the hunting fans perform more than -3, it is too overestimating its R&D capabilities.

Now, the Ministry of Defense can no longer provide extra funds to continue to maintain the research and development of this project. John has heard a lot of news. At the top, the call for cutting off this project is getting louder and louder. The risk of buying ready-made early warning aircraft from the United States is very small.

John has been working on this project for several years, and he really doesn't want the project to die, but the current situation seems to be very unoptimistic.

"The computer is about to crash," said an engineer.

Due to the limitation of computing power, the computer cannot maintain the established tracking trajectory, that is, if the target is lost, the target that has been successfully tracked will be re-tracked as a new target, further increasing the pressure on the computer's computing power, causing a vicious cycle. Now, the computer system is about to collapse.

However, this time, the computer did not crash because, next, all the radar signals suddenly disappeared.

All the light spots on the screen disappeared, the data that the computer needs to process disappeared, and the initial state was restored. I was so busy that I used my brain too much, and now it's time to rest!

"The traveling wave tube is burning." Although the rear cabinet cabin is a non-pressurized chamber, its current height has dropped below three thousand meters. The engineer went to the cabinet cabin to check it and came back and said to John.

Traveling wave tubes are the most important electronic component of radar that generates electronic signals. If this thing is broken, it can only be replaced on the ground. Moreover, due to design problems, it will take at least five hours to replace this component.

"Go back to the base." John said, this experiment ended in failure again, and the early warning machine of the hunter always couldn't work stably!

All the engineers in the cabin were in a low mood. If they had not completed those unrealistic indicators, their early warning aircraft would have entered active service now! To be continued...
Chapter completed!