397: Chapter 396 Chen Yun

As for what the lavish gift was, General Zheng didn't say, and Zheng Yi didn't ask.

However, after meeting with her father, the USB drive she brought never appeared again, and her father hastily summoned an orderly and left with the fine brew he never could bear to drink himself.

Without thinking too much—and indeed, she couldn't afford to—Zheng Yi shook her head slightly and prepared to leave the Defense Department. Just as she turned around, she saw a beautiful figure, also dressed in a military uniform, rushing straight toward her.

Zheng Yi hesitated for a moment, then stood her ground, waiting quietly for the travel-worn figure to reach her.

As the person drew near, she braked, nearly colliding with Zheng Yi. She straightened her clothes in a somewhat disheveled manner, flashed an embarrassed smile at Zheng Yi, and stared at her with wide, watery eyes without blinking: "Xiao Yi, I heard you just got back from Hanzhong City?"

Zheng Yi nodded helplessly: "Just got back."

The person grabbed Zheng Yi's hand and asked hurriedly: "Did you see my sister? Is she alright?"

"Calm down."

Zheng Yi's cheek twitched, and she comforted her: "Chen Xin is doing very well, and your Chen Group is doing just fine too."

"That's good, that's good."

The woman patted her chest, and the resulting bounce made Zheng Yi worry that something might fall out.

The woman huffed: "If anything really happened to my sister, I would sever the father-daughter relationship with that old man!"

Zheng Yi said indifferently: "This is the fifteenth time you've said that in the last three months."

"Is that so?"

The woman paused slightly, then said: "Don't worry about the details. The main thing is that my sister is fine. If I didn't have tasks on hand, I would have flown back to bring her here."

As she spoke, the woman looked at Zheng Yi again, her voice changing instantly: "Ah Yi, you're just the best. What would I do without you?"

Goosebumps broke out all over Zheng Yi's body.

"Stop, cut it out."

Zheng Yi said sternly: "Chen Yun, please pull yourself together. If you keep acting like this, I'm leaving right now!"

"Tch, boring."

The woman named Chen Yun curled her lip and dropped her coquettish expression, but still said: "Big Miss Zheng Yi, how should I repay you? How about when I can get out, I treat you to some spicy food on the street?"

"Not going."

Zheng Yi shook her head: "I have an urgent mission upon returning this time, and I have to leave immediately."

Chen Yun's face fell, and she said speechlessly: "Leaving again?"

Then, as if thinking of something, she waved her hand dismissively: "Go, go, go find the great hero in your heart. He's injured now, so it's the perfect time for you to take care of him every day."

"Don't talk nonsense."

Zheng Yi glared at her.

Chen Yun's eyes were full of playfulness, but she knew her limits. Seeing that Zheng Yi didn't want to take the bait, she stopped teasing her good friend and sighed: "Sometimes I really envy you guys who can go on field missions. Unlike us, it's just the lab, the lab, doing experiments, doing experiments. It's so annoying."

Zheng Yi was a bit surprised: "Very busy these past two days?"

"Busy, yes."

Chen Yun nodded vigorously and muttered: "I don't know which bastard, trash, or son of a bitch provided those old geezers with an Electromagnetic Rifle. It's made those old guys act like they've gone crazy, tossing us around all day. No holidays, no rest. Even me coming out to see you today was done by sneaking out."

Chen Yun looked at Zheng Yi, whose expression was a bit strange, and frowned: "Don't you dare doubt it. That is truly the most powerful Electromagnetic Rifle I have ever seen. We completely fail to understand the principles inside it."

"You don't understand it?"

Zheng Yi became interested and asked: "Is there something different about it?"

"There are too many differences."

Chen Yun shook her head and said: "Do you know what a typical Electromagnetic Rifle is like?"

Zheng Yi shook her head slightly; she wasn't a technician.

"Did you ever play with a magnet-pushed toy car when you were little? You know, the kind where you put a magnet on a small car and use another magnet to push it from behind?"

"No."

Zheng Yi shook her head: "But I understand what you mean."

"Your childhood was truly miserable if you never played with that."

Chen Yun looked at Zheng Yi with some sympathy.

Zheng Yi was slightly speechless. Seriously, what kind of girl plays with these things when she's little? Isn't it all about playing house and dolls? Using magnets to push magnets? Apart from the science and engineering genius in front of her, she had never seen any other girl around her play with that.

"A magnet-pushed car uses the principle of like poles repelling. Correspondingly, we can also place a magnet in front of the car and use the principle of opposite poles attracting to pull the car forward. I discovered this phenomenon when I was six, and I wondered: if I put a magnet in front and a magnet in back, would the car go faster?"

Chen Yun looked smug: "So I glued two magnets to the front and back of the car, passed a long stick through the roof of the car, and then stuck the two magnets to the ends of the stick according to the principles of like poles repelling and opposite poles attracting, and then..."

"Did the car move?"

Zheng Yi asked.

"How could it?"

Chen Yun looked at Zheng Yi with an expression like she was looking at an idiot: "What use is a force that doesn't do work on the outside? The car naturally stayed in place."

Looking at Chen Yun's matter-of-fact expression, Zheng Yi felt a slight headache coming on.

"I'm just telling you that magnets can repel with like poles and attract with opposite poles. This principle can also be applied to an Electromagnetic Rifle."

Chen Yun continued to explain: "And according to the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction, when electricity passes through coils arranged in a certain way, it generates a magnetic field. The direction of the magnetic field is determined by the direction of the current. Based on this principle, we can wrap multiple sets of coils with conductive metal wire around a non-magnetic tubular object, like this..."

Chen Yun casually drew a diagram on the ground, with sets of coils surrounding a tubular object, looking very clear and understandable.

"In this way, we have formed a launch tube covered with multiple electromagnets on the outside, but there is one problem with this."

Chen Yun pointed to two adjacent sets of coils.

"It's still the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction. If we power all these electromagnets at the same time, their magnetic field ranges will overlap. Part of the magnetic field will invade the metal wires of other coils and generate current. This will not only affect the operation of other magnets, but also cause the magnetic field strength to drop, which manifests as a decrease in magnetic force. What's worse is that if the power is not cut off, when the bullet advances to the next position, the magnetic field generated by the first coil will produce a reverse attraction, and the bullet will not only fail to accelerate, but actually decelerate."

"To solve this problem..."

Chen Yun drew a few wires out in the diagram and added a device that Zheng Yi couldn't understand.

"We added a controller to this set of coils. Its main function is to switch the circuit. For example, when t is 1, we turn on the power to the first set of coils, and it attracts the bullet to position one. When t is 2, we turn on the power to the next set of coils while cutting off the power to the first set. The bullet is then further attracted to position two, and so on."

Chen Yun's eyes were sparkling: "The bullet is launched."

Zheng Yi looked at the drawing on the ground and nodded slightly: "It's not hard to understand."

"The principle is naturally very simple."

Chen Yun rolled her eyes: "What stumps us is never the principle, but the practical operation, the practical operation!"

"Is it that hard?"

Zheng Yi frowned.

"Is—it—that—hard?"

Chen Yun drawled, sounding a bit frantic: "I really hate talking to you tech-illiterate people. It's so infuriating!"

She pointed to the drawing on the ground: "Do you know how much hair we lost and how many brain cells we killed just to get this thing up to the firing level of a standard pistol?"

"Suppose a 5.56 mm bullet is fired from a barrel the same length as a Type 95 rifle; its acceleration time is only 0.001 seconds. To reach the same kinetic energy level of 1000 joules as a rifle, the instantaneous power required is one million watts. Do you know what that means?"

Chen Yun looked at Zheng Yi and said word by word: "It means you have to use your power bank to power five hundred of your household induction cookers at full power in an instant!"