Chapter 310: Kordula’s First

Tech Center #2 was still lit up when Hans walked over.

All the staff remained, though none looked surprised when they saw him.

Kordula sat at the main console with three screens open in front of her. One showed a pump assembly Hans recognized from the PCL-2 reports. The other two were drawings he didn’t recognize at all.

She didn’t look up until he was halfway across the room.

"Commander."

"You were supposed to rest."

"I sat down for most of it."

Hans pulled a chair from the next console and sat, carefully. The chair held.

"Your request, I’m intrigued."

Kordula looked at him for a moment before turning one of the screens around.

"You’re wondering why I picked this one."

"Pretty much." Hans leaned toward the display. "I’m not asking you to change it. I just want to know why this was the first thing you went for."

Kordula’s brows relaxed slightly.

"That’s a better question."

She brought another diagram forward. Hans recognized the reactor ring in the middle, but most of the lines surrounding it meant nothing to him.

"The reactor at PCL-2 wasn’t failing because the reactor itself was unstable. The core was fine. Containment was fine. What was failing were the pumps, the switching bank, parts of the transmission system, and the tritium breeding system. But forget the last one for now."

She enlarged several loops surrounding the reactor.

"Most advanced machinery doesn’t have a problem producing heat. It has a problem getting rid of it."

Hans looked at the diagram again.

"That’s what you mean by Thermal Debt?"

"In a less accurate way, yes."

Kordula opened another file.

This one showed a graph. One line climbed sharply, remained high for several seconds, then dropped. Another line underneath kept rising long after the first one fell.

"Say you have something that draws an enormous amount of power for ten seconds. The machine survives those ten seconds."

She tapped the second line.

"But all the heat it produced doesn’t disappear because you stopped using it. Now the rest of the system spends the next several minutes, or hours depending on what it is, trying to dump that heat somewhere else."

"And it won’t continue unless that heat is dumped somewhere else, huh?"

"That’s Thermal Debt." She changed the display again.

"Better heat exchangers. Better working fluids. Better control over where heat moves. Better phase-change materials. Better pumps. Better insulation where you don’t want heat moving, and better conductors where you do."

A few more diagrams appeared around the first. Some came from PCL-2. Others were marked with references from Silverpeak and the Nuclear Power Plant.

"They don’t look particularly exciting if you take them one at a time," Kordula continued. "But a lot of the things you’re going to build eventually depend on how well they handle heat."

She pointed at the NPP reference first.

"Power generation obviously. The more power you produce, the more heat you have to manage somewhere."

Then Silverpeak.

"Then we have these high-current systems, rapidly transforming equipment, heavy motors, and that heavy industrial machinery."

Another file opened.

"Your factories are no different. Neither are vehicles, aircraft or ships. Engines, electronics, bearings, actuators, batteries, weapon systems—anything that runs hard enough eventually has to get rid of heat."

Hans raised an eyebrow.

"So this makes everything better?"

"No." Kordula responded quickly. "It gives us better thermal architecture. Whether a tank, aircraft, factory or a weapon can actually use it is a different problem."

She gestured toward the diagrams.

"Suppose you eventually build a weapon that dumps a huge amount of energy into one shot. The weapon itself might survive firing once, but if the heat stays trapped in the emitter, the conductors or the surrounding structure, the second shot becomes the problem."

Hans nodded.

"So better cooling means it can fire more often."

"That’s just one of the factors. Maybe the emitter still can’t handle it. Maybe the power system becomes the next limit. Maybe the mounting deforms. Maybe the insulation fails. Better thermal management removes one bottleneck. It doesn’t magically remove all the others."

"Right."

"Or take a vehicle operating in extreme cold. Metal would contract. The seals would harden. Lubricants thicken from the cold. Its batteries lose performance. Materials that work perfectly well at normal temperatures can become brittle enough to crack under loads they normally survive."

She brought up another Pylow record.

"Thermal control isn’t just about cooling something down. Sometimes it’s about preventing one part from becoming too cold while another part is overheating."

Hans stared at the diagrams for a moment. That sounded much less like "better coolant" now.

"So you picked it because it applies to a lot of things."

Kordula folded her arms. "And I know where to start. Pylow had given me several things, and I want to try them out starting with this one."

She twirled a part of her hair. "And to get the hang of how this thing works."

Hans smiled. "Very well."

He opened the research request once more and approved it.

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[ Cryogenic Systems Architecture I ]

XBR-DAE-CRYOSYSTEMS-I

[ Research Director ]

Kordula Weissenberg

[ Research Status ]

Active

[ Project Type ]

Recovered Architecture Research

[ Project Budget Reserve ]

Not Allocated

[ Please allocate Project Budget Reserve. ]

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Another prompt followed before Hans could close the first one.

Unlike the projects Tyrus started with such as the Advanced Radar, Induction Wing, and the Infantry Weapon & Gear Upgrade, this one didn’t have a fixed price or a timer counting down beside it.

It was the same as the HELIX research he was handling now.

The System considered them Recovered Architecture Research.

Pylow had given Kordula enough information to know where to start, but not enough for the System to tell Hans how many experiments would fail before they reached the end.

The project could spend weeks reconstructing one part, discover that an assumption was wrong, repeat a simulation, build something, break it and try again. It could even stop entirely if Kordula found something the recovered records couldn’t answer.

How quickly it moved depended on what they already recovered, what they discovered along the way, and how well Kordula and the Tech Center’s researchers worked through the problems in front of them.

The Gold he put into the reserve only paid for that work.

Hans entered a number.

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[ Project Budget Reserve ]

500,000 Gold

[ Confirm Allocation? ]

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The Gold disappeared from his available balance.

It wasn’t necessarily the project’s final cost. If Kordula burned through the reserve before finishing, she would have to ask for more. If the project closed with part of it untouched, whatever remained would return to him.

Five hundred thousand was enough to let her start without Hans handing her an unlimited wallet on her first day.

"Your request has been approved, Overseer." He stood up. "It’s best for me to leave you here on your work."

Kordula stood up as well and looked at his retreating figure.

"Thank you, Commander."