Rebirth of the 1980s: The Military Industry Empire

"Old Lin, is it not possible for our air force planes to conduct rehearsals over the capital in advance?" Qin Yang asked.

"That's for sure," Old Lin said. "Except for the day of the parade, the skies over the capital must be clear at all other times. Our fighter jets can fly outside the capital, but they absolutely cannot fly over the capital. If they do, they'll be waiting for an investigation when they land."

The ground troops for the parade train in the parade village. Before the official parade, they can also rehearse once in the square. After all, so much equipment needs to be rehearsed in advance to be properly arranged. What street to place it on before the parade, how to assemble on the day of the parade, how to disperse after the parade—all this is known after rehearsal. At the same time, running through the process with personnel and equipment ensures the smooth execution on the day.

However, the planes in the sky don't have this opportunity. They can only fly over on the day of the parade. They can't fly at other times, or there will be big problems.

Usually, the air force trains outside the capital, and patrols are also conducted outside. They absolutely cannot fly inside. Even passenger planes land at airports outside the city. No aircraft's route can fly over the center of the capital.

After answering these questions, Old Lin suddenly thought of something: "President Qin, do you have a premonition that the aerial conditions on the day of our parade will exceed our takeoff and landing conditions?"

If it were someone else, they'd be considered a semi-immortal, after all, there are still several months to go. Nowadays, it's not easy for weather forecasts to accurately predict tomorrow and the day after. After all, this requires powerful computer technology to support it.

This situation continued until March 1988. In order to achieve medium-term weather forecasting, the meteorological department signed a contract with the National University of Defense Technology to develop the "Galaxy-II" supercomputer with a computing speed of 1 billion operations per second. By 1992, this computer was successfully developed, finally increasing the weather forecast range from two days to ten days, and the weather forecast within a week was very accurate.

Supercomputers have a wide range of uses, but they were monopolized by the West. The East broke through this barrier, and later, on the Galaxy 3 computer, it even surpassed and reached the world's top level. After that, on the road of supercomputing, the East has always been in the leading position.

But that's a matter for the future. Now, there's no such opportunity.

"I just think that this historically significant parade cannot have any accidents," Qin Yang said. "We need to consider all kinds of situations. If the weather conditions are bad, how can we ensure the safety of the aerial flight formation?"

"President Qin, how bad do you mean by bad weather conditions?" Old Lin asked.

"Foggy weather, the kind that makes it impossible to take off and land at all."

Everyone fell silent.

"President Qin, what do you say we should do?" Old Lin continued to ask, he knew that Qin Yang must have a solution.

"Use our early warning aircraft. We need to equip all the aircraft participating in the parade with a data link system."

Looking at the early warning aircraft of the old Maozi (Russians) and the United States, you can find a very strange phenomenon: the old Maozi's A-50 early warning aircraft can only guide a dozen fighter jets in air combat at the same time, while the American E-3 early warning aircraft can guide hundreds of them.

What's going on? Is the old Maozi's electronic technology behind?

Of course, it's because the electronic technology is behind. The old Maozi's early warning aircraft uses voice communication for guidance. Under normal circumstances, a radar officer can guide one fighter jet, and it's good enough. If they guide two at the same time, they may make mistakes if they try to do two things at once. As for three, don't even think about it. Therefore, the number of fighter jets that the old Maozi's early warning aircraft can guide at the same time completely depends on the number of control consoles inside.

The United States is different. The United States' early warning aircraft uses a data link. Although there are often calling scenes in movies, in fact, under normal circumstances, you only need to call a code name and then send the data over.

The Americans pay the most attention to informatization, and Western electronic technology is also very advanced, so they began to develop various data links from the 1960s, including Link-4, Link-11, and Link-14, etc.

Among them, the Link-4 data link is a relatively old data link, mainly used to transmit non-confidential information of radio guidance commands to fighter jets. This data link uses time division multiple access and works in the UHF band at a rate of 5Kbps. This data link was designed to replace voice communication. As for the rate, the oldest dial-up modem is faster than it.

Entering the 1960s, the United States and NATO developed Link11. This data link is an important tactical data link for realizing tactical digital information exchange between naval ships, between ships and the ground, between the air and ships, and between the air force and the ground.

However, for the American military, it is most common to use their own systems. Conflicts between military services make them unwilling to unite. The data link has slow transmission rates, poor networking capabilities, etc. Therefore, for joint operations, the Americans began to develop the Link-16 data link project in the mid-1970s. This project has been used until the end. It can be used jointly by multiple services, and can communicate, navigate, and provide ten times the capacity, anti-interference, and high confidentiality performance, becoming a powerful support for the US military's information warfare.

Link16 data link technology is advanced, using the TDMA method. There is no center in the topology, so there is no need to worry about losing contact if a certain node is knocked out. At the same time, frequency hopping is also used to improve confidentiality and has been used until later generations.

As for the East, the first data link system had to wait until 1987, and it was first used on the Navy's 051G missile destroyer, code-named HN-900 tactical data link system, but it could only reach the early level of the US military. It was not until the new century that, with the rapid development of electronic technology, the East's military data links rapidly developed, and airborne 480 series data links, TJN-905 type data links, 906 type broadband high-speed data links, naval integrated data links, JIDS tri-service joint information distribution system, etc. appeared one after another.

For example, at the 2014 Zhuhai Air Show, a new generation of DTS-03 tactical data link was displayed, which is also a foundationless self-organizing network that can dynamically network and has a high data bandwidth, reaching the world's leading level.

Now, to develop advanced data links, you will encounter the problem of electronic systems. It can be found that the development of the East's military equipment will always run into the so-called wall of electronic technology.

"Yes, since we have early warning aircraft, of course we also need data links, not only to communicate with aircraft, but also to communicate with the ground. Voice communication is too slow and prone to errors. We still need an advanced data link system. President Qin, this project is entrusted to you, no problem, right?" Old Lin asked.