The Rise of a Great Power: Starting with Hand-Building Jet Engines

At the age of sixty-eight, Lin Ran dies on the awards stage. When he opens his eyes again, it is 1991. He’s in a freshman dorm at the National University of Defense Technology, with an eighteen-year-old body and that piece-of-junk game that has been with him for twenty years in his head. He’s played it for twenty years, taking apart the compressor in an F-119, repairing the turbine blades of an AL-41F, and even assembling a variable-cycle engine from scratch, all in the game. All he has to do is close his eyes to enter that hangar. There are 287 fighter jets, neatly lined up. He can touch one and disassemble it into parts, then magnify them for inspection down to the micron level. Material grades, heat-treatment processes, tolerances and fits, control logic source code: every detail is so realistic it’s unnerving.