“Only someone crazy enough to close in on a P-8A from sixty kilometers away deserves to fly this aircraft.”
Air Force ace Lin Xiao is recruited for the “Project Dawn” program: testing the world’s first two-seat J-20S stealth fighter. One manned aircraft and four stealth drones will form a “1+4” combat unit.
His back-seat partner is Su Ran, transferred from an electronic warfare brigade. She’s never flown a fighter before, and she threw up the first time she sat in a simulator.
“Seventy-five percent washout rate.”
“We might both get cut, or... we might both make it.”
From the Gobi Desert to the South China Sea, they argue in the simulator and entrust each other with their lives during a single-engine failure emergency. When a B-21 approaches their airspace, and a sixth-generation F-47 appears over Guam...
She cracks the enemy’s data link with her algorithms, while he flies straight into the opponent’s path.
“I used to think aerial combat was about who fired first. Now I know it’s about who makes the other side afraid to take off.”
Dawn must break. Because wherever they are, that is where it begins.
This novel is wrapped in a tough mechanical shell with a delicate and touching emotional core and technical ethical thinking. The novel successfully created Lin Xiao and Su Ran, the golden couple of "front cabin and back cabin". Their arc of growth from estrangement to life and death interdependence gave the cold equipment a fiery temperature. What's even more rare is that the work deeply explores the cutting-edge proposition of the boundary of AI autonomy. Through plots such as drones losing control and electronic deception, it dialectically puts forward the combat principle of "AI is responsible for 'fast' and humans are responsible for 'right'". This is not only a novel about the iteration of weapons, but also a profound hymn to the relationship between man and machine, and to the responsibility and judgment of soldiers. It allows readers to feel the passion of air combat while also thinking deeply about the value of "people" in future wars.
This short story is based on solid military professional knowledge and provides a rigorous and rich description of advanced equipment such as the J-20S and Attack-11 as well as air combat tactics, creating a convincing future battlefield. The work is not only about technical presentation, but also focuses on the tempering and growth of characters such as Lin Xiao and Su Ran in the "Dawn Project". The running-in, trust and boundary exploration between people and AI are throughout, and the arcs of the characters are real and moving. The novel has a clear structure and advances step by step from experimental demonstration to actual combat testing. It vividly shows the process of our army's new combat force from concept to maturity. It has both a hard-core sense of science and technology and a passionate feeling for family and country.
So far, the writing is pretty good.
This book is very nice