Chapter 3: The Optimized Monster

I stared at the TP-C on the inspection bench.

A huge lump of metal.

But to my eyes, the thin skeleton and the bloated fat were separate.

No wonder it failed…

The pain of the past three years flashed before my eyes.

The real reason this project struggled.

It was simple.

They were too greedy.

The military demanded brute protection that could stop even North Korea’s new anti-tank missiles.

To meet that ridiculous ROC, the operational requirement, we had no choice.

Pack the interior full of the most expensive, hardest silicon carbide tiles.

The result was disastrous.

We barely met the protection requirement, but the unit cost skyrocketed.

On top of that, it was so heavy that mass-producing it as-is would collapse the tank suspension.

Chase performance and cost and weight explode.

Save money and performance falls short.

We spent the past three years pouring in 20 billion won and flailing around trying to find that impossible balance.

But then.

That blue line I could see.

Following the grain of how force flowed, I found the answer.

We had been putting effort in the wrong place.

When impact came, only about half the internal tiles absorbed it.

The rest?

They were just sitting idle.

Expensive surplus material that took no impact, provided no support, and only took up space.

I just needed to cut out this excess fat.

Remove the idle tiles.

Cost goes down.

Rearrange the remaining tiles at an angle matching the slope of the blue line.

Protection efficiency goes up.

Honestly, I still didn’t know exactly what I was seeing.

But one thing was certain.

If I followed what I saw, the TP-C could meet the military’s ROC while securing some level of cost efficiency.

And.

If I could produce results like this, I’d be in a position to speak boldly to the company.

A candidate for voluntary retirement?

A forced resignation?

I didn’t need any of that.

It would be a chance to prove myself.

If this was real, I…

“Done looking? Let’s go. Staring at it here won’t give us answers.”

While I was deep in thought, Manager Song’s urging voice reached my ears.

I spoke without taking my eyes off the TP-C.

“Manager.”

“What now.”

“Let’s run one test on this.”

Manager Song’s brow furrowed.

“What? What test? Everything’s already over. Headquarters already sent word they’re cutting the budget.”

“It won’t cost money. Just rerun the simulation once.”

I reached out and pointed to the side of the TP-C, where the ceramic tiles were layered.

“The internal design needs to change.”

“The design? Hey, can’t you see it’s packed full of tiles? How are you going to change anything in there? There’s no space.”

“We can make space.”

I traced the path of the blue line with my finger as I spoke.

“We need to give it a slope. It can’t stay vertical like now. About… this much?”

I tilted my palm to show him.

By eye, 15 degrees, no, a little more tilted than that.

“If we lay them at this angle, the effective thickness increases because of the impact angle. It’s far more efficient than taking it head-on.”

Manager Song let out a hollow laugh.

“Hey, Section Chief Baek. Do you know what you’re saying? Sloped armor? Who doesn’t know that? But if we tilt the tiles in that limited space, the number we can load drops. What about the gaps that’ll open up?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What?”

“The tiles in there now aren’t all necessary anyway. The way I see it, at least 20 percent, no, we can remove more than that.”

Manager Song’s eyes widened.

“Remove them? Hey, protection’s barely enough even packed full, and you want to take tiles out? Did you hit your head or something?”

“We can adjust the backing material instead.”

I kept going without backing down.

Because I could see it.

That thick steel plate sitting idle behind the ceramic.

“The backing support is too thick right now. They made it absurdly thick because they were afraid the ceramic would crack, but looking again, it’s clearly overdesigned.”

“……”

“We shave down the thickness and fill the space left by the removed tiles with more shock-absorbing material like rubber composite. Then even with thinner ceramic, it’ll absorb impact better.”

Manager Song’s expression changed strangely.

At first he clearly looked ready to dismiss it as nonsense.

But as I kept talking, the supervisor’s authority faded from his eyes and the engineer’s instinct raised its head.

Cut expensive tiles to save cost.

Shave the heavy backing to reduce weight.

Use slope to make up protection and maintain performance.

In theory, it was perfect.

The question was whether he could find that delicate balance.

“Are you just going by feel? Or do you have some basis?”

“I kept thinking about it while I was lying in the hospital.”

I grinned and said it.

Whether I actually kept thinking about it in the hospital didn’t matter.

The result was what counted.

And what was really important in this situation.

Was that my ability seemed to be working for sure.

To me, who’d spent fifteen years living on machines, it looked plausible and surprising.

And to Manager Song, who’d worked at the ADD, it did too.

“…Ha.”

Manager Song roughly swept his hair back.

He looked back and forth between the TP-C and me.

It was crazy talk.

To think a section chief who’d just come back from a concussion could nail an optimized design the ADD doctors had given up on, just by thinking it over.

But.

“Just give me one week.”

I drove the point home.

“One week. I’ll revise the drawings with the structure I described and bring you simulation results. Judge based on that.”

“You think you can do that?”

“Yes. If the results are a mess, I’ll pack my things without complaint. Severance, whatever, I’ll do as you say, Manager.”

Manager Song was silent for a long while.

Inside the measurement room, only the low hum of machines running filled the air.

How many minutes passed like that?

Manager Song opened his mouth with a deep sigh.

“I’ll open server access under my ID.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not opening it because I expect anything. The water’s already spilled, so I’m giving you a chance to flail one last time. Don’t complain later.”

Manager Song said it bluntly on purpose, but I could tell.

A tiny spark had been lit in his eyes.

It was my intuition as a fifteen-year engineer.

“That’s enough.”

I clenched my fist.

Manager Song’s decision had given me a real chance.

The door slid open with a rattle.

As I stepped into the office, the heavy, sunken air pressed against my skin.

After Manager Song and I disappeared, the employees seemed unable to focus on work and were gathered in small groups, whispering.

That was when.

I met eyes with Assistant Manager Jung Yoon-ho, who was peeking out from beyond the partition.

“Oh? Section Chief!”

Assistant Manager Jung brightened and jumped up from his seat.

He ran straight over to me.

“Are you okay? Manager Song suddenly took you away, so I was worried. Nothing serious happened?”

His eyes, scanning my head, were full of worry.

He was the kid I’d trained as my second since he joined.

Since the company had ended up like this, he’d always looked deflated, so it was a lively sight I hadn’t seen in a while.

I lightly tapped his shoulder.

“Nothing serious. I came to work.”

“Huh? Work?”

“Move. I’m busy.”

I passed the bewildered Assistant Manager Jung and headed to my desk.

Manager Song followed behind.

Every eye in the office turned to the two of us.

“Why’s Manager Song at your desk?”

“Something must be going on.”

Leaving the team’s murmuring behind, Manager Song tapped my keyboard.

Tap, tap.

As the admin account password was entered, the locked security folder unlocked.

“The security folder’s open.”

Manager Song stepped aside, and the original TP-C design drawings filled the monitor.

A huge 3D model combining thousands of parts.

Over those complex lines, blue trajectories only I could see overlapped dizzily.

Instead of sitting, I called over Assistant Manager Jung, who was standing blankly, still not understanding the situation.

“Assistant Manager Jung, come sit here.”

“Huh? M-me?”

“My hands are slow. Input the coordinates I call out.”

Assistant Manager Jung sat at my desk in an awkward posture.

He looked back and forth between Manager Song and me with a look of total confusion.

Manager Song crossed his arms and gestured at the monitor with his chin.

It meant do as you’re told.

“W-what should I do first?”

“Select the ceramic tile layer first. Cut 30 percent from the total count. Remove from the outer edges.”

Assistant Manager Jung’s hand hesitated.

“Thirty percent? Then the protection density…”

“Don’t argue. Delete them. Let’s see after we delete.”

At my firm voice, Assistant Manager Jung made a tearful face and moved the mouse.

The densely packed tiles on screen disappeared, leaving gaps.

From Assistant Manager Kim So-yeon, watching behind me, came a bewildered gasp.

Other team members were murmuring with expressions of disbelief.

It made sense, since we were turning a perfectly good armor plate into hole-filled cheese.

But to my eyes, it was just the normal surgical process of removing fat from an obese patient.

“Select all remaining tiles. Tilt them 15.5 degrees on the Z-axis.”

“15.5 degrees?”

“Yeah. And narrow the tile spacing so they overlap.”

Assistant Manager Jung’s hands moved busily.

The tiles that had stood stiffly vertical all tilted at once.

Like fish scales, or a tiled roof.

“Now we modify the backing material. Reduce the thickness to 15 millimeters.”

“You’re shaving five millimeters off a twenty-millimeter plate? Section Chief, are you sure this is okay?”

“Change the shape instead. The surface touching the tiles, don’t make it flat. Carve it into a sawtooth pattern.”

“S-sawtooth?”

Assistant Manager Jung looked up at me, startled.

“Section Chief, if we model this, the mesh will break. And the shape is too complex…”

“We have to. Otherwise the tiles will shift and crack.”

I pointed to a corner of the monitor.

“Here, sector three. The tile arrangement is too neat. Move it half a millimeter to the left.”

“Half a millimeter? Does that mean anything?”

“It does. Tilting the tiles changed the load points.”

I followed the points where the blue line bent slightly with my eyes as I spoke.

“Like this, when it takes impact, that corner will stab into the backing. We need to offset it slightly so the force flows.”

Assistant Manager Jung was half doubtful, but pressed by my fierce momentum, he followed the instructions.

Tap, tap, tap.

The sounds of keyboard and mouse clicks rang out, sometimes light, sometimes irritable.

About thirty minutes passed.

On screen was a new model completely different from the old TP-C, bizarre but strangely balanced.

“Whew… It’s done for now.”

As if tired from concentrating so hard, Assistant Manager Jung stretched both arms out and spoke.

I immediately ran the simple analysis tool built into the program.

It wasn’t a precise simulation, but it could immediately show trends in physical quantities.

“Let’s see the results.”

I pressed Enter.

The progress bar in the center of the screen filled quickly.

Manager Song uncrossed his arms and stepped close to the monitor.

The team members around us held their breath.

Ding.

[Analysis Complete]

The result window popped up.

The first thing I saw were the reduction numbers highlighted in red.

[Total Weight: -12.4%]

[Estimated Cost: -21.8%]

“Wow…”

Assistant Manager Kim So-yeon let out a gasp.

“Weight dropped by twelve percent? Good God.”

That was enough to give the tank’s mobility wings.

Plus a 21.8 percent cost reduction.

The composite armor package for a single tank costs hundreds of millions of won.

Saving 20 percent of that meant the company’s margin across the full production run would be astronomical.

But Manager Song’s expression still hadn’t relaxed.

The most important metric for an engineer remained.

“Protection?”

Manager Song’s voice was low.

“If we’ve made light, cheap garbage, it means nothing. Bring up the protection numbers.”

I silently clicked the effective protection efficiency tab.

A graph appeared on screen.

The efficiency curve of the old TP-C appeared as a gray dotted line, and our modified model as a blue solid line.

The gray dotted line barely crossed the baseline of 1.0.

But the blue solid line.

[Protection Efficiency: 1.15]

It had jumped well past the baseline and was trending upward.

“1.15…?”

Manager Song’s pupils shook violently.

Protection hadn’t dropped.

It had risen by 15 percent.

We reduced material and weight, and it got stronger?

His expression said he thought it was impossible.

“This… isn’t an error? Could the simple analysis have miscalculated?”

Manager Song tapped the monitor as if he couldn’t believe it.

“Even accounting for slope effect, this is too much. We took out dense steel and filled it with rubber junk, and protection comes out at 1.15? That’s physically impossible.”

“It’s possible because the structure doesn’t just block, it burns it up, Manager.”

“What?”

“The rubber composite doesn’t just absorb impact. It induces impedance mismatch between the ceramic and the backing.”

I pointed at the waveform on the graph.

“The moment a shell hits, a shockwave travels backward. But when it meets the rubber layer, the wave speed changes sharply. In the process, the shockwave scatters and shatters the ceramic even more finely.”

“……”

“In other words, it makes the penetrator spend all its kinetic energy on crushing the ceramic before it can come through. The energy consumption rate has to be much higher than brute-forcing it with thick steel plate.”

Manager Song’s mouth fell slightly open.

An intelligent design that used incoming force against the shell, making it exhaust itself.

Everyone knew it in theory, but matching that delicate mix ratio in an actual design was a truly difficult skill.

“Did you know that mix ratio when you put it in?”

Manager Song’s voice trembled.

“Just a feeling.”

I shrugged.

Packaging the answer the blue line showed me as a hunch was quite convenient.

After a little time passed like that.

Manager Song’s gaze shifted to me.

The suspicious look from before was gone, and now he was watching me with a hint of hope.

“Section Chief Baek.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s run a precise analysis on this.”

Strength entered Manager Song’s voice.

“Not the simple tool. We need to run it properly on the analysis team’s supercomputer. If these numbers are real… we can turn this around.”

He immediately pulled his phone from his pocket.

Manager Song’s eyes gleamed sharply as he pressed a speed-dial number.

“Yeah, it’s me. Put the structural analysis team leader on. Convene a meeting. Right now.”

Manager Song hung up and grinned at me.

“Let’s go. Let’s see if these numbers you made actually hold up.”