"You mean... planes and missiles... is that right?"
After hearing Li Wei's explanation, Sophia looked somewhat surprised.
"That's right. Not quite what you expected?"
"Not quite, no. Planes... I've seen those in the newspapers, but missiles?"
"Just think of them as shells that fly on their own."
"Then how are they different from shells?"
Sophia tilted her head in bewilderment, while Li Wei raised an eyebrow.
"They have greater range and more firepower, of course."
Li Wei had also studied the Empire's weaponry. Its weapons still revolved around massive ships and heavy guns, but a shell could only hold so much explosive. Or rather, you could certainly make an enormous shell, but where would you find a suitable gun barrel?
Even Verne's From the Earth to the Moon hadn't solved that problem. Instead, it opted to dig a hole in the ground, use the earth as a gun barrel, and fire the shell toward the moon. The reason was that manufacturing a barrel capable of withstanding the force required to launch such a massive shell would be no easy feat. According to Verne's calculations at the time, a cannon capable of firing a shell to the moon would need to be nearly three hundred meters long.
But in modern society, launching a rocket into space clearly didn't require a three-hundred-meter gun barrel.
In fact, the greatest obstacle to the Empire developing missiles now was its underdeveloped electronics. Back in Li Wei's time, the missiles he knew about had thermal imaging sensors, CPUs, communications and storage systems, and so on... The Empire obviously had none of those at present, and stuffing a Difference Engine into a missile wasn't an option either.
Even without those things, however, Li Wei believed that jet engines alone would make missiles unbeatable in aerial combat.
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