Chapter 294 -287:The Slipway
Seastar, the yard office, six weeks after the launch
The draughtsman was twenty-six year old and had never been to sea.
Dray had asked for a man clever than himself, but he hadn’t fully thought through what that would look like until he actually walked into his office.
Corun Falk had come up through Titanworks upon recommedation from ironbreaker.
On the fifth day, he walked in the office and laid a sheet of heavy notebook on the desk.
"Your slipway’s too short."
Dray didn’t look up from his ledger. "I know it’s too short."
"By two hundred and forty feet."
That brought Dray’s head up. "Say that again."
"Two hundred and forty feet. I measured on Monday, and again on Tuesday because I assumed I’d made an error." Corun turned the sheet toward him. "You measured off her length alone. You have to measure off her length, plus the run, plus the depth of water required where her stern goes in. Eight hundred and twenty feet. Fifty thousand tons. She doesn’t slide off a slipway, Dray. She falls off one, and the harbour has to be deep enough to catch her."
"And if it isn’t?"
"Then she touches bottom stern-first at the exact moment she’s least supported. You’ll have a broken ship in your own harbour before she’s ever had an engine in her."
Dray sat back, his chair creaking in the quiet room. "So we aren’t lengthening the old one."
"We’re cutting a new one,"
They cleared the long oak table, unrolled the general arrangement drawings, and went through her a piece at a time.
Corun worked with three pieces of chalk. Red for anything Seastar could build today. Blue for anything Elarion could manufacture elsewhere and ship in. Black for the pieces neither could manage.
By midday, most of the sheet was bare.
"Start with the red," Dray said, leaning over the timber frame.
"The hull," Corun said, tapping a red mark. "Frames, plating, outer shell. You built a frigate that came together clean, and this is the same work at four times the scale. Big doesn’t frighten me. I’ve read your build book from Northwind. Your yard is the only part of this entire operation that’s actually ready."
"That’s quite a milestone then."
"It won’t last." Corun reached for a fresh piece of chalk.
"The engines," he said, turning to the machinery spaces. "How did you power the frigate?"
"Four cores, two shafts. Twenty-eight knots on trial."
"Four hundred and ten tons on four cores." Corun was already running numbers down the margin of the notebook. "This is fifty thousand tons, and the drawings demand thirty knots. That’s not just a hundred times the ship—it’s a great deal more than a hundred times the push. Water resists more the faster you shove through it."
"How many cores do we need then?"
Corun paused, did the sum a second time, and checked his work.
"Sixty."
Dray went motionless. "Say it again."
"Sixty. Three shafts, twenty a shaft—and that’s assuming Maerath’s people lose nothing scaling the housings up, which they will. Call it sixty-eight,some extra for any extra power needed."
"Ironhold makes two cores a month."
"Two now. Four by winter. Twenty a month inside two years, according to their projections." Corun set the chalk down. "Sixty cores at twenty a month is three months of everything this territory can produce. Three months where no tank gets an engine, no aircraft gets built, and Skyforge gets nothing at all."
"And at four a month?"
"Fifteen months—which is manageable, because you don’t need them for three years. Hull first, machinery last." He picked the blue chalk back up. "But somebody in Elarion has to write down today that sixty cores belong to this hull. Otherwise, in two years they’ll all have gone into armored vehicles, and you’ll be sitting beside a finished shell with nothing to turn the shafts."
Dray reached across the table for a sheet of letterhead. "I’ll write to the duke tonight."
The main armament was next, and the arithmetic got worse.
"Eight sixteen-inch," Corun read off, pointing to the centerline. "Four twin turrets, two forward, two aft. How many sixteen-inch mountings does Elarion currently own?"
"One," Dray said. "On the headland above the channel."
"Which took how long?"
"Eleven months."
Corun drew a harsh blue line under the forward turrets: 8 × 16inch — BRAKKA.
"Then that’s one issue," Corun said. "
"He’ll get faster."
"He’ll have to." Corun rotated the drawing toward Dray. "And there’s a second turret problem nobody’s raised yet. Look where the barbettes sit. These aren’t bolted onto the deck plating. The whole trunk of them goes down through three decks to the shell rooms at the bottom of the ship. The hull gets built around holes that have to be the exact right size in the exact right place, years before the turrets that fill them even exist."
Dray studied the heavy blue circles on the deck plan. "And if a turret comes out an inch wider than its hole?"
"Then you have a fifty-thousand-ton ship and a gun that won’t go inside it, and one of the two gets cut apart with torches."
"So the hole gets built to the size," Dray said slowly, "and Brakka’s turret gets built a little less than it, and neither of us sees the other’s work until the day it’s lowered in."
"That’s the long story short. You and Master Brakka agree on a set of figures this year, and then hold to them for four years, four hundred miles apart." Corun shrugged. "If either of you ’improves’ something without telling the other, this ship never leaves the fitting-out basin."
The loading arrangements were what Corun had avoided all morning. He came back to them last, drawing a second sheet over the first—a blueprint in his own crisp hand.
"The normal turret takes ninety men," Corun said.
Dray stopped short, his teacup halfway to his mouth. "Ninety?"
"Per turret. Handlers in the magazine, more on the hoists, a crew in the working chamber, a rammer crew at the breech." Corun tapped the original sheet. "Four turrets. Three hundred and sixty men whose entire job is moving two-thousand-pound shells from the bottom of the ship to the back of a gun. Fast, standing right next to the propellant bags. When a battleship blows, that’s almost always where the fire starts."
"Or we don’t." Corun pushed his own drawing forward. "You have the Karl’s carriers running at Ironhold. Two-tonne shells, and no man takes the weight—it comes off the overhead crane and onto a tray. I read Brakka’s build notes on the way down here."
"You want to put a crane inside a gun turret?"
"Rails," Corun corrected, trailing a finger up the line. "The shell comes out of the magazine onto a guided rail. Up the trunk, into the working chamber, around onto the loading tray, and straight into the breech. It never leaves the rail. No man ever lifts it."
Dray leaned close, tracing the mechanical linkages with his thumb. "Who operates it?"
"One man at the controls in the working chamber. One at the magazine end watching the feed." Corun looked up, his tone dropping. "And hear me carefully on this, because I know how it sounds on paper. This is not a turret that loads itself. A man starts loading of every single round, and a man can stop it too. There is no version of this that runs empty."
"Why not, if the rail system takes the weight?"
"Because shells hang up," Corun said flatly. "Powder bags go in crooked. Something gets bent, and nothing looks wrong from the outside. A machine doesn’t know anything has gone wrong—it just keeps shoving until something sparks. A man feels with his hands. Take him out of the loop, and the first time a shell jams in that trunk, you lose the turret and everyone standing under it."
"How many men, then?"
"Eleven per turret. Maybe thirteen."
"Down from ninety."
"Down from ninety." Corun let the silence stretch for a moment. "Forty-four men on the whole main battery instead of three hundred and sixty. And they aren’t standing in a human chain passing live cordite hand to hand. Most of them are behind heavy armor, watching a rail."
"Rate of fire?"
"Mortals get two rounds a minute. On rails, I’d expect three. I’d like to say three and a half, but I’ve never built one." Corun tapped the paper.
"And the trade-off?"
"Mages or a magic core running each rail," Corun said quietly. "
The anti-aircraft defense was the one area where Dray had anticipated an uphill battle, but Corun swept it aside immediately.
"The drawings show a secondary battery and dozens of light guns for air defense," Corun said, sliding that sheet out of the stack. "We’re not building any of those."
"We’re not?"
"You have Vulcan Aeries. Six rotating barrels—one unit puts out more lead in ten seconds than an entire battery of light guns manages in a minute." He sketched quickly in the margin. "Sixteen of them. Four groups—two forward of the funnel, two aft—and each group sited so it can fire across the ship as well as out to its own side. An enemy coming in low to port gets met by the starboard guns, too."
"What about the blast arcs?" Dray asked.
"Yes. That’s the catch."
"When those sixteen-inch guns fire," Dray noted, "anything on the open deck within sixty feet of the muzzle gets flattened. On the headland test, the overpressure tore the roof right off a storage shed ninety feet away."
"Which is why the Aerie groups sit outside those specific blast arcs," Corun said, pointing to a set of fine red rings on the main deck. "This design has already worked out those geometry envelopes for the guns. That’s the luxury of being handed a design where someone else already thought all the fatal mistakes."
They reached the fire control system last, and it was here that Dray finally hit the edge of his technical understanding.
"Before you start on the calculating table — I know what’s on those drawings and I know we can’t build it." He pulled the sheet across. "Twenty years of clockwork we’ve never done. Gears and cams below the waterline that take four things and tell the guns where to point."
"So you’ve read it."
"I’ve built around it by using mages but they can only work for two hours each. It’s on the frigate." Dray tapped the sheet.
Corun didn’t argue. He looked at the sheet for a moment.
"How many mages does it take?"
"Three on the frigate. That’s six hours of the day covered and eighteen where she’s blind." Dray shrugged. "For this ship, thirty for full coverage."
"She might not need any."
Dray looked up.
"Say that again."
"Gandalf and Maerath have had something on the bench at Skyforge since the spring." Corun found a folded paper in his coat and flattened it out — a sketch "The apparatus works because a mage sits in front of it and reads it. That’s the whole of the bottleneck. So the question they’ve been chewing is whether the reading has to be done by a person at all, or whether the thing can be made to write down what it sees on its own."
"An apparatus that watches itself."
"That’s the idea. The mage still starts it and the mage still checks it, but he isn’t sitting there for two hours going mad. One man could tend three or four of them." Corun folded the sheet back up. "Maerath told me it’s months off, and then told me not to repeat that as a promise, so I’ll say it as— they think it’s possible, they don’t know when, and everything I put on these drawings assumes it doesn’t exist."
"Why assume that?"
"Because if I design her around it and it never comes, she can’t fight." He put the paper back in his coat. "If I design her for mages and the apparatus arrives, she gets better and everybody’s pleased. That’s the only way round it that doesn’t end with a battleship that needs a miracle."
Dray thought about that for a while.
"You’re right," he said. "But write to Maerath anyway. Tell him what this ship would want if his machine works, and tell him the date I’d need it by, because he’ll work harder with a date on it."
Dray leaned back and surveyed the long table.
Red chalk across the hull lines. Blue chalk marking the turrets, the power cores, the loading rails, and the machinery spaces. Black coloured paper under the fire control spaces. And a single number—30—written in the corner.
"Write it up," Dray said. "All of it. Every single number we have to lock down with Ironhold. Every core we’re claiming. Every deck opening and its exact dimensions." He tapped his thumb against the edge of the desk. "One master document. It goes to the duke, to Master Brakka, and into my safe. After this winter, nobody changes a single figure without all three of us signing off on it."
"That’s going to be a thick document."
"It’s a five-year build so it better be."
Dray stood up, walked to the window, and looked out over the yard. Beyond the wooden framing of the old slipway, the raw coastline was marked out in long rows of white wooden pegs. Beyond the pegs lay acres of undisturbed mud and rock.
"How long to cut the new slipway?"
"A month of digging," Corun said from the table. "A year before you could lay a keel on it and sleep soundly at night."
"And the dredging out front?"
"Start now, and the channel finishes right about when you need to slide her in."
Dray watched the rain sweep across the white pegs for a long moment.
"Then we start digging on Monday," he said. "And we don’t lay a single frame until you tell me the hole in the ground is right. Everything after that gets a lot more expensive to be wrong about."