didn't stall out. Which was certainly true. A stall happens when the loss of lift causes the nose-heavy airplanes to go into a dive. A delta has its weight farther back, so it doesn't stall. It just sinks and its controls get mushy. He told himself that a delta-wing would be able to land in narrower spaces because its wingspan would not need to be as wide. Also, true lift is square feet of surface area. The greater the distance from the leading edge to the trailing edge of the wing, 'the chord,' the less the span, or the distance from wing tip to wing tip, needed to be for the same lift. Of course, there are always trade-offs. More chord means more drag. And he was told that by Herr Hal Smith, the up-timer expert on aircraft design.
Willem looked at the copy of a picture of the Convair Delta Dart and imagined. He roughed out a sketch based on the Dart, but with a propeller rather than a jet engine. The propeller was in the front, as it was in most airplanes. Just behind the propeller was the engine, even though he wasn't yet sure what sort of engine he could get. Behind the engine was the cockpit and behind that the fuel tank. This was a small plane, one person and some armaments, but small, a short wingspan. He ran some calculations using the new slide rule he had bought, pencil and paper. The wing span would be only thirty feet and the plane would be thirty-five feet long.
Willem was no great artist, but like most people of his station he had been taught the basics. His drawing wasn't good, but it was good enough to give a real artist the idea. He drew a wing section and made marks on his silhouette to indicate where the ribs of the airplane would be placed. Then he took another sip of beer and went back to his calculations.
****
Pierre Trovler was in Grantville for the movies, for the pictures, for the art that came from the future. He wasn't in the encyclopedia, he'd checked. There was no way for him to know why, and if Pierre had known, it's hard to tell if he would have been pleased. For in that other history Pierre had died in 1632 of food poisoning. Without that bad bit of mutton, it's quite likely that Pierre would have made enough of a name for himself to have gained an entry in the encyclopedia. But Pierre didn't know that. No one on Earth, in either timeline, knew it. All he knew was that he had looked and found no entry for Pierre Trovler, born June 9th, 1604, outside Paris. That lack of such an entry had left him a bit-actually, rather a lot-more modest. He knew he was a good artist, but knowing that he wasn't in the history books and not knowing why had been a cold shower to his ego. It had needed one. He worked harder now. For instance, he worked on the rough sketches that Willem Krause had given him with care and practiced skill, using Herr Krause's notes as well as his sketches and the drafting course from the adult education class at Grantville's high school to make designs and even a perspective view of the aircraft. He worked well into the night using the Coleman lantern, had some of the fried chicken that he had bought that noon, then went to bed.
****
Pierre Trovler handed over the cardboard tube that held the plans. The tube, as it happened, was made down-time, a copy of examples that had come with the Ring of Fire.
Krause took it with a smile that was both very endearing and probably more than half real. 'So how is it?' he asked as he removed the cardboard cap from the tube. 'Did you manage to turn my scribbling and notes into something worth seeing, or were they too bad to even give you a starting point?'
Pierre grinned in spite of himself. 'I persevered, Herr Krause. In fact, they weren’t bad drawings. To be honest, they weren’t professional, but the information was there.' He started to add that he thought that Herr Krause would be pleased, but decided not to. He doubted the man would be influenced by such a claim and it might raise expectations.
By now Herr Krause had the papers out and was looking at the drawings and the neat, careful notes. 'Marvelous. This actually looks like the design of an airplane.'
They talked for some time. They talked about the shape of the wing, and of the three-wheeled undercarriage.
'How do you turn it?' Pierre asked.
'These here . . .' Herr Krause pointed at the trailing edge of the wing and the line that Pierre hadn't known the meaning of. '. . . are actually separate little wings. They move up and down and change the airflow over the wing so that one wing has more lift or so that the lift is more in the front of the wing or more in the back.' He pointed at the tail fin. 'That has a rudder that pushes from side to side.'
'Those parts will need to be clearer and drawings made of the . . .' Pierre paused. He didn't know how or why little wings Herr Krause talked about moved up and down. '. . . of whatever it is that moves those little trailing wings up and down.'
'They're called ailerons,' his employer told him. 'Or, more generally, control surfaces. And they are moved by a system of cables that are run inside the wing and body of the aircraft.'
'Just as you say, sir, but they will need to be drawn for the plans and I will need to know what they look like.'
'More than that, the book
'I may, sir. Giuseppe Bonono is certainly skilled enough,' Pierre said. 'He is from Padua and came to Grantville to see what new skills and tools of the carpenter's art might have been developed in the future.'
****
It took a few days to arrange a meeting with the carpenter. It part that was because it wasn't, as it turned out, one man. Giuseppe Bonono, a widower and master carpenter from Padua, had on arrival in Grantville discovered Black amp; Decker power tools. Hand-cutting a hole in a piece of wood so that you might insert a dowel had never been one of Giuseppe's favorite occupations. Electric motors to do the grunt work so that the carpenter could concentrate on the art of carpentry had impressed him greatly. So had the advancements in treating wood. Not that the up-timers knew everything. Giuseppe had his own tricks of the carpenter's trade and thirty years of hands-on experience.
It was, by up-time standards, a small shop in Rottenbach, on the road from Grantville to Badenburg. By the standards of the seventeenth century, especially in terms of output, it was major industry. Still, while their bread and butter was the tables, chairs, and desks they produced, they were also very interested in prestige work.
Willem Krause's delta-wing airplane had the potential to be prestige work. The sort of work that they could advertise and that would bring in sales.
It only took convincing them of that.
Not that they were going to do it for free. Prestige work meant prestige prices, after all.
'Gentlemen and masters, I am on a budget,' Willem complained pitifully.
'You do that very well, Herr Krause,' Giuseppe complimented him.
'Yes, thank you, Master Bonono,' Willem agreed immodestly. 'I thought the squeak at the end was especially artful, as though you had just twisted the tongs in which you held my stones. Nonetheless, it is true. If we can't come to an equitable agreement, I will be forced to go elsewhere. I don't want to. Pierre tells me good things about you. But my backer is already concerned over the expense involved and he actually has access to tongs. Red hot tongs, if needed.'
No one asked who his backer was. There was no law forbidding the building of aircraft for Louis of France or the Holy Roman Empire. But being able to say honestly 'I had no idea who it was for' might prove useful. Besides, it wasn't their business.
Eventually they agreed on a price for the scale model. It was to be a one-twentieth scale model which would make it a bit over a foot wide and a bit under two feet long. It would be much heavier for its volume than the full- size one would be, but the control surfaces would be adjustable so that that the model could be tested in the wind tunnel with ailerons up and ailerons down so that the effect on drag lift and ground effect could be measured.
****
'Gemma,' Master Bonono shouted. 'Gemma, bring wine!'
'Yes, Papa,' a girl's voice said.
The noise of the power tools was muted here and Willem was glad of it. His ears were still ringing a bit from the noise of the table saw.
A pretty young girl brought wine and Willem gave her an appreciative smile for the wine as his eyes took in
