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have been too deep even for the Mississippi, much less the Elbe. It also would have been armored to resist 19 th -century artillery, like the Civil War's fifteen-inch smoothbores, rather than the much more anemic guns of the 17 th century. Worse than that, Eddie had called for a single-screw design. His otherwise praiseworthy objective had been to save the huge bulk of a paddle wheel housing, which would not only have cut down on places to mount armament but required an even bigger investment in armor. Given that they'd had to fight people like Quentin Underwood tooth and nail for every salvaged railroad rail dedicated to the project, that hadn't been an insignificant consideration.

Unfortunately, marine screw propellers were much more difficult to design properly than Eddie had imagined. Simpson knew that; his last assignment before the Pentagon had been as a member of the design group working on the propulsion systems for the Seawolf-class submarine. Moreover, an exposed prop and shaft would have been extremely vulnerable to damage in the event that one of the ships grounded, which was virtually certain to happen eventually to any heavy, clumsy armored vessel operating on inland rivers. And the provision of a single shaft would have meant that any damage to a propeller would leave one of the precious ironclads unable to move or maneuver in any way.

Which was why Simpson had bullied Stearns into letting him have the diesel power plants out of four of the huge coal trucks which had originally been used as armored personnel carriers. Fuel for the APC engines, though scarce, was still available, and once Underwood got the kinks out of his oil-field production, scarcity wouldn't be a problem. Not with the priority Stearns had agreed to assign to the Navy, at any rate.

With the engines figuratively speaking in hand, Simpson had created a highly modified version of Eddie's original concept-one which used powerful diesel-driven pumps scavenged from the Grantville coal mine to provide hydro-jet propulsion. The pumps were powerful enough to chew up most small debris without damage, and screens across the intakes protected them from anything larger. Using the diesels would increase the gunboats' logistic dependency on the Grantville industrial base, since it wouldn't be possible to fuel them with coal or wood in an emergency, as would have been possible with a steam-powered engineering plant. On the other hand, the diesel bunkers could be safely located below the water line, and at least if a freak hit managed somehow to penetrate to one of the ironclads' interiors, there would be no handy boiler full of live steam to boil a crew alive.

The other two things he'd done to Eddie's original design were to cut the armor thickness in half and add the trim tanks. Reducing the armor had let him squeeze an additional ship out of the rails allocated to the project, as well as saving displacement, but the tanks were at least as important. The original Monitor had been designed with minimum freeboard to reduce target area, but that wasn't going to be possible with this design. Since there was no practical way to design a proper turret at this point, they had no choice but to use a more or less traditional broadside scheme for their armament, which meant something that would look a lot more like the Merrimack… or, as Eddie was prone to correct in tones of exasperation, the Virginia. That explained the slabsided, ungainly appearance of the basic design. It also required a deeper draft than the 'cheese box on a raft' Monitor's design. Simpson had managed to minimize that to some extent by designing the ships to 'flood down' for combat by filling the trim tanks built into them. That had allowed him to design a roughly five-hundred-ton vessel which drew less than four feet of water with the tanks pumped out and almost ten feet with the tanks filled. Which also, just incidentally, let him save about five feet worth of armored freeboard which would be protected by water when they flooded down.

At first, Eddie had been inclined to sulk when Simpson modified his basic design. To his credit, he'd recognized that the alterations were genuine improvements, and that was the reason Simpson (although he doubted that the young man was aware of it) had specifically requested that he be assigned to the Navy. Stearns had already sent him to Magdeburg to help oversee the project, after all, which meant Simpson couldn't have gotten rid of him, anyway. And the Navy was going to need officers who could actually think. Those were rarer than one might have thought, and from his own experience, Simpson recognized the mental flexibility involved in acknowledging that someone else had actually made one of your own brainchildren better. So he'd decided to make a virtue out of necessity… which was how both Eddie and his friend Larry Wild had abruptly become junior-grade lieutenants in John Simpson's Navy.

And if it had also let Simpson get the last laugh on Mike Stearns, so much the better.

'Fortunately,' he went on after a moment, 'convincing the freiherr to go along with our plans isn't really our concern. If Mr. Schaubach feels that he's unlikely to be able to get von Bleckede to see reason, refer him to Mr. Piazza.' He smiled again, more blandly than ever, as Eddie frowned. Ed Piazza, the secretary of state, had been Stearns' choice to serve as his personal representative to all the various minor local potentates not worthy of the personal attention of the head of state.

'That will take time,' Eddie began, 'and-'

'That may be true,' Simpson interrupted. 'But it's the secretary of state's job to deal with things like this. Or let Gustav's chancellor Oxenstierna deal with it. We've got more to worry about than convincing one minor nobleman to see things our way. Besides, whether we like it or not, we've got time before we'll actually need to get that far down-river, now don't we?'

Eddie looked rebellious, but Simpson was accustomed to that. What mattered more to him was the fact that the youngster actually thought his way through it, then subsided with nothing more than one last grimace.

'Now,' Simpson went on, 'was there anything else you needed, Lieutenant?'

'No, I guess not… sir.'

'Good.' Simpson turned to Davis. 'And what can I do for you, Mr. Davis?' he asked.

'Actually,' Davis replied, 'I just wanted to let you know that Ollie says he should have the first half dozen gun tubes ready to ship to us by the end of the week.'

'Good!'

Simpson was unaware of the way in which his genuine enthusiasm transfigured his own expression. The change was brief, but Davis recognized it. It was a pity, he often thought, that Simpson had such a completely tone deaf 'ear' where minor things like interpersonal relations were concerned. Personally, Davis still thought the man was a prick, especially as far as politics went, and he didn't much care for the 'admiral's' obsession with matters of rank-social, as well as military-and the perquisites which went with it. But he'd come to recognize that however unpleasant Simpson's personality might be, the man undeniably had a brain. Quite a good one, as a matter of fact, when it could be pried away from things like his political disagreements with Mike Stearns.

However much Davis hated to admit it (and, as it happened, he hated it quite a bit), Simpson's experience as an officer in the up-time United States Navy really did show in the organization he was building here in Magdeburg. The up-timers under his command might carp and complain about 'Mickey Mouse bullshit' and mutter balefully about 'front office management pricks,' but Davis had come to realize that there genuinely was a method to his madness. Of course, sometimes the machinist wondered how much of that method was due to the fact that Simpson had a clearer appreciation of what was needed than his fellow up-timers did and how much resulted from his own innate propensity for empire building. But whatever his reasoning, Simpson's Navy was much better disciplined and shaping up as a considerably more professional organization than Frank Jackson's Army.

Too many of Jackson's senior officers were still up-timers themselves, with a casual attitude toward him and toward each other which remained essentially civilian. That was fine as far as they themselves were concerned. They knew one another, and their relationships, however casual, worked. But the core of the Army had been the United Mine Workers of America. Davis wasn't certain how well the example of that attitude would serve as those from outside the original UMWA membership began attaining senior rank. And whatever might have been the case for the Army, Simpson didn't have that existing structure to build upon. He was creating the Navy out of whole cloth. Almost a hundred percent of its personnel were 17 th -century Germans and Swedes, leavened with just enough up-timers to provide the technical skills the newly made Americans had not yet acquired. And that was another kettle of fish entirely.

It didn't make Davis like Simpson any more, but it had permitted him to at least appreciate that the man did have some worthwhile qualities. Which was why he thought it was such a pity that Simpson was so persistently unwilling-or unable-to demonstrate the enthusiasm Davis had come to realize he felt for his present task. Instead, Simpson was prone to giving the impression that he had taken on the 'chore' as a matter of noblesse oblige, to save the uncouth Appalachian yokels from the results of their own ignorance. That, more than any real policy differences, explained the antagonism that Simpson had a positive genius for stirring up among the people in the U.S. government he dealt with.

Thank God we're in Magdeburg, Nat thought to himself wryly. If we'd been based in Grantville, Simpson would be getting challenged to a duel every other Tuesday-the law be damned.

'Are we going to use the wire-built design or bronze casting?' Cantrell asked. Simpson gave him a sharp glance for interrupting, but said nothing. Simpson, Davis had noticed, was prepared to cut the youngster a much greater degree of slack than he did for anyone else. He wondered if Eddie realized that?

'Wire-built, for the first half dozen, at least,' Nat replied. 'The power plant has more than enough Schedule 160 twelve-inch pipe for the liners for all sixteen of the rifled guns, and we've unlaid enough steel cable to provide plenty of wire.'

Simpson and Eddie both nodded. Twelve-inch Schedule 160 pipe had an inside diameter of just over ten inches and a wall thickness of about one and a quarter inches. That was ample to provide the liner for a ten-inch artillery piece, and Grantville's machining capability was more than adequate for the task of providing it with rifling grooves. But that left the task of reinforcing it. The original Grantville power plant had run to relatively high steam pressures, but there was a world of difference between that and the pressures which would be exerted in the bore of a black-powder cannon!

Two competing solutions had been proposed. One was to reinforce the tubes by winding them in thick cocoons of steel wire, which just happened to be available in significant quantities once the spools of steel cable had been discovered at the coal mine. Unlaying the cables by hand to separate them into individual strands of steel wire had been a laborious and manpower-intensive task, but once the decision to support the ironclad project had been taken, the manpower had been made available.

The second solution had been to cast bronze reinforcements around the tubes. In some ways, that was a simpler approach. It would result in somewhat heavier guns, but the technology to accomplish it was already available to the 17 th -century's metalworking industry. The finished guns would be somewhat heavier, and the tubes themselves might warp slightly in the casting process, but Davis doubted very much that the warping would present any insoluble difficulties. They were planning to do a final bore in all the gun tubes anyway, in order to bring them to a uniform size.

'The theory is that until we've got the on-site ability to do the casting here, they're going to have to ship the finished guns to us overland. The casting teams are pretty heavily committed to the field artillery and carronade projects right now, so coupled with the lighter weight for shipping considerations they decided to go with wire.'

'As long as they make the delivery schedule, I don't really care which approach we use,' Simpson observed.

'Yeah,' Eddie agreed, but his expression was pouting. 'I still say we could have produced a breech-loading design, though. Our rate of fire is going to suck.'

'That decision has been made, Lieutenant,' Simpson observed a bit coolly. Then he relented just a touch. 'I'd obviously prefer breechloaders, myself,' he said. 'But the Allocations Committee was right. We don't have the resources to do everything we need to do, and muzzleloaders will do the job for us. Especially with the hydraulic recoil systems.'

He shrugged, and while no one could have called Eddie's nod cheerful, there was no real disagreement in it.

'At least they'll recoil inboard so they can be reloaded under armor,' he sighed.

'Especially in light of your suggestion to operate the port shutters with the same recoil system,' Simpson agreed. Nat was aware that Eddie still considered himself an