Commander Cantrell in the West Indies(25)

John Simpson understood their job, may have even had a species of theoretical sympathy for it, but he was a man who had been given an official mandate that had also become his personal mission: to build a navy which, with its small number of hulls, could defeat any conventional force in the world. And the primary factor in achieving that extraordinary potency was up-time technology, either in terms of design, or in terms of actual up-time machinery. Unfortunately, it was that latter desideratum over which the admiral and the Department of Economic Resources, or DER, eternally wrestled, since there could be no increase in the amount of advanced technological systems. Grantville was almost four hundred years away from the riches of the American military-industrial complex, or even Walmart. There were never going to be any more motors, tires, televisions, or computers than there were right now. Not for a century or two, at the very least. And almost everything that Admiral Simpson wanted for his Navy, a hundred other people wanted for some other project.

The electronic inclinometer and fire-control system was, Eddie had to admit, one of those resource wrestling matches about which he felt the most profound ambivalence. On the one hand, that system was not technically essential to the operation of the new ship’s guns. And there was no accomplishing it “on the cheap.” Down-time materials and technology were simply not up to the task of fabricating one that was sufficiently sensitive and reliable.

But if he had had a system that could the measure the attitudinal effects of wave action on his hull, and then send an electric pulse to fire the gun the moment that the ship was level, he would have been able to hit today’s target—a forty-foot by twenty-foot wood framework mounted on a barge—on the fourth, or maybe even the third, try. Instead, after the first three shots—which had been required to make the gun’s basic azimuth and elevation adjustments—he still kept missing the target by thirty or forty yards. But not because his targeting was off, or his crew was sloppy, or the ammunition was of irregular quality. No, it was because of these comparatively tiny three- and four-foot swells.

The roll in the deck beneath his feet was almost imperceptible. From moment to moment it rarely varied by more than one degree. But since that motion was not predictable, and since a fraction of a degree was all it took for him to drop a round short or long, it represented an irrefragable limit upon his accuracy. It was a random variable over which he had almost no control.

What little control he did have was through the combined sensory apparatuses of a down-time inclinometer and his own eyes. But the inclinometer, although the best that could be fashioned by exacting down-time experts, was simply a very well-built three-axis carpenter’s level: it was not sensitive or responsive enough. And of course, the human eye was an invariably unreliable instrument—although when combined with trained human judgment, it could furnish by prediction much of what the inclinometer could not provide quickly enough.

That precision provided by electronic firing controls was simply not important to naval weapons and tactics of this era. The contemporary down-time guns were fairly primitive smoothbore cannons that evinced all the individual idiosyncrasies of their unique, by-hand production. And so, lacking the range and uniform performance of up-time weapons, it was inevitable that they were most effective when fired at very close ranges, and in volleys. That way, some balls were sure to hit.

Obviously, such weapons would have derived much less benefit from an inclinometer-controlled firing system. As Eddie had explained to Anne Cathrine, putting an up-time inclinometer on a down-time cannon was a lot like putting four-wheel disc brakes and airbags on an ox-cart. She had simply stared at that reference, so he had tried another one: it was like putting lip-paint on a pig. She got that right away.

But with the new eight-inch, breech loading, wire-wrapped naval rifles that Admiral Simpson had designed for these steamships, the want for truly accurate and speedy inclinometers was making itself felt. Profoundly. The extraordinary range and accuracy of these weapons made them, ironically, far more vulnerable to the inherent instability of a sea-going ship. This had not been so important a consideration during the Baltic War, where engagement ranges had been short, the waters relatively calm, and the hulls had been comparatively bargelike and stable. But now, highly responsive fire control was a paramount concern. The hulls that were the prototypes for Simpson’s blue water navy—a large one similar to a bulked-up version of the Civil War era USS Hartford; the other, a slightly shrunken equivalent of the USS Kearsarge—were ocean-going, and if they stood high, rolling seas well, it was in part because the shape of their hulls helped them stay afloat by moving as the water did. Ironically, they were far less stable firing platforms, but fitted with guns that required, and would richly reward, superior stability. Or fire control correction.