Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(14)
“New Dublin?” Forester queried, surprised. That was the name of a once-rebellious city on the Imperial island of New Ireland. “Don’t misunderstand; I’m not ungrateful for your country’s generosity! And two carriers—and the escorts we’ve completed at Scapa Flow—will give me greater confidence we can hold what we’ve gained against the damnable Doms, but perhaps I don’t understand your naming conventions.”
“We name carriers for battles,” Alan told him.
“An’ destroyers for bloody heroes,” Stokes adjoined. “We didn’t in His Majesty’s navies, but it seems fittin’.”
“Ah.” Forester cleared his throat. “Indeed.”
The pier they stood on was the old one in name only, having been badly damaged once and rebuilt three times. The newer fitting-out piers and shipyards to the north were larger, but were still almost entirely devoted to building wooden hulls. Some were quite large and would become the latest—again, slightly smaller—class of Fleet Carriers, as well as cargo ships, oilers, and essentially everything they wanted Austraal to start making. Bigger, dedicated steam-powered auxiliaries would help with many things. They’d require smaller crews, carry heavier loads, and get them where they were needed faster. Only that would help get a handle on their supply problems. But while the Empire of the New Britain Isles was finally hitting its stride building screw-propeller, iron-armored wooden warships, the western Alliance had gone all in with steel-hull designs for combat vessels. And now that they knew how, and materials were available in larger quantities, they were quicker to make. Not only did they require less skilled labor, but it also wasn’t necessary to cut the wood, freight it in, trim it, and lay it up to dry—or dry it themselves, which, on the scale they were building, required a process nearly as extensive as making steel in the first place.
Three steel ships were currently fitting out, floating high in the water at the pier, and the skeletons of more were rising on the ways nearby. The closest two hulls looked just like Walker’s and those of the two other new destroyers that had already deployed. Unfortunately, one of those was already lost as well. And hulls were about all these were, as yet. The closest had been decked, and the foundations for the bridge structure and aft deckhouse stood incongruously square atop it, but the skylights over the engineering spaces gaped empty. Workers operated windlasses and heaved on taglines secured to a large, complexly shaped object suspended from a crane. The next ship seemed slightly farther along, and a couple of hundred yards down the pier was yet another similar, larger shape that looked almost complete. Two Lemurian naval officers practically ran to meet them, but Alan smiled and waved them away after returning their salutes. “As you were. We’re just here to gawk.”
“Ay, ay, Mister Chaar-maan,” one said, “but peese waatch you steppings.” He waved at the crane and the extremely heavy-looking iron . . . thing . . . hanging from it. “Is stuff sqwaash you all ever-where. Even in aar!”
“We’ll be careful,” Alan assured. “Don’t let us distract you.”
The ’Cats nodded skeptically and backed away, leaving the four men watching the object sway down toward the closest hull.
“That’s one of our reduction-gear boxes,” Alan told Forester proudly. “And you’ll be hard-pressed to imagine anything requiring more precision. Maybe a gun director or TDC. But reduction gears take a lot more abuse. They’re what transfer the rotation of the turbines to the screws.”
Forester shaded his eyes. “It seems a rather crude housing,” he objected. “And I thought the, ah, turbines were the most difficult part of copying Walker’s power plant?”
“The geared turbine drive, Lord Forester,” Stokes stressed. “An’ the turbines themselves were tough enough, even with examples to look at. We had to make good nickel steel first—which we needed for proper automatic weapons and naval rifles, anyway—an’ then we had to relearn how to heat treat the stuff.” He grinned. “You’ve been watchin’ us go through those labor pains, and we’ve given you reports on everything we did, to share with the Empire. Suffice to say we made ’em. But you can’t use ’em as efficiently without reduction gears. Unlike reciprocatin’ engines, they get all their torque from their high speed.” He saw that Forester still looked unconvinced. “Don’t let that casin’ fool you. There’s nothin’ crude inside it.”
“They’re what took us so long to get the first new DDs out to the fleet,” Alan confirmed, then shook his head and held his hand up, thumb and forefinger almost touching. “Even with the rest of the first ships already built, we were that close to starting from scratch on their power plants, trying turbo electrics, or something like that. Some wanted to go direct drive and take the efficiency hit, or put reciprocating engines in ’em and settle for twenty knots. But Captain Reddy told us we might as well do it right. And he was right. We needed the technological kick in the ass making those things gave us. We’ve been building guns, engines, even torpedoes, and our tooling still wasn’t precise enough. We lost our best metallurgist, guy named Dave Elden, in the battle out there.” He pointed at the bay. “Fortunately, he’d already written down a lot of stuff. But our people still had to relearn it. And Courtney Bradford and Ben Mallory helped too,” he added. “Both were engineers in fields that use special metals—petroleum and aeronautics.” He shrugged. “But when it came to actually making the gears, we had an ace up our sleeve we didn’t even know about: a guy named Charlie Murphy.” Forester raised his eyebrows. “Another prisoner who survived Mizuki Maru—and the Japs,” Alan explained. “He’d been a machinist on the sub tender Canopus in Manila Bay. The old . . .” He stopped. Even Stokes had only recently learned the story of how, bombed out and listing, Canopus and her machinists fixed or made everything imaginable, not only for her subs sneaking in and out, but for anything else needed on Corregidor before it fell. And she did it all at night, setting smoke pots and pretending to be sunk and abandoned in shallow water during the day. “Anyway,” Letts said, “Murphy’s one hell of a machinist. Even so, he had to do a lot of hand turning and milling, constantly checking his work with calipers—all while teaching others to take the same care he did. He designed jigs . . .” He stopped again. “Long story.”