Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(16)
“You used the same, ah, reduction gears in her?” Bachman asked.
“The very same,” Stokes confirmed. “Only she has three of ’em, an’ three turbines to drive her. Two outboard an’ one on the centerline. She can cruise on that one an’ save fuel. Gives her longer range.”
“I saw she had three screw propellers when she launched,” Forester remembered aloud. “Will that truly make that much difference? And with the same engines as the smaller ships, will she not be considerably slower?”
“We hope it’ll make a difference,” Alan hedged. “James Ellis sustained thirty-six knots on her trials, with engines built in Baalkpan. That’s faster than Walker ever was. Will her engines last as long as Walker’s have?” He held his hands up, then dropped them. “Who knows? We have identified a lot of inefficiencies we think we fixed on those.” He nodded toward the DDs under construction. “Either way, except for some nagging quality-control issues with tubes, I believe we’ve built better boilers than Walker or Mahan ever had.” He blinked fondly at the Lemurians working on the ship. “Those little guys can be awful imaginative when you give ’em a chance. They’re never satisfied, now they’ve got machines on their mind. They seem to constantly think, Well, if this works good, why don’t we do this too?” He arched an eyebrow. “Sometimes it works. Anyway, once Walker’s repaired, she should still work up to twenty-eight knots or so. I’d love to get her here and put brand-new boilers in her!” He glanced at the cruiser. “She’s got eight boilers spinning three turbines. Should make twenty-eight knots, at least.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Forester said, still somewhat skeptical, Alan thought. “But how can that work?”
Alan shrugged and began to recite the cruiser’s specifications, by way of explanation. “Her hull shape’s almost literally an up-scaled version of Walker’s. She’ll probably roll just as bad, but they’re damn clean lines. She’s four hundred and forty feet long, with a forty-five-foot beam. Fully loaded and ready to fight, she’ll displace around four thousand tons.” He nodded at Forester, anticipating his next question. “Yeah, three times as much as Walker, so it’ll take her longer to start and stop, but it won’t put much more strain on her engines to keep her at speed. At least that’s the theory. And with that centerline screw right in front of the rudder, she’ll turn even tighter. One of the limiting factors on Walker’s speed has always been her boilers more than her engines.” He rubbed his nose. “And age and hard use, of course.”
He nodded at the new ship “The math comes out like this: We’re figuring on between twenty-three- and twenty-six-thousand-shaft horse power. We don’t have the instruments to measure precisely, but it’s close, based on what Walker’s engines were rated at and the performance of the new DDs. Add three shafts together and we come up with at least sixty-nine thousand. The old Brit C Class CL’s of the last war . . .” He hesitated, looking at Forester. Though somewhat British by descent and culture, it was pointless to describe a class of ships built 150 years after Forester’s ancestors came to this world, possibly from another world entirely, where C Class light cruisers may never have happened at all. The multiple lines of history that seemed to have converged here often made things difficult to explain. Or comprehend. And trying to do either always made Alan’s head hurt. “Skip it,” he said. “Anyway, these other ships, of similar hull shape, length, and displacement, got nearly thirty knots out of about forty thousand SHP. . . .” He realized he’d lost Forester entirely. “Skip it,” he said again, and sighed. “We’re pretty sure.”
Forester cleared his throat, then smiled and waved at the ship. “Well,” he said, “she certainly looks formidable!”
“She is, by most standards,” Alan agreed, but his enthusiasm was suddenly waning.
“By any standard, she’s a hell of an achievement,” Stokes stressed. He pointed. “She’s got six five-point-five-inch guns, all tied to a calibrated gun director copied from Amagi. We went with the five-fives because we’re already makin’ ammunition an’ liners for ’em, for the salvaged Jap secondaries on Santy Cat an’ the others. They’re bag guns an’ won’t shoot as fast as four-inch-fifties, but they’ll shoot farther an’ hit more than twice as hard. She’s also got five dual-purpose four-inch-fifties, as you can see, which’ll help against aerial targets. We’re workin’ hard to design a proper antiair fire-control system, after what happened to TF Alden. . . .” He frowned and looked at Alan. “Nobody saw that comin, an’ it was my job to expect it.” His tone sounded more scolding than contrite. He looked back at Forester. “She’s gettin’ the first new fifty cals as well, a full dozen of the bloody things, in six twin mounts. That’ll help too.” He gestured aft. “An’ she’ll carry eight torpedoes an’ two Nancy floatplanes. The aft deckhouse has more space for a workshop than Walker ever had, for torpedoes, everyday repairs, an’ aviation maintenance as well.” He waved his hand back and forth. “She’s got half a dozen depth charge launchers down her sides to frighten mountain fish”—his expression turned hard—“or kill subs, which she’ll find as easy as Walker ever did, now we’ve matched the old girl’s sound equipment.” He shrugged. “An’ her electrics are better than anything we’ve done. Commander Riggs’s been bloody busy with all his contrivances. The only thing she hasn’t got I wish she did is radar.”