Grantville Gazette 38 gg-38

by Коллектив Авторов

  ****

  "Hey, Gemma," Gemma heard Darius call. "You want to help me with this one? It's that airplane nut again."

  "How can I help?" Gemma asked. "You know that airplanes are . . . how do you say . . . out of my league."

  "He wants the answers in German if possible and he'll pay extra for it. So I'll look the stuff up and then we'll go over it together and you can translate it into German."

  "I'm still not the best at German."

  "Yeah, but you need the work as much as I do."

  "No way to get a dowry built up if I don't," Gemma said.

  "All you down-time girls are always worried about the dowry business. What ever happened to love?"

  "Love is for those who can afford it," Gemma said, primly. "And I can't. Not yet. Not since we spent so much on the doctors for Mama. My sister's marriage took what was left, so Papa and I are starting over."

  "You guys can't go back to Padua?"

  "Matteo is in charge of the shop. Papa doesn't want to work for his son."

  ****

  Willem spent months in the National Library, looking at plans and reading texts on air flight. And in the process, paid for the pimple-faced boy's junior prom. And more.

  Increasingly, he found himself entranced by the delta-wing aircraft. He told himself that it was because they 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 Aerodynamics 101, insists that a scale model should be made and tested in a wind tunnel," Herr Krause said. "I will not skimp on such a step because, as the up-timers say, it's my pale pink body that will be strapped into the thing when it flies." Then he grinned at Pierre again. "Do you happen to know a carpenter of skill that could help us first with making the model and later with making the airplane?"

  "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 her form. Nicely curved, firm, yet soft. He let her see that he had noticed then went back to the discussion. "I'm told the model will need attachments where they attach little threads which are in turn attached to weights and scales and dials. One at the center of balance, one at the nose, one at the tail, and one on each wing."

  The girl seemed to accept his appreciation as her due but showed more interest in the plans. "A delta wing?" she asked curiously.

  "Yes!" Willem was suddenly more interested in the girl. "You know about delta wings?

  "Not really. But I was the German translator on your additional questions at the research center, so I had to read up on aircraft design. From what I read, delta wings are not particularly well thought of by Herr Smith."

  "There are disadvantages but also advantages. For one, a delta wing doesn't need as much wing span for the same amount of lift. So a delta might be able to use a runway that a straight wing wouldn't."

  "You know this man?" Master Bonono asked his daughter suspiciously.

  The girl, Gemma, rolled her eyes as her papa went all fatherly on her and Willem hid his smile as the girl answered.

  "I've never met him till today, Papa, but I have seen him at the research center, consulting with Darius."

  "You watch out for that boy. He doesn't have two dollars to rub together, even if he is an up-timer."

  "He's just a friend, Papa!" Gemma said with clearly strained patience and a face growing a bit pink.

  When Willem first learned that the girl knew of his interest, he had had a moment of concern. But it was clear, after all, that all that had happened was a coincidence and perhaps a useful one. "So you have some familiarity with aircraft design?" he asked. "From your work in translating the questions?"

  "A little," Gemma admitted, doubt clear in her posture. "I have a good idea what the words mean, anyway."

  "So here," Willem said to Master Bonono while gesturing at the girl, "you have a consultant on the interpretation of the design in your own house. How convenient."

  Making such a model is not the work of an hour or a day, but for a master like Giuseppe Bonono it wasn't the work of a lifetime, either. In a couple of months, there would be a twentieth-scale model, of the arrowhead plane, as Giuseppe called it. Ready for the wind tunnel test over at Smith Aeronautics.

  Leaving the Bononos, father and daughter, to their work Willem went looking for flying lessons.

  ****

  "And this is realistic?" Willem didn't even try to hide his doubts.

  The man shrugged. "It was my son's, and he mostly used it for gun-fighting games. But it has the flight simulator on it. The ads say it's realistic, but I don't really know. It's fifty dollars an hour if you want to use it. If you don't, there's others who do."

  Willem tried it and didn't know if it was realistic or not. It did let him get used to the idea of banking into a turn and a little bit familiar with the gradualness of flight. And, perhaps more importantly, the misleading nature of that gradualness. Planes do things slowly and smoothly . . . till they don't. The don't part is when they get close to the ground. Then things get fast. A crash at two hundred miles per hour is pretty sudden.

  ****

  The second simulator was a thing of wood and canvas, controlled by men with ropes and poles. They rocked and tilted the mini-plane in three dimensions in response to Willem's manipulation of the controls. Again, it was far from perfect but it taught him something about flying. Well, reinforced something the flight game had shown him. If you bank the plane to the right then bring the stick back to neutral, you're still banked to the right. To get back to level flight, you have to move the stick not just back to neutral but beyond it, till you have reversed what you did to bank in the first place. And all the time you were banking to the left and un-banking, you were turning left. So, to turn left, you pushed the stick left, then back to center, held the stick as you made most of the turn, then pushed the stick right till you were out of the bank, then brought it back to center. And with each move it was easy to go too far or hold it too long, and it took practice to get it right.

  That was what the low-tech simulators that had sprung up since the Belle had first flown were about, letting you practice before climbing into one of the still few planes that had been completed since the Belle's first flight. Flight time in those was very expensive. The Belles were unavailable, strictly for the military. Kelly Aviation usually had one plane running, well, sometimes. In general, Mr. Kelly would finish it, then a few days later take it apart for parts for the next one. But during those times when one of his planes was in fact flight ready, you could take flights in it and even get flying lessons. For the paltry sum of two hundred fifty dollars an hour.

  The Kitts had an airplane and mostly kept it running. It was a two-seater, front and back, and lessons were three hundred dollars an hour. Over the two months that Giuseppe and Gemma were occupied in building the model, Krause racked up over a hundred hours in various simulators, forty hours of ground school, reading maps from the air and such, and a grand total of seven and one quarter hours in the air. He thought he knew how to fly, not well perhaps, but well enough. Besides, he was spending a lot of money on flying lessons.

  ****

  It was in the days before the model was ready for the wind tunnel that the secrecy, which had been more a matter of habit and general caution, became a matter of vital necessity. Hans Richter flew into history and John George into insanity within days. In response to the change from the CPE to the USE, John George and and the Elector of Brandenburg had withdrawn from the Swede's alliance. John George had never been the most popular neighbor to the up-timers, but now he was considered a traitor by the king of Sweden and at least a potential threat by the Americans. Building an airplane nominally for John George would be seen as an act as hostile as building the plane for Cardinal Richelieu. Possibly more hostile. After all, John George was closer. It made no real difference in Willem Krause's plans. He had always been careful about such things. Because if no one knew who was paying the bills, it would be harder for them to come in at the last minute and take away his airplane. Now, keeping them in ignorance would be essential to keeping the project going.

  "I lost another commission today," Pierre Trovler told Willem dejectedly "Because I'm Frenc
h. I'm not a cardinal or a politician. I'm an artist."

  "You have my sympathy, my friend," Willem told him. "As long as you don't expect me to express it too loudly. People are excited by boys at Wismar and incensed by the League. I suggest you don an appropriately patriotic mien. Perhaps a painting of the heroic outlaw driving into the enemy ship. Or, you could join the CoC. I'm just grateful no one is asking where I was born, since my family's estates are in the electorate of Brandenburg."

  "I'm already a member of the CoC," Pierre told him. "I was before this happened."

  "Really? I wouldn't have thought you were the sort. Didn't you just say you weren't political just after you disclaimed being a cardinal? Do you paint in red robes?"

  "You don't have to be a cardinal to be Catholic and you don't have to be a politician to believe in liberty. I know you're of the nobility, but you're a regular guy, not like John George."

  Willem gave no sign by word or action that anything had changed but something had. For while he was in no way John George and cordially despised the man, neither was he a regular guy. He was of the nobility and that made him different from peasants of any situation, no matter how grand their circumstance or how mean his. He was of the nobility. His genial manner was just that-a manner. He stepped down from his natural station to put people like Pierre at ease and get the best labor out of them, not because he thought them his equal. But here they thought they were-even normally sane people like Pierre. He would have to be more careful now.

  ****

  Willem watched as the technician attached the thin steel wires to his model airplane. One from the top of the model, set at the center of gravity, went through the top of the wind tunnel, over and around a pulley, off to another pulley, then down the side to a weight and gauges for reading. The bottom center of gravity wire went down through the bottom of the wind tunnel to an adjustable spring.

  There were similar sets of wires at the nose, center, tail, and wing tips. Together the wires and gauges would measure the lift and drag of the airfoil at varying wind speeds and at various flap and aileron settings.