The Ship: The New Frontiers Series, Book One

by Jack L Knapp

  Maybe, with Chuck’s help, that would change. After all, modern fighter aircraft were so unstable as to be essentially unflyable without computer controls. Maybe such control systems would also solve Morty’s problems?

  #

  Chuck packed his bags and tossed them into the pickup, then swept and mopped the floor. He made a quick pass through the bathroom and called the landlord to tell him to come up and inspect the property. Chuck would not be there for graduation, and he would not be coming back in the fall.

  The truck’s tank was full, and a walk-around and check of the oil and radiator levels showed nothing that needed correcting. An hour later Chuck was on the road, a bag of sandwiches on the seat beside him and a case of bottled water on the passenger-side floorboard. He took US 180 east and headed for Carlsbad, New Mexico.

  He filled up in Carlsbad, then continued east. He crossed back into Texas just past Eunice, New Mexico. From there it was a straight shot to Andrews, although he wouldn’t be going that far. He turned north a few miles before reaching the town, heading up a farm-to-market road that went past Morty’s ranch.

  Chapter Three

  “Grandpa, is that the thing you’re so excited about?”

  “You’re old enough to call me Morty, Chuck. That’s it. It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

  “Nope. Where did you get all that stuff?” Chuck looked at the collection of machined parts and pulleys.

  “Some of it I salvaged from other machines. Eventually I’ll be making all new parts from scratch. I’ll admit it looks crude and Rube Goldbergish, but the proof is what happens when I fire it up. Give me a second, and you should also probably stand behind me. I’ve had accidents, but you should be safe if you stand where I am.”

  Chuck nodded and moved behind Morty as he began flipping switches on a control panel. Had Morty shrunk, or Chuck grown? It was much easier to look down at the old man from Chuck’s six foot two inch height and notice the wispiness of the white hair crowning Morty’s head. Still, the old man was active, moving around with an agility that would have done someone half his age proud. Chuck, truth be told, was hampered as much as Morty himself, in part because of the wound. Maybe, now that he was no longer spending so much time behind a computer monitor, he could work on his own physical ability? Maybe even regain some of the physical ability he’d lost? It was something to consider, when there was more time.

  But it was time to pay attention. “The important thing is to not bring everything online at once. The machine draws so much current when it’s starting up that it will trip the 15-amp circuit breakers, which is all I’ve got in the shop. This first switch powers up the left rotors.” Morty pointed to the left side of the panel. “The second switch brings up the right rotors, and I have to wait until they’re at the same RPM before I do anything else. That’s what the painted dots are for, to let me judge when they’re synchronised. If I turn on the main motor before that happens, the rotors are so unbalanced that things fly apart,” He nodded at the wall. “You can see where the parts hit when earlier models failed.”

  Chuck glanced around. The damage wasn’t obvious, but now that Morty had mentioned it, he could see the dents in the pegboard that lined the shop’s walls.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t get hurt, Morty.”

  “I was careful. I knew as soon as I applied full power that I was getting into new territory. I shut it down the first couple of times without ever giving it a full-power trial. I was worried about the vibration, but I’ve improved the rotors since then. I needed a dynamic balancer that I could adjust, and that’s what those three slots are. There’s an adjustable weight on a threaded shaft, you just turn the knurled knob to move the balance weight in toward the center or out toward the rim. It’s a pain to balance all three, but it’s precise even if it is slow and fiddly. Anyway, when I tried it out, it worked.”

  “What are those coils out on the edge of the wheels for? You called them rotors?”

  “Right, the wheels are the rotors, and they have a kind of flywheel effect. Otherwise, the coils will stop them from rotating when the start picking up the charge from the primary. There’s a kind of drag effect as the coils move through the field generated by the base coil. As soon as the rotors spin up to full speed, they’re essentially functioning as gyros as well as holding that flywheel effect. As for the coils, that’s from Tesla’s notebook. They’re essentially a variation on his radio-frequency coil, and he claimed they were essential. As the rotor spins, the coils pick up a charge from the primary coil in the base of the machine and create a revolving electromagnetic field. According to Tesla, rotating the coils around a central axis--that’s what this main shaft is for--rotates the entire field, which in turn interacts with the fabric of space. I’m not sure I understand it, but based on what I know of Tesla’s work, I can’t dismiss it either. The man was clearly a genius. You know about his broadcast power machine, right?”

  “I think I heard something about it, but he never got it working, right?”

  “Correct, he ran out of money, so we’ll never know if it would have worked or not. He was dependent on investors to finance the transmitter, and they finally balked at how much it was costing. His original concept was really expensive, but he scaled it down by half and eventually built that. The device in New York only had one trial that I’m aware of. There was a different tower built in Colorado, smaller even than the one in New York, but even so it provided enough of an effect that Tesla believed his theory was confirmed. Anyway, he built the second, larger, tower on Long Island. One difference, he excavated a very deep basement beneath the tower and put in metal grounding elements. In essence, his tower was a huge Tesla Coil that was intended to turn the ionosphere and the Earth itself into two electrical poles. The idea was that a user could hook up an antenna and a ground and tap into the broadcast field. Crystal radio sets work something like that, no battery or power cable needed.”

  “Really? So what happened?”

  “Residents complained about the earthquakes. They were small, but even so there was damage. Plates fell off shelves, things like that. There were also lightning discharges as the coil’s secondary built up to full charge, and people were scared that the lightning bolts would set their houses on fire. No one except Tesla was really disappointed when the investors pulled the plug. But what happened when he powered up his device showed me that he was onto something, and when he claimed in the notebook that this impeller could interact with space, I had no basis for rejecting it. So I started thinking about Tesla’s belief, plus I had Einstein’s ideas. Tesla likely never heard of Einstein or his general and special theories of relativity.”

  “So how do the coils charge? You said they’re part of a transformer?”

  “Right, the primary coil is built into the base that the machine is mounted on and the rotating coils are the secondaries. The coils spin up with the rotors at first, not really doing anything at that point, but when I power up the main motor, the central axle revolves and the spinning rotors bring the coils through the field generated by the primary.” Morty pointed to a heavy steel shaft running the length of the impeller. Heavy-duty pillow blocks at each end housed bearings for the shaft. A pulley was connected to the commercial-duty electric motor mounted on the base by a thick rubber belt. “The motor is a two-phase five-horsepower unit I salvaged from an industrial lathe. It drives the belt that revolves the main axle. The two pulleys are different sizes, stepping down the speed of revolution. If I try to get the main shaft up to the same speed as the motor, parts start to fly off. The gee forces are too strong. Stepping down the speed allows it to work without breaking, even though I’m not getting as much impulse as I could if the shaft was rotating at full speed.”

  “So what should I be looking at, Morty? You’ve got small motors driving rotors with pairs of coils and a big motor that’s going to revolve this whole mess as soon as you switch it on. What’s with the twin rails the frame is mounted on?”

  “The b
ottom of the frame has hooked flanges that hold it to the rails. They prevent the frame from turning, in the same way that the hooks on a roller coaster’s wheels hold it on the track. There’s a lot of counter-torque generated when I turn on the main motor. I mounted two of the smaller units so the torque canceled, but that one broke. This is the only one I’ve got that’s working now.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. So I stand behind you, you bring up the power, and what’s supposed to happen?”

  “See that dial just behind the frame? That’s a strain gauge, and that’s what I want you to watch. I’ll watch the machine, and with luck I can shut it down before it flies apart. But you’ll see what I saw when I built the first device. I wanted to prove the concept before I started putting more money into it.”

  Morty watched the spinning rotors, judging when they were at the same speed. Chuck glanced at them and noticed a blur caused by the painted dots that soon settled down into a line. Satisfied, Morty flipped the final switch on the panel. Chuck realized that this one was two switches ganged together to apply two-phase power to the large motor.

  The buzzing noise from the rotors slowed and a new sound was added to the mix, a kind of rattling whirr. Chuck glanced at the strain gauge. The needle now registered near the middle of the gauge, quivering. Slowly it crept higher and the machine’s frame crept forward on the rails. Chuck realized that if not for the mounting bar attaching the strain gauge to a large steel girder, the machine would have flown across the shop.

  A loud pop announced a tripped circuit breaker. Slowly the whining died away and the main motor slowed to a stop. Moments later, only the inertia of the rotors, still spinning, showed that anything unusual had happened.

  “I’m ready for a cup of coffee, Chuck. Come on into the kitchen and we can talk about what you’ve just seen.”

  #

  “I’ve never heard about this being in any of Tesla’s papers. I remember some of the things he did. His work was eclipsed by Edison, but Tesla invented the AC power system, so you can’t just dismiss the man.”

  “He did a lot more than that, Chuck. There’s no telling what he’d have accomplished if he’d had money, but he never really had a sense of how to hang onto what he earned. He made money, but he spent it or gave it away, and the next time he needed something financed he had to go to friends or to businessmen. Some of the businesspeople cheated him. There’s no other word for it.”

  “You didn’t say where you got the papers.”

  “Not exactly papers, it was actually a journal of his daily work. There were three of them in an old trunk your grandmother bought. She got interested in antiques, and one day she came home with that thing. She paid $5 for the locked trunk because it was heavy and she was curious. Except for Tesla’s journals, everything else was junk. There was also a letter in Tesla’s handwriting; he owed money to a man in Colorado Springs and he gave him the journals to pay off the debt. He’d done that before, according to what I read, and later on he made a habit of running up bills and giving people some of his devices to settle the debt.”

  “Interesting. So grandma bought this, and you finally found something that’s kept your interest?”

  “Yes. At first, I started reading them because Mary Ellen gave them to me, to show I was interested in her gift. Tesla’s not the easiest guy to read, I’ll tell you that much! I just kept going after she died. I really miss her, Chuck. I just wish I could have told her how I felt while she was alive. But I’ve never been able to show emotions, and now that it’s too late I really regret that. Something for you to remember, grandson. When you find your own life mate, don’t be afraid to let her know how you feel.”

  “I won’t, grandpa. I think grandma knew how you felt. She had to, considering how long you were together. You bought her horses and the ranch, so I think she knew.”

  “I hope so. But I should have told her.”

  Chuck changed the subject. “So what does your machine do, Morty? I can’t deny that demonstration was interesting, but what would you do with it if you got the vibration and control problems solved?”

  “I call it an impeller, Chuck. Tesla only claimed that it provide impulse. This one’s crude, but even so it’s an improvement over my first few efforts. You apply electricity, you get motion, it’s just that simple. You don’t need propellers or jets or rockets, and you don’t need to couple it to wheels. I’m using AC to drive the motors, but DC might work better. Easier to control, I think. You could reverse the polarity of the electricity and cause the impeller to push backwards.”

  “Where did you get the coils on the rotors? Those aren’t off the shelf components, something you can just buy anywhere.”

  “No, I made them. I’ve got a small lathe I use just for winding coils. I bought it used from a shop that does custom motor rewinding. I had to do some repairs to get the lathe working, but I managed it. I’ve had to do a lot of that, rebuilding machines, because I didn’t have the money for new machinery. The lathe was old and the bed was out of true, but after I rebuilt it, it worked fine. That was the last machine I needed, so my shop is complete, for the time being anyway. I can begin building all the impeller parts from scratch when I’m ready for the final version. My major expense these days is buying copper wire.

  “The next version will use motors that I’ll build myself. The rotors will have the moving coils built into the hub, and the stator coils will be part of the fixed shaft. I’ll use thicker steel rods for the main shaft too. Heavier parts seem to make everything more stable, maybe because of the flywheel effect. Anyway, I can do all that, so what I was hoping was that you could come up with electronic control systems to automatically do what I’m doing by hand.”

  “I can do that, I think. The hard part is designing and installing the measuring instruments. You have to have sensors and measuring devices or the control units can’t work. They also have to be in the right location if you expect good results. Instead of DC motors, why not use frequency controlled AC? I’ll need to measure the RPM of each rotor, but that’s just standard stuff, easy to do. I’ll set up feedback loops based on the rotor speed and run the loops through a small processor chip on the frame. Probably the best place is near where the pillow blocks are mounted. Anyway, the processors will control the rotor speeds automatically, so you won’t have to worry about those. I’ll set up a control for what the main motor does using a central computer. A joystick input will make it easy to vary the power input to the main motor, so that’s your speed control. If I add a switch on the joystick panel, I should be able to reverse the input so you can go forward or put it in reverse. I can also install instruments to detect vibration and automatically damp it out, maybe by varying rotor speed to counter the vibration. I’ll have to try that and see how it works. It’ll take some thought, but I doubt I’ll have any real problems. I should be able to have a working system by the time you finish your next version of the impeller. How many did you plan on using on whatever you want to build?”

  “I hadn’t gone that far. I figured to build a cart with maybe two, one on each side. That way, one could run counterclockwise and the other clockwise. That would get rid of the torque problem if the cart was stiff enough not to flex in the middle.”

  “Suppose you had four impellers, one at each corner, pointing up? Would it lift off the ground?”

  “I don’t see why not, but it would depend on the weight and how much power you had available. We’d have to be careful that all four impellers put out the same impulse, too. Control might be a problem.”

  “That’s what computers are for, Morty. Why don’t we try it?”

  “Why would we want to do that, Chuck?”

  “Morty, you’ve been thinking that this impeller might power cars or trucks, right?”

  “Well, no. It seems to me that it might work all right for long-haul heavy trucks, but it’s not really responsive enough to operate in traffic. Diesel and regular automotive systems work fine already, and for that matter there
are several hybrid or all-electric vehicles already operating. Using an impeller for power wouldn’t be an advantage.

  “What I had in mind was an impeller system to power a boat, maybe even a ship. You could totally seal the hull, no openings below the waterline, and put an impeller or maybe several impellers inside. An impeller-powered hydrofoil craft would be a major improvement over conventional systems. You could angle the impellers upward at twenty degrees or so and the lift would help the boat get up on the hydrofoils at slower speeds, so it could be maneuvered easier. Hydrofoils can’t turn as tight as regular ships, but if the impeller system could keep the hull from leaning too far, you could make tight turns even at full speed. Anyway, that was my first idea. I thought about railroads too. It might be possible to do away with the locomotive entirely. They’re already diesel-electric; the diesel drives a generator and that powers a huge electric traction motor. It would be easy enough to adapt the electric output to drive an impeller, maybe several, so you wouldn’t spin the wheels while the locomotive was getting the train up to speed. Suppose each railcar had its own impeller, or maybe two? The engineer wouldn’t deal with that diesel-electric system, he’d just control the power going to the impellers in each car. Edison built a system like that early on, powering each car separately, but it never caught on. Using impellers to counter the lean in a turn would also mean that accidents, where someone was going too fast to stay on the tracks, wouldn’t happen.”

  “That’s not bad. Is this as far as you’ve gone?”

  “Well, first I needed to get it working. I need a better way to control the problems I’ve been having, and I don’t know much about computers. I was hoping you could help.”

  “I can, but I can do more than that. You’ve got the basic idea, but we might want to think bigger. How about airplanes? Wouldn’t your impeller work on those?”

  “Well, sure. I don’t see why not. You’d need a source of electricity. Batteries wouldn’t work, they don’t have enough power. Generators, such as that diesel-electric system I mentioned, are too heavy for aircraft use. Maybe we could use fuel cells.”