Never Sound Retreat by William R. Forstchen Read Free Book Online Page A

hold down one side.
    "By doing that they cut down on the bulk of the actual airship, there's less drag. It means they can't hover unless flying into a significant head wind, but it also means they can go a hell of a lot faster. You also mentioned that you saw what looked like flaps on the end of the wings."
    Jack, reaching into his haversack, pulled out his own drawings and pointed them out.
    "You said you saw the flaps moving, then the ship banked over and turned?"
    "Yup. They don't turn in a flat circle; they bank over and turn." As he spoke Jack held up his hands, tilted them, and moved them through a turn.
    Warming to his subject, Chuck picked up a pencil and jotted a quick sketch into the corner of his own drawings.
    "That allows tighter turns. They don't just use a rudder to turn. Damn, I never thought of that. It'd be easy enough to put those flaps on our wings and run cables back to a control stick. I've been thinking about that engine on the wing arrangement as well. It cuts down drag with fuel tanks inside the wings.
    "The length of the wings is rather long, how about if we tried this?" And yet again his pencil scribbled out a change in design, Jack leaning over the table, watching.
    "Cut the wings in half and put one on top of the other?"
    "Strange-looking I know, but with support struts going between the two wings it will make them stiffer, a biwing design. I even thought of another change." He pointed to the bow of the ship.
    "Pilot up front and forward?" Jack asked.
    "With the old design, the gondola car underneath, you had a 360-degree view, but it was underneath. If we put you up forward in the bow, you'd have a 360-degree view forward, up, and down. You'd also have a forward view down as you did before. We'd put a second person in what I'd call a turret directly under the wings. He'd be a gunner and could also drop bombs. We'd put a third person, a gunner, topside and aft on the tail. You'd all be hooked together by speaker hoses, and I even thought of a small access tunnel that your bomb dropper could use to get up to the forward cab. With this arrangement there isn't a blind spot on the entire ship."
    "How long before we get them?"
    "That's the problem." Chuck sighed. "Three weeks, maybe a month for the smaller test model, three months or more for ships with the range of Flying Cloud. My suggestion is that we scrap those currently under production and take the material to refit for this new design."
    "That leaves us with no ships at all."
    Chuck nodded. "More Flying Cloud models would be nothing but sitting ducks, even with the wings I was putting on. I want to take one of the smaller two-engine models, refit it, use it as a test. Then start turning out two-engine models like the Bantag's, and then some of these."
    He pulled out another sheet of paper and unrolled it. Jack could feel a rush of desire, as if Chuck had unrolled a copy of one of the racy lithographs that someone had been mysteriously producing in the last couple of months and which had become so popular with the soldiers.
    "Four engines, 120-foot wingspan but with only half the gas of Flying Cloud. I figure it can do nearly sixty miles an hour, maybe seventy. It should be able to carry half a ton of bombs six hundred miles."
    "How many can you make?"
    "I want sixty of the smaller ones as escorts," Chuck replied, "and twenty of these big ones by next spring."
    Amazed, Jack shook his head.
    "I know, seems impossible, but I think this war will be decided by airships. I don't want them fed in piecemeal. I convinced Colonel Keane on that score. Build them and unleash them all at once, have one all-out pitched battle and destroy their airship facilities on the ground. We struck a deal with the Cartha, paying a pretty penny, but with them as the middlemen we're buying every stitch of silk to be had."
    "The Cartha?"
    "Yeah, I know, the bastards are playing both sides."
    Jack could understand the pressure they were under, the ruins of the Merki tribes