That Simpson's ships, on the other hand, could apply up to eighty degrees of rudder, would have made them immensely more maneuverable even without the fact that they weren't solely reliant on wind power or oars. It had taken his seventeenth-century officers a while to make that mental adjustment, and then to make the necessary counter-adjustment and learn to respect the limitations that still existed. Actually, the second adjustment had been rather more harrowing for Simpson to observe. For a while, it had reminded him forcefully of Hans Richter's adventures behind the wheels of up-timer vehicles.
After that, they'd settled down, and Simpson felt reasonably confident of their ability to handle the paddle-wheel timberclads. The ironclads, though, were a different kettle of fish entirely. Crude as they might still appear to up-timer eyes, they were far more advanced in both concept and execution than the steam kettle timberclads. For all their greater size, they actually accelerated faster and had a tighter turning radius (proportionately) and a higher sustained speed than any of the steamboats that had yet been produced here in the United States of Europe.
And they were lots, lots bigger.
"Meet her," Captain Halberstat said.
The captain's voice came faintly but clearly through the open armored door. Simpson couldn't hear the helmsman's response, but Constitution steadied on her new heading, steaming directly down the center of the river. Well, not "steaming," precisely.
The pair of pumps around which each of the four ironclads had been built turned them into what Simpson sometimes thought of as the world's biggest jet skis. They'd allowed him to avoid all sorts of problems in building the things, and they offered significant tactical advantages. They didn't come without drawbacks of their own, of course. For one thing, they were big, and designing their intakes and flow lines had presented quite a few headaches. Foreign object damage was also a consideration, and designing screens to protect the intakes against objects large enough to inflict damage without thoroughly obstructing water flow had provided another set of headaches.
On the other hand, they'd kept Simpson from having to figure out how to design truly efficient propellers-something he was going to have to do by the time they started laying down the proposed screw-frigates. They were also far less vulnerable (and far more mechanically reliable) than the paddle wheels he'd used for the supporting steamers. And they were immensely more efficient at moving water… which, after all, was what any mechanical propulsion system had to do.
He stepped to the front of the open bridgework wrapped around the armored conning tower and looked ahead down the river. The pair of up-time power boats leading the ponderous line of gunboats downstream looked particularly anachronistic this morning. The fact that they were stuffed with Marines armed with flintlock rifles only added to their incongruity, but Simpson couldn't have cared less. Each of those boats, like each of his ironclads, mounted one of the precious up-time fishing fathometers and carried one of the experienced Elbe River barge pilots. Over the last several weeks, those boats and pilots had scoured the upper reaches of the Elbe, familiarizing themselves with its waters in order to pick practicable channels for Simpson's vessels.
The fact that the river was running springtime deep and that the ironclads' draft could be reduced to as little as five feet by pumping out their trim tanks had helped immeasurably with that task, but there were still a few problem areas waiting for them. Most of those had been addressed by building staustufen, or temporary holding dams, on the shallow bits. Like the more permanent wehrleucken, the staustufen's function was to raise the water level in a given section of river to something which would float the gunboats. Unlike the wehrleucken, staustufen were intended from the beginning to be temporary structures. Once the water had risen sufficiently, they were simply breached and the vessels upstream of them rode down with the released wave. Wehrleucken, on the other hand, were permanent dams with central spillways that were supposed to be broad enough for barges and other river traffic to pass through.
Unfortunately, none of the existing wehrleucken had been built to handle anything like the size of the USE's steamboats and gunboats. In the long run, a more formal and efficient system of locks was going to be necessary, and its construction was already underway. But for now, Simpson was stuck with what was already in place.
And what's already in place is stuck with me, too, he thought with a certain grim satisfaction. You should have listened to Matthias, Freiherr. He was trying to be much more reasonable than I'm going to be.
One thing about Mike Stearns, the admiral reflected. The man had nerves of steel and an intelligent ruthlessness whose depth Simpson, for one, had been woefully slow to recognize. In his own way, Stearns was every bit as ruthless and willing to resort to bare knuckles at need as Gustav Adolf himself… and just as pragmatic.
The prefix for the ships themselves, in fact, was a reflection of that characteristic of the man. SSIM stood for Schiff seiner imperialen Majestat-"His Imperial Majesty's Ship," in English. The CoCs had raised a ruckus, wanting USES instead. But since there'd been no substance to the matter beyond pure symbolism, and the issue was raising the emperor's hackles-more because he saw the CoCs as challenging him than because he really cared himself-Stearns had squelched the CoCs and settled the issue to Gustav Adolf's preference. Figuring, Simpson had no doubt, that he'd save his bargaining leverage for issues that really mattered. When the time came to fish or cut bait, Prime Minister Stearns, unlike certain other up-time political leaders Simpson could have named, never waffled.
Careful, John, he told himself. You're actually starting to like the man!
Chapter 32
"Are you sure about this, Darryl?" asked Melissa. Both she and Tom Simpson were practically squinting at McCarthy, with pretty much the same expression on their faces they might have had if Darryl McCarthy had just announced he was going to become a monk. Or, perhaps more to the point under these circumstances, he'd announced that he knew a batch of Las Vegas showgirls who'd decided to take holy vows.
"Yeah, I'm sure. Why is it so goddam hard to understand?"
"They're Yeoman Warders, Darryl," said Tom patiently. "You know. The Tower of London's Beefeaters-even if they won't be called that for another half century or so. Renowned for their unswerving loyalty to the king. That sort of thing."
"Oh, piss on that," snapped Darryl. He gave Melissa a wary eye. "Meaning no offense."
"Good thing for you there's no blackboard around," she said, half-smiling. "As I believe I've mentioned about twenty times since we got stuck in here. But Tom's question still stands, Darryl. I'll grant you that the Beefeater reputation got overlaid with a lot of sentiment by our time. But it's still true enough-and nothing we've seen since we got here has indicated otherwise. Yes, they've been very pleasant to deal with. Far more pleasant, God knows, than this bunch of thugs who've been running the Tower for the last few weeks. But I've never doubted for a moment that the Warders would do their best to stop us from trying to escape."