The Monster
Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett
The Eagle Flies
Magdalena van de Passe stood outside the building and stared. She paid not the slightest attention to what was going on around her; she had eyes only for the plane that was flying overhead. She had seen airplanes on TV, but she had seen dragons and giant apes on TV, too. A civilized person and old Grantville hand knew that just because they had it on TV didn’t mean that they could do it in the here and now. It didn’t even mean that it was real up-time.
She couldn’t hear the engine, or maybe she heard it just a little; it might be her imagination. It didn’t matter. The plane was real. Man had learned to fly and could do it in the here and now. And she was going to. She didn’t know how, she didn’t know when. But she was going to fly. Whatever the cost. She felt almost like she was flying now. After the plane had gone over and while people were running off to wherever they were running off to, Magdalena went back inside. She needed to be alone and to think. Her life had just taken a sharp turn and was running off in a new direction. She needed to catch up with herself.
Back in the building, she looked at the books that had accumulated over the last months. She had come to Grantville at the combined request of her father and her patron. An engraver from a family of engravers, Magdalena was here to learn about opportunities in that field and opportunities in general. To facilitate that, she was studying up-timer business practices. She had found it interesting; now she found it positively engrossing. Right there on her desk was a paper on the costs of mule trains and how they compared to barge traffic, the new rail lines, and trucks on the improved roads. What about airplanes? How much would they cost? How much could they carry? What were their hidden costs?
Suddenly, Magdalena’s life was making another turn or perhaps she was catching up with the last one. The outline of a plan was forming. There were a lot of pieces missing, but she could fill those in; she was sure of it. Meanwhile she had some letters to write.
* * *
Dearest Father,
I pray that you will put aside your reasonable skepticism and gift me with a continuation of that trust you gave me when you sent me to this place of wonders. For what I have to tell you next may make you wish you had sent my brother instead.
Magdalena had been sent instead of her brother because she was probably the least trusting member of the family. Her brother was a talented artisan but “he’d buy the Brooklyn Bridge without even arguing the price,” as she had heard Cora Beth say.
I would not believe the report I must now make lest I had seen it with my own eyes. Not ten minutes ago, I stood outside this very building and watched a flying machine overhead. With my own eyes, Papa. I would not accept such a claim on lesser evidence. Nor can I truly expect you to. What I do ask is that you begin to let yourself consider believing that it is possible.
I make this request because one thing came very clear to me as I watched the manmade bird sail over head. There are no toll collectors in the sky.
Your Services No Longer Required
“Sorry, Georg. But with Jesse Wood running the Air Force...” Vanessa Holcomb actually seemed sorry, though they hadn’t gotten along. Kitt Aviation was letting all the down-timers go, because Jesse Wood had beaten them into the sky and would be deciding who got the government contracts. They said they were going to have to cut back. The rest sort of flowed over him as he dealt with the fact that the sky was no longer his to claim.
* * *
Two days later Georg Markgraf paced back and forth outside the Gardens. This was a crazy idea. He wasn’t any good with people; he knew that. Maybe he should try to join the Air Force...but the line was long for pilot training. Besides, he wanted to build planes more than he wanted to fly them. And the up-timers had that part pretty much sewn up, so far as the Air Force was concerned. He had tried the Kelly’s; they weren’t hiring either. That left starting his own company.
* * *
Georg finally ran down and most of his guests left, but Farrell Smith stayed. “Kid, you are not good at public speaking. Your presentation skills are pitiful. You’re not well organized and you get distracted. In fact, you pretty much suck at it.”
Georg slumped and buried his head in his hands. “I know. I know. But I can build a plane.” He thumped his chest. “In here, I know it. I have seen the designs at Kitt. Seen the designs at Kelly. I understand aerodynamics; the numbers and concepts make sense to me. I can do as well. Better. Because they are not considering what we can do now. They all concentrate on what can be salvaged, not what can be built anew.”
“How do you mean?”
“Craftsmanship!” Georg held up his hands. “I don’t mean fancy doodads. I mean the ability of a good craftsman to judge wood, its strengths and weaknesses, by feel. To shape it using the structure of the wood itself. I mean the skills of a good leather worker to make a saddle or a wine sack and pick the right leather for the right job. Those skills can be combined with your up-time tools and knowledge to craft airplanes.”
Farrell kept him talking late into the night. Because the kid had a point. Just before Farrell left, Georg asked, “Do you think any of them will invest?”
“Not a chance, son. I’d be running too, if I didn’t know you a bit and Dad hadn’t said some good things about you.” Farrell shook his head. “Those folks came here half sold after Jesse Wood’s flight. You managed to convince them that investing in flight was crazy.”
“What do I do now?”
“You wait. Just hang on and let me see what I can do.” Farrell assured Georg that he’d contact him in a couple of days. The boy had good ideas. After listening to him talk about the monocoque design he had in mind, Farrell was convinced of several things. Georg Markgraf was as qualified as anyone in Grantville, outside of Farrell’s father, Hal, to design aircraft. Georg wasn’t, however, qualified to run a company whether it designed aircraft or made thumb tacks. And, finally, Georg had to be prevented from making presentations in front of potential investors at all costs.
Farrell paused, then turned back. “Georg, where are you staying?” With the kids moving out, the house was a bit empty. He’d have to clear it with Mary but perhaps the kid could stay with them. Farrell wasn’t really qualified to run a business, either. He could put together a presentation, even if it would end up sounding like a lecture.
“I was sharing a room with a friend. It’s paid for the rest of the month.”
* * *
Farrell wasn’t all that much of a salesman himself, but after years of teaching shop at least he could sound like he knew what he was talking about and keep on point. He made the presentations. The fact that his father was the one and only aeronautical engineer who had been brought with the Ring of Fire didn’t hurt and the timing was good. After Jesse Wood flew and, especially, after Hans Richter soloed, people were ready to throw money at flight projects. It had been proven that it could be done down-time and the down-timers—even more than the up-timers—saw the potential benefit.
There were more than rational reasons for this. The simple fact was that the New US, and much of the CPE, was caught up in the romance of flight.
We Need a Bigger Plane
June 25, 1633
Dear Sirs:
TransEuropean Airlines is seeking bidders to produce one or more aircraft to open passenger and cargo service to various cities within and without the USE. The planes must be capable of carrying at least ten passengers or one ton of cargo for a distance of at least three hundred miles non-stop.
We will provide partial funding on approved designs. Further, we will provide aid in acquiring or constructing engines, within reason. We will provide final payment after successful test flights are completed.
On successful completion of testing of the first aircraft, we will guarantee to buy up to ten more, if the manufacturer can provide them to us within a reasonable period of time.
Contact M. van de Passe
Address: 2613 Makem Rd
Phone: 448-5767
Magdalena looked at the letter and smiled. The letter would go out to Kelly, to Kitt and to anyone else who might be doing anything serious in terms of aviation. It would also go out to potential investors to let them know that TEA was serious. Of course, TEA didn’t actually have the money to pay for the aircraft yet. But like the bible didn’t say “Act as if you have financial backing and financial backing will be given unto you.”
* * *
“I’m not sure I believe this.” Georg Markgraf sat at the desk, staring at the computer screen.
Farrell glanced over. “What’ya got?” The computer was running an Excel spreadsheet, full of formulas, drag coefficients, lift calculations, wing stresses...all he had to do was plug-in a few variables and out came a pretty good estimate of the flight speed, stall speed, ceiling, empty weight, loaded weight. In general, the results were the probable flight envelope of the projected aircraft.
“That letter we got from TransEuropean Airlines. It got me to thinking. So I started plugging in numbers to see what I got.”
“Umm hum?” The spreadsheet had started with something Farrell’s father, Hal, and Vanessa Holcomb had put together. Excel was such a powerful program that the various designers, including Georg, had started adding bits. More formula based on up-time books, then more based on experimentation to fill in the gaps. It was a pretty good tool by now, one that let you try things and get a rough idea how they would work.
“Well, I plugged in a hundred and twenty-foot wingspan and got a stall speed of like twenty miles per hour.”
“Never work. With the materials...” Farrell stopped speaking because Georg was glaring at him. He had forgotten Georg’s wing stress kludge.
“I know that.” Georg’s irritation was as evident in his voice as it had been in his look. Then he visibly shook it off. “We couldn’t support even an eighty-foot wingspan. Not in a monoplane.”
“A biplane? They’re a lot less efficient. You only get about eighty percent as much lift for the wing area.”
“Sure. But the upper and lower wings support each other, so they don’t have to be nearly as strong. And if the lower wing is shorter than the upper, we only lose lift where both wings are involved. It lets us extend the upper wing farther out. With a seventy-foot lower wing, we could have a hundred-foot upper wingspan.”
“What about drag?”
“A lot, but drag is a function of speed and this would be slow.” Georg laughed. “To think I would ever call sixty miles per hour slow. I’m more concerned about the strutting disrupting laminar flow.”
Farrell scooted his chair over to the computer and started to examine Georg’s numbers for real. The four Jeep engines would only put out a grand total of maybe six hundred horsepower. But that was all this thing would need if the numbers were right. “A biplane with those? And have the darn thing fly?”
Georg waved his hand at the computer. “The spreadsheet says we can.” He drew pictures in the air. “The upper wing would have a hundred feet of span, the lower seventy. The lower wing is as much to support and strengthen the upper as to give added lift.” He sat back down at the desk. “I’ve got to check these figures. Go away.”
Farrell did. There wasn’t much point in trying to talk to Georg when he was calculating.
* * *
Slowly, as he went through checking the formulas to be sure he hadn’t dropped a decimal some place, Georg began to believe it. It would be, he was convinced, unlike in any plane that had ever flown. It would be more like a powered glider than an ordinary airplane.
Georg loved the DC3. He had ever since he had seen one in the movies; more so after he had read up on them. A lot of flight enthusiasts loved that plane, he’d discovered. The DC3 Dakota was perhaps the most-loved plane in up-time history. It was also totally out of the technical reach of anyone down-time. It had two radial engines, each putting out over a thousand horsepower. It was all metal construction and that much aluminum simply wasn’t available. But it—or as close to it as they could get—was what TEA wanted.
The biplane that was staring back at him from the numbers on his computer screen would have over one and a half times the wing area of the DC3. It would need it, because it would have barely a third of the horsepower. It would need the extra lift just to get off the ground, as under-powered as it was. Its cruising speed would be less than half that of the Dakota’s, but then its landing speed would be a lot less, too. With a full cargo load, it would have about five hours flight time. Right at three hundred miles.
It would carry a ton and a half of cargo, perhaps a bit more. The body would be a semi-monocoque construction—part of the structural support coming from internal bracing, part from the shape of the structure—made of a composite of fiberglass, and viscose that they had been testing, making for a light strong airframe. It would be a lot like the Dakota, except it would be made of fiberglass rather than aluminum. It would be well-streamlined, even the supports between the wings. But in power and speed it would be closer to something out of World War One or earlier.
“We really can do it.” Georg pulled out a paper and pen and started to draw.
* * *
Hal Smith snorted. “I can see what the kid’s gone and done, Farrell. He didn’t know it, but he’s reinvented the wheel. If he’d ever seen a picture of the Ilya Muromets built by Igor Sikorsky near the dawn of aviation, he’d have recognized it right off. This is as close a cousin to it as I ever saw.”
“So it will fly?” Farrell asked. “I thought it would, but couldn’t be sure.”
His dad gave him the look that said “I always was disappointed in you.” Then he nodded. “It’ll fly...assuming you can build it.”
* * *
“Hand me the scraper.” Georg didn’t look up. He had heard a sound and assumed it was someone who belonged there. An instrument was put in his hand. He glanced at it. “Not that one. The corrugated one.” He stuck his head out from under the section of fuselage enough to see a pair of legs in the split skirts that all the ladies seemed to be wearing these days. He didn’t recognize the legs. “The wiggly one.”
Having received the right scraper, he went back to his work. “Sorry. I have to get this done before the viscose dries. It’s like cardboard, you see. The strength comes from the shape and where the bits connect.” Having gotten the fabric pressed into the grooves, Georg climbed out from under the section he was working on and looked at his unknown helper.
He saw a woman of medium height and quite a nice figure, but it was her eyes that really caught his attention. Intelligent eyes that were examining what he had been doing. “Ah...Are you looking for work? We don’t have anything right now, but check back in a couple of weeks. We’re expecting a big contract.”
“I’ve seen cardboard. This doesn’t look like it. Isn’t cardboard supposed to have flat sheets on either side of the curvy bits? And aren’t the curvy bits straight?”
Georg grinned. He couldn’t help it. “I’m constantly trying to figure a way of putting it that makes sense myself. Corrugated cardboard’s inside sheet is given a curvy fold in one direction because it’s easier to do it that way in a cardboard making machine and because cardboard is mostly used for making boxes. The corrugations add strength, but primarily in one direction. We need the added strength to go in different directions at different places in the structure. So we adjusted the corrugations to curve around the structure to give added strength where we need it in the direction we need it.”
Georg waved his hand at Joseph Kepler. “Joseph is the carver. I just told him where the stresses were going to be. We’ll add a smooth top coat later for added strength and streamlining.”
* * *
Farrell finally got off the phone and headed for the shop. He had to get Georg out of there before he blew the deal. When he entered the shop he found Georg and the crew talking with a young woman about engraving, and how it was sort of like the way they made the forms. “I hate to break this up but Herr de Passe is on the way from TEA and we need to get Georg out of here before he opens mouth and inserts foot.” Farrell looked around the shop. “And get this place cleaned up. Let’s try to look like a real company that might actually be able to build the airplanes they want.”
“Too late,” Magdalena said.
* * *
“You’re not ready for this thing yet, Georg,” Magdalena said after they had shown her the designs for what Georg called the Jupiter. “I’ve seen what you’re trying and like most of it, but you don’t even have a single engine plane in the air yet. Do you have any idea how much the fiberglass costs? It’s too much to invest on a first plane. Finish the Mercury. You have a buyer for that one. Learn from it and refine your designs.”
It clearly wasn’t what Georg or Farrell wanted to hear. Well, it wasn’t what Magdalena wanted to say. But facts were facts. After they had built a smaller plane that would fly, she would talk to them again. Besides, she didn’t have the money to pay TEA’s part of the cost yet.
* * *
Vrijheer Abros Thys Van Bradt found it necessary to leave Amsterdam due to the sudden arrival of unwelcome guests, an army of Spaniards under Cardinal Infante Don Fernando. He was forced to leave behind most of his wealth, taking only his wife and immediate servants. He stayed with a cousin for a short period, but he couldn’t spend his life there; he had business that needed attending. So in a matter of a few weeks he started making his way to the Ring of Fire. From what he understood, it was an excellent location to do business. He almost went to Venice, but he remembered a letter and a small investment he already had in Grantville.
As the primary patron of the de Passe family, he had been allowed to read the letter Magdalena had written to her father and he had believed it. More than the word of the flight, he was impressed with the cost analysis of other forms of transport that she had sent along. It was nothing he didn’t already know, but it had taken him years of experience to get the feel for it.
He arrived in Grantville on August fifteenth, with very little cash on hand and much of his wealth locked behind a siege hundreds of miles away. He still had connections and, surprisingly, the Amsterdam guilders were worth more than expected.
“So, girl. Tell me about airplanes and this airline you’ve started.”
Magdalena told him. She told him about the other investors she had lined up, about the costs she had calculated and what they would need. They discussed where they would get fuel, oil, pilots, aircraft and a host of other things.
He provided introductions to other investors and helped to persuade them to invest. The strategic reserve of fuel had been used, which had driven the price of fuel through the roof but that was a temporary problem.
“Yes, but,” Fredrich Kline, one of the investors said yet again. “There is still the problem of shipping the fuel. That doubles the price right there, more than doubles it, I’d say.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Magdalena said, “the fuel is a mix of fifteen percent gasoline and eighty-five percent ethanol. Ethanol is really just alcohol—twice distilled spirits. So even when you do need to ship the gasoline to the airport, you only need to ship fifteen gallons for every hundred gallons of fuel.”
Vrijeer Van Bradt nodded. “It will take organization to set up airports and find the most economic way to get this gasoline to them. But Magdalena makes a good point. Spirits are available almost anywhere and—since they are not for drinking—the cheapest, poorest quality can be used.”
* * *
It took some wheedling, something any artist learned to do early, and Magdalena expected that. Still, it hadn’t taken all that much. For every lord who controlled a pass, there were a dozen merchants and lords who resented having to pay the tolls. It was only partly economics; a big part was anger and the desire to get some of their own back. They liked the idea of their cargoes sailing over the toll stations of “Baron-I’ll-take-mine-off-the-top.” That was where most of her investors had come from, people that had been hit with tolls or robbed by bandits.
Yes, it was a potentially profitable venture but the way their faces lit up at the thought of flying over all the tolls and risks of land travel...Magdalena honestly thought that some of them wouldn’t care if they lost money on every flight as long as “Baron-Off-the-Top” didn’t get it. Of course, each of the investors had their own unreasonable “baron” that they had to deal with, whether it was a Lutheran school or a group of merchants that collected the tolls. In fact, more than a few of the investors collected tolls of their own. That didn’t change the fact that they resented it when they had to pay them.
* * *
They finished the Mercury and sold it to Cristoforo Racciato. They did learn from it. The Mercury was a bit of a mishmash of concepts and Cristoforo was quite good about telling them where he was having problems with it as well as what he liked. Cristoforo was introduced to Magdalena and took her flying. Georg wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He wanted very much for TEA to buy his Jupiter four-engine biplane. But Cristoforo was charming and Georg wasn’t. So he found himself glad that Magdalena was flying in his airplane but wishing that Cristoforo was rather less charming.
* * *
Cristoforo munched contentedly on a sandwich. He loved eating in the air. In fact, he loved doing just about anything in the air. He checked the gauges on the Mercury, then glanced at the horizon. A storm front was building, but he figured he could beat it to Leipzig. Or at least find a field closer to Leipzig to set down in. A little later, looking back, he saw lighting and began to look for a good place to set down.
* * *
Five minutes later, he was still looking and the storm was getting close. He pushed the stick a little forward as the world turned into gray mist. Slowly losing altitude, he tried to get below the clouds where he could see to land. He was going to be late and Gus had said that the parts were needed in a hurry. He’d offered Cristoforo enough money for a dozen tanks of gas. While Cristoforo was trying to figure out how to explain to Gus that it wasn’t his fault, the engine died. He tried to restart. He was losing altitude too fast, so he pulled back just a little on the stick and tried the engine again.
Between the added weight of the rain and the added drag of flying through raindrops, the plane was handling a bit differently than Cristoforo was used to. It went into a stall and he wasn’t ready for it. The delay in his response cost vital seconds and Cristoforo’s lack of experience cost more. Still, he almost made it.
He had managed to pull out of the stall, induced spin and had the plane level again but he had used up all his altitude doing it. He was going to land—like it or not—and he was coming in hot, fast and heavy. The field had been plowed and was in the process of being turned into mud by the rain. The Mercury bounced once on the top of a furrow but then a wheel hit in a furrow. The wheel stopped, but the plane didn’t. It nosed into the mud, bounced again and landed upside down. The cockpit roof collapsed and his skull was crushed by the impact.
* * *
Heinrich Bauer heard the noise and went out in the rain to check it out. What he found was what was left of a plane in his field. Well, partly in his field, partly in Johan’s. He wasn’t the only one. Several of the villagers had come out to determine what the noise had been. After checking on the pilot and confirming that he was in fact dead, they retreated back indoors to try to figure out what to do.
The next day they sent a rider to Leipzig and started cleaning up the mess. They were later told that they should have left everything just where it was till the investigators got there, but by then it was much too late. They did collect up the bits of wrecked plane and scattered cargo and put it in a barn in case it might be worth something, but they had work to do.
It wasn’t that they weren’t sorry about the boy. He had never done anything to them but crash in their fields, and it was clear enough that it hadn’t been on purpose. But he was already dead. There wasn’t anything they could do for him. And they had no reason to believe that anyone could tell anything from the crash site that they hadn’t been able to tell.
* * *
“Damned shame.” Georg shook his head and continued to pick through the rubble of the Mercury. It had been sent to them by the Racciato family in the hopes they could determine what had gone wrong.
Cristoforo had been a good kid.
“It seems to me that he waited a little long before he tried to set her down,” Farrell said. “Or maybe it was just bad luck. The clouds were pretty low that day from the reports.”
Georg nodded. But he was busy going over the report. “Look at this. The villagers didn’t hear anything until the crash. The engine must have died. Water in the carburetor, you think?”
“Hard to tell. We’ll know more after we go over the engine.” Farrell pointed to a piece of the wreckage. “It could be that the weight of the rain on top of the weight of the cargo pulled some screws loose.”
On the strength of Cristoforo’s praise they had gotten two new orders for Mercury-style aircraft. With his death, those orders had been canceled. Georg was convinced that they would have kept them, at least kept one of them, if the designer had been an up-timer. And they still didn’t have a contract with TEA.
The Contract
November 1633
Whap!
Georg jumped. Magdalena could be fairly temperamental, but she didn’t usually try to beat the table to pieces as she was doing now. “Ah, Magdalena? What is the matter?”
Whap! The file folders hit the table again while Magdalena worked out her frustrations. “They won’t sell. ‘We’re going to build them, and fly them,’ they said. So TEA can’t buy their plane.”
Georg cast a glance at Farrell, who hid a grin of relief. “We have the plans for the Jupiter ready, Magdalena. Well, almost ready.”
Georg and Farrell had both been worried that one of the other aviation companies would beat them to the punch. Now, with the refusal to sell to TEA, they still had a chance. Georg, for more than one reason, wanted the sale to TEA. Not only did he want his own plane in the air, he was very interested in Magdalena, who appeared to return that interest.
Magdalena glared around the room. “I have a sneaking suspicion that you’re not quite as sympathetic to TEA’s plight as you pretend to be.” Then just a touch of grin showed through the storm. “Never mind. Show me the progress reports. Where are you with the Jupiter?”
* * *
Magdalena was learning to be a pilot and had seen sea planes on TV since coming to Grantville but she wasn’t an aircraft designer. An airport, while not that difficult to build, was needed for a large aircraft. At least she assumed it was. She didn’t want a repeat of what happened to Cristoforo. Not with a plane full of passengers.
She asked Georg to replace the wheels with pontoons or make the fuselage into a hull.
Georg promised to look into it. It was only a couple of days later that he delivered the bad news.
“It won’t work. Pontoons don’t sit on the water, they sit in the water. They displace as much water as the weight of the plane on top of them, all the cargo and fuel it’s carrying, plus the weight of the pontoons themselves. When the plane tries to take off they push that much water out of the way. All the way from the start of the taxi to lift off, and drag more water with them.”
“But there are sea planes all over the movies from up-time.”
“Yes.” Georg snorted. “And thousand horsepower engines to pull them out of the water.” Georg’s face was a picture of desperation. “The long wings that let us take off at thirty miles per hour are just that much more weight when you put the plane on pontoons. I talked to Herr Smith about it. The flying boats of the thirties used ten percent of their fuel loads on takeoff and landing. They ran those thousand horsepower monsters full out—they had to just to get into the air—then they cut the power way down for level flight. I’m sorry, Magdalena, but with the engines we have, it would never get into the air.”
“I’ll hire Maria,” Magdalena said. Maria was a friend from before she had come here. She had a knack for finding things in the National Library.
“Won’t do any good.” Georg glared at her. He was not, she knew, that fond of Maria. “I’ve already studied everything they have on aircraft.”
Nor did he lack for ego. Sometimes Magdalena wondered what she saw in him. A lot of the time, actually. Yes, he was the smartest person she had ever met, but sometimes he was a real jerk. Of course, sometimes he was anything but.
“TEA needs a certain amount of flexibility if we can possibly get it.” She gave Georg one of her best looks. “It’s worth a try.”
* * *
“Eureka,” Maria whispered. What she really wanted to do was shout. MSP Aeronautics was her first major client. They had hired her after their investors had insisted that the plane must be capable of water landing and take off. But who would have thought that she would find it in a Time magazine article? She read the first part of the article again.
Aug. 25, 1967
Everything seemed normal when Test Pilot David W. Howe eased the LA4 “Lake” amphibian toward Niagara Falls International Airport earlier this month. He radioed a highly abnormal report to the tower: “Bag down and inflated.” Seconds later he landed—without wheels—on a cushion of air.”
The article went on to describe—with a maddening lack of technical detail—the principles and basic structure of ACLG, Air Cushion Landing Gear, conceived by Bell’s T. Desmond Earl and Wilfred J. Eggington. It was simple enough in principle—put an airplane on top of a hovercraft. At least that’s the way the article made it seem. Maria spent the rest of the day getting a start on learning about hovercraft to try and fill in some of the technical details that the Time article left out.
* * *
“This doesn’t make sense,” Georg complained. “If this is so good why didn’t they use it up-time? This article says it happened over thirty years before the Ring of Fire.”
“I have no idea.” Maria smiled. “I do know that a lot of stuff they had, they didn’t use. Mostly it was because they had something better, but not always. Sometimes—” She shrugged. “—they just didn’t.”
“I think I might know,” Farrell said. “Look at the date. By sixty-seven little private airports were all over the place. I used to love to look at the planes as we went by one on the highway. Most planes had no need for amphibious take off and landing. So ninety percent of the potential market is gone before they start. As for the planes that did need to be amphibious, well, pontoons were a known tech. The FAA already had all the guidelines in place. The manufacturers knew how to build them, the FAA knew now to test them, the pilot knew how to check them before flight. By the time the air cushion came along in the sixties, it was competing with established tested products.
“It probably would have cost Bell millions to jump through all the hoops the FAA would have wanted. For what? Maybe a thousand sales a year and liability down the line if someone blew the maintenance requirements and got themselves killed.” Farrell shook his head. “I’d lay five to two that the bean-counters got hold of it and said, ‘Don’t bother.’ Once that happened, well, they never took off because if you owned a plane you could buy pontoons but you couldn’t buy this ACLG stuff.”
“That’s not the real question,” Magdalena interrupted. “The real question is ‘can we do it?’ ”
Maria pulled another file from her case. This one consisted of a report she had made after interviewing Neil O’Connor, who had turned out to be something of a creep. Neil was the proud owner of a home-built hovercraft that he had built after the Ring of Fire. After his discharge from the Army—a discharge he and his family didn’t discuss—he used it to provide rapid transport down the Saale River. Because it was a hovercraft, it didn’t care how shallow the water in the Saale was. It went right over sand bars with out even noticing them. He could get you from Grantville to Halle in half a day. And right now the railroads were looking like they were going to put him out of business in the next year or so.
Neil was probably going to be needing a job any time now, and building air cushion landing gear might well be his out. That hadn’t kept him from hitting on Maria from the moment they had met. He was one of those up-timer guys that figured any down-timer girl would just naturally be thrilled to be his latest conquest. However, if Maria had it right, they were going to need Neil even more than he needed them. While simple in principle, air cushions weren’t all that simple in practice. They weren’t just skirts but a sort of a cross between skirts and leaky balloons. The design had to push the air inward.
Neil’s air cushion was a series of tubes pointing at the ground, placed in a circle around the outer edge of his craft. There were two layers of plywood above that, with a gap between them. The fan was set into the top layer of plywood. When the fan was turned on the air was spread between the two layers of plywood and escaped from there into the tubes which inflated. The tubes formed an inward curving ring around the craft and as the air was forced through them much of it escaped into the area surrounded by the ring.
The way Neil explained it, there were three levels of pressure. The lowest pressure was the air outside the hovercraft. The highest was the air in the tubes and between the two layers of plywood. The middle pressure was in the area below the plywood bottom and surrounded by the inflated tubes. It was the way the air had to flow that kept the skirt of the hovercraft from blowing up like Marilyn Monroe’s skirt in The Seven Year Itch. Neil had leered at her when he said that part.
The tubes were made of oiled leather, with removable thicker bits at the bottom where the worst wear was. Neil generally had to change out one or more of the extensions every trip, which was one of the reasons why his service was so expensive.
Maria hesitated but she was a professional. “There is another option.”
Farrell looked at her and smiled encouragement, so she continued. “Hydrofoils. Herr Bell, inventor of the telephone, was working on hydrofoil landing gear from the beginning of the twentieth century. While it’s clear that he got hydrofoils to work, I have not been able to see any case of a plane actually taking off using them. I have no idea why but I think they didn’t work.” After some discussion—and over Georg’s objections—they decided to go with the air cushion landing gear. The Time article was proof that it did actually work.
* * *
The problem with air cushion landing gear became apparent as soon as they started to seriously look at it in terms of something designed to leave the ground. Once the ground was taken away the air escaped almost instantly, the skirt deflated and stayed deflated till the plane landed. Not till it was going to land, until it was on the ground. They worried over that a lot. It was the Time article that finally came to the rescue. “Bag down and inflated,” the pilot had said. The air cushion on the plane up-time wasn’t a skirt, not even a fancy skirt. It was a bag.
Building the Monster
January 1634
The ACLG required several changes in the design of the aircraft. The lower wings were shortened and their width increased. They became short stubby things, barely forty feet wide. The upper wings were increased in length. The Monster began to look less like the Ilya Muromets. While all this was going on, Georg was working out the thousands of details that go into making an aircraft. Where the control runs would go, how to save weight and drag while increasing lift.
Georg really wanted to use monocoque construction and mostly he did, but not all of it could be built that way. The materials he had to work with would actually increase the weight if he tried to make a pure monocoque plane. There were places where internal supports would be needed to save weight. But he spent weeks balancing the numbers to determine just where the internal supports had to go, where he could use the shape of the plane to provide the support. The good news turned out to be the engines. Though water-cooled, they were lighter than expected, if weaker than he wanted. He refined his estimates, did drawings, changed things around, did more drawings, refined his estimates again.
He got in knockdown drag-out fights with Magdalena over weight versus cost, which didn’t help his love life any. Lost some, won others, redesigned again. After that he got in knockdown drag-out fights with Farrell, Hans, Karl and the guys in the shop over how to build each and every component. How to make the forms, how to angle the fabric, how much of which glue and resin to use, in what mixture.
Testing and Turnover
“Bag motor on.” The putt-putt of the small lawn tractor engine that powered the two fans and inflated the ACLG was loud in the cabin. Farrell looked over at Magdalena and grinned.
He put the engine in gear. “Bag inflating.” Farrell looked out the window and saw the large leather bag balloon out below the plane. He waited till the plane lifted on the air cushion, and he started the left inboard engine. The plane started to spin. They hadn’t realized just how little drag there would be. He managed to kill the engine but not before the plane had made a full half circle and not before he had scared the heck out of himself and Magdalena. He felt a thump as Georg apparently leapt onto the plane. The door opened. “Magdalena, are you all right?”
Neil was sitting off to the side laughing his ass off. It rapidly became apparent that after checking to make sure she was all right, Georg’s next intended destination was to murder Neil. Farrell almost let him. Air cushion landing gear apparently didn’t include brakes. And air, it turns out, is more slippery than any grease.
* * *
“We’ll have to work out some sort of procedure to handle it,” Magdalena said. “Start the engines with the props feathered.”
“It will take more than that, I’m betting,” Farrell countered. “Each engine will be a little different. They’ll idle at different speeds. What we’re looking at is having to fly the plane from the moment the engines come on.”
“Kickstands.” Georg snapped his fingers. “Kickstands, like on the bicycles in town. One about twenty feet out on either wing. And maybe one near the tail. They’ll have to be retractable. And they won’t work on the water or even on muddy ground, but even if you land on water you should be able to taxi onto solid ground.”
“But what about water and muddy ground?” Farrell pointed at the four levers that were the thrust controls for the four main engines. “We need something that will let us adjust the thrust on each engine to match the thrust on all the other engines. We’ll need it in the water as well as on a runway.”
They tried several things before settling on what amounted to an anchor. Near the tail, a retractable tail skid provided drag. Since the drag point was well back from the engines, uneven thrust twisted the plane less. It wasn’t a perfect solution but it was workable.
* * *
Another day, another test, and this time the Monster only slewed a bit back and fourth as Farrell brought up the engines. When Magdalena retracted the tail skid, off they went. The surprising thing was how fast it picked up speed till the air drag matched the engine thrust. They started to bounce a bit when the air speed indicator read twenty-five mph, which was before they were supposed to. Farrell gave it a bit more power and at thirty-two indicated air speed, they were off the ground. And drifting left. Farrell adjusted the flaps and the engines again.
It handled like a barge. Slow and steady. You turned the wheel and it took a while for the plane to turn. Banks weren’t just slow, they were physically difficult. The Monster had a lot of wing and a lot of flaps and no power-steering. In fact, it took both of them to bank it to any great degree. They made a slow circuit around the field and landed.
After that came the water landings. Any stretch of water a hundred feet wide was a landing field. Well, two hundred feet wide. Or a body of water that didn’t have trees or too steep a bank.
Fields were landing fields, too, and they didn’t have to worry about rocks unless the rocks were three feet tall.
Each flight brought them closer to the final turnover of the plane to Trans European Airlines. Each flight used more of the gasoline-ethanol mix that they had adjusted the engines to take.
Testing completed, TEA paid the final delivery payment. It was a great deal of money. Markgraf and Smith Aviation was in the passenger plane business.
TransEuropean Airlines
The Wietze Oil Field
Since its creation last year, TEA had been an airline without any airplanes. All outgo, no income. Arrangements had been made, deals agreed to, money spent—all on the basis of Magdalena’s promises and the investors hopes. Now they had a plane. They needed fuel. Well, gasoline. They had the alcohol stations. But they had been unable to contract for much gasoline, in the middle of a war, until they could show a working aircraft.
On a sunny Thursday afternoon, the oil men at Wietze looked up into a clear blue sky and saw a plane. It wasn’t the first they had seen, but it was the biggest.
Quentin Underwood came out to see. As did Duke George of Calenburg, who owned the oil fields. Quentin was impressed, Magdalena could tell, but not nearly as impressed as the duke.
“There they are.” Magdalena climbed down from the plane and helped an older gentleman down after her. The older gentleman was Vrijeer Van Bradt. And Vrijeer Van Bradt was here to buy gasoline. Lots of gasoline. He wanted it shipped to various places in and out of the USE and he wanted to make arrangements for some to be carried by the Jupiter itself.
If it wasn’t carrying much of anything else the Monster could carry close to three hundred gallons of gasoline. When mixed eighty five gallons of methanol to fifteen gallons of gasoline that came out to seventeen hundred gallons of aviation fuel. Enough for fourteen three-hundred-mile trips.
Van Bradt looked at the approaching men, then looked at all the people who had stopped working to watch. He rubbed his hands together. “Time to, how do they say? Oh, yes. Let’s make a deal.”
* * *
The first trip to Venice was just the three of them: Magdalena, the copilot, Johan, and Vrijeer Van Bradt, along with a bunch of extra gasoline. As luck would have it, they arrived three days after Cardinal Mazzare. They hadn’t had any intent to upstage the new cardinal of the United States of Europe, since they hadn’t known that he was going to be there. Or that he’d been made Cardinal for that matter. The neat thing was that he came out and looked at the Monster and blessed it. Then spent a couple of hours looking at the engines. The official name of the plane was the Jupiter. But its real name had come about when Colonel Jesse Wood had come by for a visit, taken one look at it and said “What a monster.” From then on, no matter what Georg said, it was the Monster.
They spent three weeks in Venice that first trip and a week in Bolzano with Claudia de Medici. Now that a real live plane was part of the deal, they could work out the details of the agreements they’d previously made. Magdalena came away convinced that Claudia was one smart cookie. The deal they had worked out had real advantages for TEA and Claudia.
Among other things, it just about guaranteed them full cargo loads because Claudia got half-price for standby cargo transport. If they didn’t have a full load, they stopped at Bolzano and carried what she wanted, carried it at about the cost of the flight. In exchange for which Claudia provided docking facilities and didn’t charge tariff on what they carried. At the end of the year if they hadn’t carried at least the required amount of her stuff, or offered to, they paid her a fee.
Having completed their business—and Cardinal Mazzare having done the same—they gave him and a few of his aides a ride back to Grantville.
A month later
Magdalena glanced back at her passengers who were crowding the portholes on the right side of the plane and over at her co-pilot. Their navigation had been just a touch off this trip. It looked like they would pass about a mile to the east of Munich, closer than the five to ten miles on most trips. They were also a bit light this time. Their passengers were two Venetian merchants who had business in Grantville, and Claudia de Medici, who was taking one of her free flights.
Magdalena grinned. This was still a very new thing and it was a first flight for all of their passengers. While their ceiling was higher, they were flying at about three thousand feet to facilitate sightseeing. One of the merchants pointed out a feature of Munich that he recognized. The other apparently missed it.
Claudia de Medici spoke up. “Signorina de Passe, might we go around again to get a better look?”
Magdalena looked over at Johan and shrugged. He shrugged back. They knew relations between Duke Maximilian were in the dumps, but heck. They weren’t doing anything, just flying over. She started a slow right turn that would take them around Munich and if they lost a bit of altitude in the turn, that was all to the good. It made for better sightseeing.
* * *
On the ground, a captain of the duke’s guard cursed. They were rubbing it in. The duke had been livid every time they flew near Munich. Now it seemed they wanted to rub salt into the wound, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. At least, at first he thought there wasn’t, but as they circled they got closer and lower.
The captain started shouting, “Load with canister! All cannons! And double the charge!” That got him a questioning look from the sergeant but they did it right enough. It took a couple of minutes for the plane to make the circuit around Munich and by the time they did, they had dropped to eighteen hundred feet and were less than half a mile from the wall. By that time, His Grace had arrived and the captain had the guns aimed at a point in space he thought the plane would fly through.
* * *
“What are they doing there on the wall?” Claudia de Medici asked, just as the puffs of white smoke appeared.
It wasn’t a golden bb, not even a silver one. The cannons missed entirely; no single bit of shot from those guns came within a hundred yards of the plane. They were much lower and closer to the cannons than they should have been, and the Monster was a big, slow-moving plane. Still, it wasn’t close enough or slow-moving enough—or, most especially—low enough, to be hit by cannon fire. They weren’t, however, far enough away to avoid being frightened by it.
What it actually was, was a loose copper fuel line, combined with suddenly ramming the throttles to their stops. The fuel line on the right inboard engine came loose and sprayed the hot engine with fuel. Johan had already kicked the rudder over and started to reverse his bank by the time the fuel line came loose. The engine didn’t catch fire; there was fuel and oxygen in plenty but in spite of the heat of the engine, there wasn’t a spark.
As the engine died, the torque of the left side engines was no longer balanced by the right side engines. The plane started a right roll and right yaw, bringing it closer to Munich and lower. Magdalena and Johan struggled with the controls. Neither of them were what an up-timer would call qualified. They had more time in the Monster than anyone else, but it was still only a few hundred hours. They had very little experience flying with one engine dead and none at all with it happening suddenly out of the blue.
“The right inboard engine is out,” Magdalena shouted. While Johan tried to remember what he was supposed to do. Some of it was obvious they were rolling right, so stick left. They were also yawing right, so left rudder.
Johan noticed that all the engines were at their max. Magdalena must have done it. Then what Magdalena had shouted penetrated and he cut the fuel to the right inboard engine. While Magdalena was holding the stick left, he throttled back on the left engines.
“Take the stick, Johan. I’ve got to adjust the trim.”
* * *
It took a few minutes and almost five hundred feet to get everything as well balanced as they could. Magdalena pulled out a pencil and started doing sums. The Monster could fly with three engines. At least, with its tanks half empty. But three engines delivered unbalanced thrust, so the right outboard engine was being run full out.
They couldn’t do that with the left side engines or they would end up going around in circles. As it was, they had the left inboard engine at about fifty-five percent power and the left out board at eighty-five percent. The rudder was almost all the way over and they were in a slight left hand bank to keep from slipping right. All of which meant that they were using about twenty percent more fuel than they should be using at this point in their trip.
They weren’t in any danger of crashing, not as long as the right outboard motor held. They would just run out of fuel before they got to Nurnberg. As long as the left outboard motor held. They were stressing the heck out of it. The engine wasn’t designed to handle that sort of RPM on a constant basis.
They had time before the fuel shortage became critical, but they needed that engine fixed. Normally, they would put down in a field or on a lake or river to fix an engine. It had happened a couple of times before and was generally no real problem. But to do it where people pulled up cannons and shot at you just for flying over seemed unwise. This was not a place where you wanted to land even for a few minutes and they didn’t know how long the repair would take.
Johan was not as familiar as Magdalena was with engines. Generally, when they stopped to fix something, he held the tools. They discussed the matter in whispers, in an attempt to avoid alarming the passengers.
“I could go out on the wing and have a look.” Johan didn’t look happy about it but he didn’t hesitate either.
“Don’t be silly, Johan. You’ve never met an engine that you couldn’t make worse by looking at it.” Magdalena looked down at the rudder pedals; the left one was almost to the floor. “Besides, you weigh one eighty, I weigh one twenty. Which of us is going to do a better job of holding the rudder hard over?” Even with the trim set all the way it was still taking muscle to keep the plane straight and level.
He nodded. “What do we tell the passengers?”
At that point it became apparent that their whispered consultation had not had the desired effect. “You might try the truth.” Claudia de Medici arched an eyebrow. “Just how bad is our situation?”
“Well,” Magdalena hesitated. “It would be just inconvenient if the duke wasn’t a crazy man. We’d just land, fix the engine, then be on our way.”
Claudia nodded. “How far away were we when they fired at us?”
“Around eighteen hundred feet up and a bit less than half a mile off. Why?” Johan asked.
Claudia shook her head. “Crazy people, indeed. To have had any chance of hitting us, even to reach us at that range, he would have had to double charge his cannon. He was willing to endanger his men in order to have a very slight chance of hitting a target that was no danger to him. Just out of spite. I agree. I don’t want to land in his territory. What options does that leave us? We seem to be flying well enough on the three engines remaining.”
“There are two problems facing us. One is fuel. Flying this way takes more,” Magdalena said. “The other is that we are over stressing the remaining right side engine. It will last for a while, but we don’t know how long. The longer we wait before fixing the inboard engine, the worse it will be.”
“How long will it take to fix the damaged engine?”
“We don’t know yet. The only way to find out is to go out and look. Normally we’d land and look but in this case...” Magdalena pointed back toward Munich. “What I am going to do is go out on the wing and look at the engine to see what’s wrong with it.”
One of the merchants swallowed. “Go out on the wing?”
“It’s not that bad.” Magdalena smiled at the man. “I’ve seen it done and our air speed is low.” She didn’t mention that the only time she had seen it done was in the movies in Grantville.
* * *
The Monster had one real disadvantage when it came to wing-walking. Its streamlining. Handholds were hard to come by. Magdalena wing-crawled to the right inboard engine with one hand on the leading edge of the bottom wing. To keep the engine away from the water when making water landings, it was hung from the upper wing rather than sitting on the lower. There was a support that went from the bottom wing to the streamlined box it was in. But the bottom of the engine casement was four feet from the bottom wing and she was only five feet six.
After she reached the support, Magdalena carefully tied herself to it and looked around. She was terrified and at the same time exhilarated. Standing in the open with just three and a half feet of wing below her, twenty feet from the body of the plane. With a forty-five mile an hour wind blowing in her face. She wanted to shout for joy. She wanted to get back inside the plane where it was safe. Her hands were shaking and that wasn’t all. She wanted to jump Georg and would have if he weren’t over a hundred miles away.
Instead, she took a few minutes getting herself under control. She forced the cowling open against the wind and examined the damage. By now she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to jump Georg or kill him. The cowling worked fine on the ground. But in the air, with a gale blowing in your face, and that gale trying to slam the cowling on your hand, it sucked.
She found the problem easily and it was an easy fix. She decided that she could fix the engine right there, and there would be no need to land. She reached for the line and bumped the strut holding the cowling opened against the wind. It slipped and the forty-five mile per hour wind slammed the cowling against her back and head.
There wasn’t time for it to build up much momentum or she would have died at that moment. As it was she was knocked senseless, and left dangling from the strap she had used to tie herself to the support.
* * *
Inside the plane Johan, Claudia de Medici and the two merchants watched helplessly as Magdalena dangled from the strap. Johan started looking for a place to put the plane down. Duke Maximilian be damned, and all his solders with him.
They had come just twenty miles since they had left Munich. No rivers of any size were within another twenty miles but there in the distance was an open field. There was going to be an unhappy farmer.
Johan cut back on the power to the remaining engines and started the bag engine. That was what they had come to call the small motor that ran the fans for the air cushion landing gear.
* * *
The farmer watched as the plane floated down onto his field, across his carp pond and out the other side. It stopped, still sitting on the big brown bag. He saw a woman—he thought it was woman, it was hard to tell at this distance—dangling from one wing. Then he saw the large man come out of the plane and run along the wing to the woman. He thought of going to give aid, he thought of calling the local lord, but on due consideration, he decided that he didn’t want to get involved.
He knew that the duke didn’t like the people from the future. Had even been told that they weren’t from the future, also that they weren’t people but demons. He didn’t know what he believed about them except that he didn’t want either the duke or the people who flew mad at him.
* * *
Johan reached the still woozy girl only seconds after touch down. He used some ammonia as smelling salts and that seemed to mostly do the trick. Magdalena had been semiconscious as the Monster landed and the spray from crossing the carp pond had helped. “Let me up, damn it. Where are we?”
“What? About twenty miles north of Munich.”
“Well, if we were going to land anyway, what the hell was I doing out on that wing?”
Johan paused for a minute. “Got me. I’m not crazy enough to do it, that’s for sure.”
That was when Claudia stepped out on the wing. “I hate to interrupt, but since I doubt that they have any airplane fuel here and since Maximilian has never impressed me with his forbearance, perhaps we should see about fixing the engine and being on our way?”
Magdalena looked at Claudia, who was standing calmly on the lower wing of the Monster, shaded by the upper wing, and suddenly realized what “unflappable” meant. Claudia was unflappable. Magdalena got up. It hurt, but she did it.
Looking at the engine without the wind in her face, she saw a problem. The nut had been over-tightened and the threads had slipped. “Johan, get me a the five-eighths inch wrench, would you? And the vise grips!”
She had to bang the connection a bit to make it fit again. And she gooped it up to keep the stripped threads from leaking too much. She used the vise grips to lock it in place and taped that. All in all, it took almost fifteen minutes.
Fifteen increasingly nervous minutes. Johan had climbed up on the upper wing, which put him almost twenty feet off the ground and gave him a good view of the surrounding territory. About twelve minutes into the repairs he shouted down, “Riders!”
“How far?”
“A couple of miles, perhaps a bit more.”
“I’m almost finished.”
“Well, finish later. We need to leave. We’ll make a short hop, ten miles or so then you can finish.”
“Can’t. If we lose the vise grips, we’ll be even worse off. Just another minute. Go ahead and start getting ready for takeoff.”
“Right! Ma’am, gentlemen...if you’ll kindly take your seats, and fasten your seat belts for takeoff.”
Claudia might have been unflappable, but Matteo dal Pozzo, one of the merchants, certainly wasn’t. In a nervous voice, he asked, “How often does something like this happen? I don’t mean being shot at, but having to land in the middle of nowhere.”
“Not that often,” Johan said. “Certainly a lot less often than it did in the early days of flight up-time. Our engines are better and better maintained. It does happen sometimes, though.”
“So our cargoes aren’t really safer than if this were a mule train?”
“Of course they are. A mule train spends the whole trip subject to being found by bandits. It can be tracked by them. We can’t. For your cargo to be taken by bandits, they would have to be right where we happened to land. And be there right when we landed.”
Claudia laughed. “Matteo, we have regular flights from Venice to the USE. That is worth millions. Granted, it’s much more expensive than a mule train or even a coach. Still, it is faster and much safer.”
* * *
While Magdalena was tying down the vise grips, she felt the plane shift under her as the bag inflated and took the plane’s weight from the stands. She closed the cowling, and ran.
“The wind’s from the south,” Johan told her as she was strapping in. “And so are the troops coming our way.”
There was really very little choice. They had to get into the air as quickly as they could. They took off into the wind and into the faces of the approaching riders. There were no puffs of smoke from the riders as they passed overhead at only a couple of hundred feet. But Magdalena could see them trying to get their flintlocks ready. And one guy waving a sword at them.
Magdalena couldn’t resist. She stuck her thumbs in her ears, then waggled her fingers at him. She leaned back into her seat. “Let’s try to keep this a unique experience, Johan. At least on this airline.”
* * *
Technical Notes:
The Ilya Muromets is, or was, a real airplane built by Igor Sikorsky in Russia in 1913. It had flight characteristics quite similar to those described for the Monster. It was Russia’s large bomber during World War One, but was initially designed as a luxury passenger plane with seating for sixteen passengers.
Likewise, the air cushion landing gear is real as is the Time article on it. There is also a small hybrid hover/flair craft that is sold as a sports vehicle. The technology is proven but does have several drawbacks. The primary one is weight, after that comes the lack of friction. It’s like taking off and landing on a slip and slide. Everyone seems to assume significant issues in terms of drag while in flight, but from the reports the drag issue is minor to nonexistent. Besides, parasitic drag is more of an issue for high-speed aircraft than for the sort of low-speed aircraft envisioned here.
The composite materials are a bit more iffy. There are several possible routes that might be taken to achieve the desired ends. The fabric could be the fiberglass we used, or silk, or even linen. The bonding agent might be glues or Viscose, the material that is extruded into both cellophane and rayon. Viscose was originally developed to act as a coating for fabric tablecloths. It failed in that use because it made the tablecloths stiff. It apparently didn’t occur to the inventor that there were circumstances under which that stiffness might be a good thing. If it had, we might well have had the composite materials revolution a century early in OTL. We can point to no instance of viscose and fiberglass being used together and the specific properties of that composite aren’t known to us. It’s a WAG.
What isn’t a guess is that the down-timers, being made aware of the concept of composite materials that are light and strong, will experiment with the concept using the glues and resins they have. They will, we’re sure, combine those glues and resins with up-timer knowledge of chemistry to make new ones. There is, for instance, a better than even chance that they can make carbon fibers within a very few years of the Ring of Fire. Carbon fibers are produced by baking polyacrylonitrile (PAN), however, lower-quality fiber can be manufactured using pitch or rayon as the precursor instead of PAN. Further heat treating can improve the quality. Our point, however, is that while what the particular composite is may be somewhat unpredictable, that some fairly decent ones will be developed, is predictable.
Semi-Monocoque is not quite the same thing as monocoque. What semi-monocoque means is that there are internal supports but fewer of them are needed because some of the stresses are supported by the shape of the structure. The use of corrugations, as in the skin of the Ford Trimotor, is a semi-monocoque; the corrugations in the aluminum add structural strength. Since then, quite a bit more has been learned about ways of effectively adding strength to materials through structure. And most modern aircraft, and car bodies, are of semi-monocoque or monocoque construction.