CNS 0352, Full Shipcrafting, Outmoon Semester. Dr. Mannemeul Cirtosh, Phd.
Week 1
Class is small this term, but enthusiastic. Word must have gotten around about the failure rate last year; just as well, to have fewer slowpokes in the hammocks. Four students, three of them all heart and soul in this, one more who’s interested and bright but might just be dabbling in the end. Stencils flying at notes all through the introductory lectures, eyes pinned to the charts, immediate, clear questions from all quarters whenever prompted. This is going to be a good one.
They all should pass, that’s a given, sure as the tides. It’s who makes the biggest splash by the end – that’s the suspense.
Students
-Mafi
-Holliburt
-Gilmer
-Slikes
Attendance’ll be easy to track this year.
Week 2
Students made a bit more of a mark this week. As I thought, the planned pace is too slow; all of them have already made preliminary blueprints and have crafted prototypes on their own time as pre-coursework. Agreed to grade them as their first assignments, next class we’ll begin drafting work on their final projects. More time can only mean higher quality.
-Mafi, she’d designed a skirmishing warship with a specially crafted hull that shaped its wake with adjustable settings in the form of all kinds of flaps and ridges. You could erase almost all trace of your passing, and in combination with a muffled engine and a low profile, you can slip through places a rowboat would be tricky with. Great in theory, a nightmare in fact. Originality’s worth a lot of points, even if the breezy math’s going to take them right back. But the detail on the armaments keeps her mark high. The lady knows weapons. If she wants a recommendation for navy work when she graduates, I’ll sign her off before she can finish the sentence.
-Holliburt had put together a novelty. A damned interesting novelty, but a novelty; a fishing boat whose sails could be converted to soak up moonlight in a dead calm. You could see where he’d thought “this would be a good idea” and then where he stopped. Good draftsmanship on the papers, a nice concept, but no follow-through, no thought put past his one idea. If anyone stops at the end of this course, it’ll be him.
-Gilmer’s father owns one of the industrial shipworks out in Motash. Shows through the freighter sketches he gave me: artsy as anything that could be dreamed up from past midnight, but built to survive a blast from God’s own broadside. Seeing all those big prefabricated tankers get hammered out all alike all day, every day, from childhood to youth, that just sets a creative mind squirrelly with thoughts on what to do different.
-Slikes’s proposal was the farthest out of mind: a ship that ran almost entirely underwater, with just the solar sails sticking above the waves, designed to be quiet, unobstrusive, discreet, and blend in with the colours around it, so nothing took it for lunch. Crazy, but thought out thorough, and the math she’s got scribbled out there in the corners has stuff I’d use a calculator for. Top marks for her.
Good stuff overall. Too many big ideas with not enough fine print, sure, but we can work on that. Build the things piece by piece, I always tell them. Piece by piece.
Week 4
More theory this week, and had all their assignments graded out before it was done. Another perk of a small classroom.
The main objective for the first session was to get their brains humming. Think about the whole ship and all of its parts, don’t tie yourself too hard to one big idea – but don’t confuse one big idea with the One Big Goal: the thing you’re making this ship to do. Keep that goal there in your eye at all times, and make sure every single thing you do reaches it. Then you’ll be alright.
Day two, all four of them have a pretty good clue of what they’re working on. Gave the go-ahead to all of them.
-Mafi’s doing a heavyweight fearbreaker. I guess she figures that if she can design whatever she can dream up, she might as well dream big. Can’t wait to see her choice in cannons for that thing, there’s going to be more guns than rivets.
-Holliburt’s going to try and run off a midweight storm skiff. Ambitious choice with a good rate of failure; must be trying to impress me. Making ships that’ll keep afloat in a bad sea is tough. Making ships that thrive in a bad sea is downright nasty.
-Gilmer has a mind to stretch himself out of his comfort zone; no tankers from him, but a roly-poly coral rover, all belly and all living space to hold a full-sized clan from grandparents down onwards. A craft made from pure practicality, but I’ve a hunch he’s going to make it pretty.
-Slikes, she was almost too busy scribbling away to even talk to me, adding between sentences. Said she was working out her idea as she went, and the endpoint could change a bit as she goes, but one thing’s for sure: it’s going to be travelling below the waterline.
Week 5
Piece by piece started up this week with the hull. Started off with information: gave them the full story of all the golden oldies, a rundown of the latest tricks that haven’t made it into catalogues yet, and encouragement to look up as much as they could.
-Mafi’s gone with a mix of old and new that both the crustiest admiral and the scrawniest techman’d approve. The hull’s good-old-fashioned triple-plated fearbreaker steel, forged through the lens of the innermost moon for that unbending tenacity that soaks up an impact and spits it back out at you; but shaped to a setup of her own design: strange wavy patterns and ripple-soft swirls that according to her should give the thing an unbeatable amount of forward momentum. Asked her about stopping, she just said “don’t.” Pithy, but I’m not so sure it’ll sell to an accountant.
-Holliburt took Mafi’s plan, but in reverse: a design not too far off the classic storm skiff, with all those outriggers and the twin hulls. But the material, now, that was new. Sharkwood, they called it; special stuff that was successfully created in a laboratory in the last decade and only fabricated non-commercially even now. Took forever to get the saws working right, took longer to get just the right size on the trees, but the natural grain on those planks lets them just slide through water without even a twitch, like the boat was greased by angels
-Gilmer’s hull is out of its norm. Round, sure. Made of living coral, it goes without saying. Bloated, a bit, if a tad sleek for something of its sort. But it’s smaller than any coral rover I’ve ever seen by about a third. He’s up to something, I can guess it, and what’s more, I trust him to make it all play out fine. Can’t wait for the interior plans.
-Slikes’s plans…well, for a minute there I’d thought she’d handed in her biology work by mistake. Long and lean, thin as an eel’s blood and sleeker than sin. But then you look closer, and it all makes a bit more sense. She’s making something that’ll travel under the surface, yes. All the way under. For that, there’ll be no wind power, no moonlens, no nothing. This girl has to solve energy problems that’ve beaten half the engineers on the planet hollow for centuries.
I talked to Odarrion, the unlucky man stuck with physics this term, about her chances. He says to just wait and see what happens. I don’t know if I trust a man with that laugh of his, but we’ll just wait and see.
Week 6
Propulsion’s turn to shine. Same routine as always: I give them the lowdown on the old, the new, and then they go out there and come back to me with the strange and beautiful. That’s the theory. Hasn’t failed us yet.
-Mafi’s moonblend-fuelled turbines are on the oversize even for a heavyweight, and there’s five instead of the standard three. She’s tripled the fuel compartment size too. A hunk of steel this big is going to take a minute or eighty to get going, but once it does, it should move faster than a cork in a cannon. And maybe as smoothly; the crew on this had better have seasoned stomachs.
-Holliburt’s going with wind power to keep the storm skiff lightweight. The sails are like the hull: just a little bit different. They’re made of the toughest lyreweeds, like the old days, but with triple the density. Only high-powered industrial equipment could set the weave that tight, and they’ll need special calibration for it. This boat sees water at all, it’ll only be in small numbers crewed by canny men: high-grade or go home. The mast is an old plynth pine, hard to come by these days, but they’d rather bend double than snap in any gale. More’s to the point, they’ll spring right back upright once that gale’s moved on.
-Gilmer’s opted for a inmoon diesel. A solid, sturdy, slow-moving thing that’ll keep going long after the rest of the ship has bloomed its last, sloughed off, and ground itself down to seafloor slime. Though with that hull he put on it, it’s going to take a while. I took a second or third look at it over the last few nights, and he’s got the coral layered with precision a master gardener would envy. Got space to grow for decades before anybody on board needs to raise a trimmer to it.
-Slikes has a, well. A thing. She gave me all the data for it, but it’s seventeen pages of pure mathematics and the citations include twenty-nine blackwater biology periodicals. Got halfway in and stopped for the night; it was accurate as best as I could see and there was something going on in there. The only recognizable part of the whole mess – and it’s a downright real mess, it’s going to fill at least half the hull of the damned thing – is a little outmoon chugger. Not the most common lensblend, but it’s got a damned powerful kick to it if you can get the finicky tweaked out of it. But Slikes’s plans are going deeper. This little engine’s just the primer for whatever’s lurking in those notes of hers.
I’d show Odarrion them, but what if he calls it off? Man doesn’t know the first thing about shipcrafting. Never could appreciate the sort of risks creativity demands. No, she deserves all the trust she can hold.
Week 7
Time we gave steering a bit of a shot. Some of these kids have put a lot of power behind these hulls of theirs, but that isn’t to say they’ll go where they point them just yet.
-The controls and mechanisms on Mafi’s fearbreaker are all normal as far as they go, up until you get to the rudder. That rudder on Mafi’s baby girl is as outsized as her engines, reinforced from the inside out to put the armoured plating to shame, and has the mechanical muscles behind it to heave against the bad edge of a tidal wave with grit to spare. At the speeds she wants that thing going at, it just might be enough to steer it. Barely.
-Holliburt’s rudder is dreadnought-quality moonblend steel. Not something you see very often in a storm skiff, heavy metals like that, but he’s got a real fine cross-hatched build on it that should keep as much of the strength as it can while shedding most of the weight. And this is one rudder that’ll never snap in any gale, let the winds blow how they want. The strength of its attachment to the hull and the tiller atop it worry me, though. Sure, the rudder won’t break until the ends of the winds, but what good does that do if it’s been shaken off the boat forty leagues back?
-Gilmer could be a lensman if he wanted, his circuitry is so fine in the details. The controls on his rover’s steering are so simple they could be operated by an untrained child, and that takes a complexity that makes your head whirl. He even put in a rough sketch of a new-age autopilot, runs off a sensor system that checks currents to estimate the depth. First-draft, that thing is already patent-worthy. This boy is going places, and if his daddy isn’t proud of him for it I’ll pay him a visit and make sure he is by the end of it.
-Slikes has no rudder. She’s got fins though.
Yep, checked again. She’s still not handing in her biology work by accident. Flonis says she’s the most enthusiastic pupil she’s ever had though, so the girl’s obviously bringing some inspiration along with her. That’s fine. We only have the moonlens and all that comes with it because Berramont Tury thought to ask herself why and how a kraken’s eye glowed so brightly under the blackest waves. The pricklemine, bane of many a warship, that only bobbed in the tides thanks to the day Varn Nurris spotted a jellyfish and wondered what would happen if you substituted concentrated electric shock for the venom, and set your sights on what rode atop the sea’s surface instead of beneath it. And of course, who could forget the coral rovers, where some bright soul in centuries past thought that the only thing that stopped a reef from being the perfect home was that you couldn’t make it float. Well, they were all made fun of in their time, and they all came out just fine. No reason Slikes isn’t sipping from the same cup as all those geniuses of time ago.
But still…fins?
Week 8.
Time to work on the guts of these beasts, get them all tuned up and worked out. We’re getting closer to the time of construction now, where we make our votes, make our choices, call up the university shipyard and tell them we’ve got our orders ready. Only so many ships can see the open sea based on a single student’s dreaming. Even when the dreamers are these four.
Damn, but I’d build them all if I could, with my own hands.
-Mafi’s edited her hull a bit more with this week’s work: it’s double thick now, especially at the front, and the bow is more like a fist than a knife-edge. “Should set the spray flying,” she said, and told me not to worry about the speed, that’s what the engines were for, she’d done all the math. And she had, and she had. It’s just the question of “why” that’s got me all interested here. Anyways, for this week’s work she’s got triple redundancies and a hell of a lot of leak controls. Crew’s going to be smaller than your standard heavyweight with that much space taken up on safeties, but she says she wouldn’t trust anybody but seasoned professionals on this thing anyways. Too strange for the fresh ones. Pretty funny to hear that coming from someone her age, but I’m not going to laugh until I hear the punchline.
-Holliburt has four or five run-of-the-mill storm skiffs inside his storm skiff. The bunkroom’s in the old sprawling Halteen style, the catch hold is more streamlined and Arbesque, and the storage compartments for line and patching are the tight-packed Nashy method. Interesting. Maybe even effective. But nothing really new, not even in the old-made-new way. Good, but not great. Sure, novelty alone won’t set your name on fire and douse you in moonlight, but neither will rehashing last century’s tricks.
-Gilmer, well, he’s been shaping this girl for months, and only now does he tip his hand and show us that she was a queen all along. Look inside that coral rover’s tubby little frame, and you wonder why it’s so small?
Detail. Everyday, ordinary, perfect detail down to the last knothole in the final plank of old ommery ashwood. He’s got every single necessity that a rover should have, but packed into half the size it should be. Even the food’s shrunk down small, with a miniature cannery to keep the storage hold packed tight and neat. Half the mechanisms in here are brand new, and the other half have had so many parts stripped out to make room that they might as well be. I changed my mind: the boy wouldn’t make a fine lensman. He’d be a jeweler the likes the world never dreamt of.
-Slikes’s baby is tight inside. A cabin over the bow, with a little class viewing port, but most of the steering information is going to be coming in through sensors, second-hand. It’s packed tight with machinery, all unrecognizable, all low-energy stuff. She said she’d make it all clear soon.
Still no idea where the power’s coming from.
Week 9
Time for the superstructure and any other gewgaws that roll up at the last second. Next week we all tip our hands, and we decide who’s getting built and who’s staying put.
-The guns on Mafi’s fearbreaker are the heaviest the lady can carry. A bit heavier than anything we’ve got currently, actually – but then again, we’ve never made a fearbreaker with muscles in it like this one. The bridge is so armour-plated it’d put a bunker to shame, and it’s slung real low in the hull. There’s a communications mast, but it can be lowered straight down into the deck to streamline the whole ship. The final touch: a pair of outriggers that can be dropped down on either side of the hull. Between those and the bow, this thing’ll lift more of a mist than a hurricane once it gets up to speed.
-Holliburt’s followed old storm skiff doctrine and kept the deck as clear and clean as possible, with a minimum of durable, tough rigging. Good solid stuff though, and the cables he’s using may be old state-of-the-art, but the synthetic coating on them to ward off any manner of moisture is brand new, and should last for decades before replacement. Beats the bi-daily application of schutz juice of the latter days, or even that weekly oiling they’ve used for the last few decades.
-Gilmer’s got four moonlenses up on deck in a tight array for open-sea recharging, all of them convertible jobs that can soak any of the three moons’ rays without too much of a hitch. Sure, they aren’t going to be the most efficient tools for any one job, but with all four doing it they’ll make sure the fuel never stops coming. The deckhouse is sprawling and takes up most of the aft, but there’s room on the bow for dozens of lines to hang laundry or air-dry catches or whatever you mind. Not an inch wasted, and many more saved.
-Just a single hatch for exit and entrance on the back of Slikes’s little experiment, along with a completely retractable antenna that can poke just up above the surface if it sidles real close to it. No exterior drag, she says. Where she’s going, nothing can afford to get damaged. Not with miles up to go to get where it can be fixed.
Week 10
It’s all over with now, the project we make a reality is laid out flat. And I’d be lying if I said it were close. There wasn’t a single really weak chart out there, but the winner was plain the moment it was laid out for us.
Mafi spelled it all out for us. The contours in the hull, the outriggers, the bow, the engines… her heavyweight will kick up a mountain of spray when it moves, making its own fog. Between that and her engines, this lady’ll come to close blows faster than anyone could count on, and once she gets there, those guns and that hide of hers will keep her safe and her enemies blasted clean. If she gets close enough, Mafi said, she even built the prow sturdy enough to take a full-on ramming at top speed. Her numbers don’t lie: the lady could punch straight through another fearbreaker. Make a hell of a racket and need one big dry-docking afterwards, but if you land the punch that ends the fight, you don’t mind too much. A frightening machine, but a damned interesting one.
Holliburt, well, he didn’t have much to say. An updating of the storm skiff to match modern times, he said. Well sure. That can be done. It has been done. You’ve got the latest model, but it’s got no personal touch to it. It’ll sell, sure. You’ve got a job on your hands here Holliburt, you’re good, you’re right on the money. But you’re no artist, and it pains me to say it so blunt. If there’s one certain no-winner here, it has to be you, pretty as you’ve made your case.
Gilmer’s design is what it is: the perfect coral rover. All of the long list of needs and wants and structural demands condensed down into the smallest package I’ve ever seen, doing the job of a ship twice its size without a moment’s stress. Here’s what you could’ve done, Holliburt: refining an old job in a new way until it shines like a kraken’s eyeball. There’s love in every line.
Slikes finally laid it all out for us: this baby of hers goes deep, yes. And it stays deep, yes, all the way down in the blackwater, where every scientist wants to go and nobody ever wants to stay. And it all works out just fine, all of the weirdness. The fins, the streamlining, the powerful lights, but it still doesn’t explain her fuel problem. Krakens surface three times a year to fill their eyes, and they have to stay up for a week – Slikes says she wants this thing to stay down for as long as it needs. Forever, if need be. And that’s where her biology and physics come into this, because Slikes has given her submarine an honest-to-god gut, from mouth to stomach to waste vents. Suction pulls prey into that razor-edged maw at the prow and pipes it into a chamber, where a sort of chemical soup kicks in. All sorts of acids in there, nasty stuff. Once the digestion’s over, all sorts of heat’s been kicked up, and that’s what keeps it cruising. Streamlined down to the last inch, a single burst of thrust and proper current use can keep it rolling onwards for weeks – and with the autopilot she’s rigged up, built on the back of the brains of softline eels, it’ll find a path through the heart of a whirlpool.
Well now, it just wasn’t even a contest after that. Build order went out this evening. Let’s see what the shipyard makes of it.
Week 11
Grades went out.
-Mafi 93%. I showed her charts to an admiral I know. He said she’s crazy. Also, he has a job for her. Well, more of a career.
-Holliburt 85%. Not half-bad. He’ll have no trouble finding a place for himself out there at all. But it might not be as a shipcrafter.
-Gilmer 94%. His father will know men who know men that want this kid. He could walk into any shipyard on the planet and use this one project as his entire resume and get put in charge of half the new product lines on the spot.
-Slikes 99%. The 1% is excessive secrecy. The 99% is all hers. They laid down the foundations for her baby this evening, and they’re going to work fast. Should be up by the end of midmoon break, and first voyage right after the fact.
Midmoon field results for CNS 0352, Full Shipcrafting, Outmoon Semester. Dr. Mannemeul Cirtosh, Phd.
All right. Now the important thing is to consider what we’ve learned here.
First: softline eels are tenacious creatures that are almost impossible to discourage, and so are their instincts.
Second: softline eels will eat anything smaller than they are, and they’re pretty generous about estimating body length.
Third: experimental systems should always be tested, then re-tested, then tested a bit more. Especially if they’re auto-piloting subsystems that are intended to edit overlying manual control. No matter how good the math turns out.
Fourth: math lies. I don’t care what your teacher told you, math is a damned liar.
Fifth: legal immunity to prosecution doesn’t do a damned thing for your professional reputation.
Sixth: perspective in kind, this was still a hell of a good field test for the effectiveness of public safety standards in the average harbour.
See? As long as you learned something, it wasn’t a waste. And I think we all learned something.
I think I’m ready for a bigger class again come inmoon semester. Failing kids is hard, but it’s a hell of a lot less work than dealing with success.