At a U.S. Naval Institute proceeding, the commentators conceded that the gun would be useful for countermining, that is, using explosives to set off enemy mines-stationary targets. They were less sanguine that it could be used effectively against a rapidly closing foe, as the elevation limited the zone of danger for the target and ranges are difficult to estimate. If the pressure were reduced because the enemy was close, the projectile would have a lower velocity and be more vulnerable to deflection by the wind. (Zalinski). The naysayers doubted that the countermining advantage was sufficient to justify building a ship with the dynamite gun as the main armament
In practice, USS Vesuvius proved reasonably useful for shore bombardment-the quietness of the pneumatic action meant that the enemy didn't hear the guns fire-but the system was quite obviously impractical for use against another warship. USS Vesuvius would have been outranged by conventional guns, and the inability to traverse the gun other than by turning the ship meant that a fast attacker could evade its fire. (McSherry).
It doesn't appear that scaling down the gun to a size suitable for turret mount would have been productive. The US Army tried out the Sims-Dudley dynamite gun, which fired a 2.5 inch caliber shell carrying five pounds of nitro-gelatin. Since the army couldn't carry compressors around, the gun used black powder to compress air, and then the compressed air to project the shell. The length of the gun-and-carriage was 14 feet and the muzzle velocity was just 600 fps, yielding a range of just 900 yards. (McSherry).
Compressed air projection reappeared in an anti-aircraft gun format in World War II. The Mark I Holman projector had a 4.5 foot smoothbore barrel and used compressed air bottles to fire fragmentation grenades up to 30 rounds/minute to perhaps 600 feet. Its advantages were that the low barrel pressures meant that it didn't need high-strength steel, its recoil was small, and of course it didn't need any cordite. Its disadvantage was that it was quite inaccurate. (Wikipedia/Holman Projector).
Liquid Propellants. These became popular in rocketry, but for artillery, despite a half-century of effort, their time hasn't yet come. (McCoy).
This article continues in Part 3, "Hitting the Target."
Long Ago and Far Away
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
I write mysteries under the name Kris Nelscott. I’m currently working on the next.
These mysteries are set in an alien world, with unfamiliar technology, and inexplicable cultural attitudes. You’re thinking, She does that in her Retrieval Artist sf/mystery series. Why the pen name? What’s so different about these books?
What’s different is this: The Kris Nelscott novels, about black private detective Smokey Dalton, are set in Chicago 45 years ago.
I wrote the first novel in 1997, and my editor at the time called it “historical.” I was offended. I was alive in 1968, when the first novel was set. I was eight, but I was alive. The first novel takes place in the days surrounding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, and I remember that day clearly. (I was trying on a bunny costume-not Playboy bunny. Easter Bunny bunny-and no one wanted to look at it. They were all staring at the TV.)
I had no idea how 1968 could be historical. It wasn’t that different from 1997. Yeah, in 1997, we worked on computers, but they weren’t that common for blue-collar folks. Some people could afford cell phones, but in reality, the differences weren’t extreme. Most people still smoked in restaurants, most cars could be fixed by a hands-on mechanic, and many of the chains that existed in 1968 still existed.
Not any more.
The book I’m currently writing, which will be out next year, takes place in January 1970. I spent most of this month digging in old newspapers like I always do, because I get great details from old newspapers.
And here’s the first major difference. In 1998, I had to go to Chicago to get my hands on the biggest black newspaper in the country, The Chicago Defender. (The first book, set in Memphis, didn’t use the Defender.) I spent my days either in the public library searching microfiche or in the Museum of Radio amp; Television, watching old video tapes, streamed through their library archive because they didn’t want patrons touching the materials.
Yeah, everything looked old, but not that old. Except the fashions. The fashions were horribly out of date.
Attitudes weren’t as out of date as we would have liked. People still used the N-word in regular conversation-and they didn’t call it “the N-word.”
Now, to dig through the Defender’s archive, I contacted my local library-via e-mail-and they gave me-via e-mail-the password to a library reference account so that I could view issues of The Defender at home. On my laptop. On my computer. On my television. On my iPad. The only thing I couldn’t do with those issues was copy and paste them or excerpt them without some electronic watermark.
I ordered all of my research books from various online sites, and had them shipped to me. I watched videos directly from the TV stations that made them, online, at home, in the comfort of my office. I could’ve watched them on my phone for heaven’s sake. When the stations didn’t have the archive footage I wanted, I went to the Museum of Radio amp; Television. Not just Chicago’s great archive, but also the ones in New York and Los Angeles. They let me search their archives as well.
I started my research Super Bowl weekend, and you know what the hype was like. Biggest This, Biggest That. Commercials! Commercials pre-aired on YouTube! Online Discussions! Local casinos, taking bets. Every bar and restaurant with a Super Bowl Party somewhere.
My 1970 research included Super Bowl IV, which took place a month earlier than it did in 2013, and had almost no hype. Yeah, it was a big football game, but it didn’t mean a lot in Chicago because Chicago wasn’t playing. So who cared about the Vikings or the Chiefs? Who cared about New Orleans-or the fact that the very first celebrity (Carol Channing) actually showed up for the half-time show. The show was a tribute to Mardi Gras, which Chicago did not celebrate.
In fact, the only thing recognizable about my 1970 research was, of all things, the fashion. Yep, it’s back. With the exception of the hair. Everyone says hair was big in the 1980s. They should look at the afro circa 1970. They really should.
I started a list on my Facebook page-phrases you wouldn’t understand (or meant something different) in 1970. One-hundred plus people participated, some I’ve never met in person. Heck “Facebook page” is a phrase no one would have understood in 1970. The phrase that started it all for me? “Tweeting The Grammys.” My brain is locked in 1970 at the moment, but I live in 2013. “Tweeting the Grammys” seemed really weird to me.
We are, as my husband said after I mentioned this, truly in a science fiction universe. The world is smaller-I’ve been corresponding with a friend in Bulgaria all day (that’s not a 1970s phrase either)-and more accessible. We carry more information on our phones than the nonfiction section in my local library has on its shelves.
I am writing this essay on a computer in Oregon. I’ll then e-mail the essay to my husband who is traveling in Idaho. He reads everything first. If he likes it, I’ll then e-mail it to Florida. Once accepted, the essay will get uploaded, and you folks will read it, from wherever you are.
Explain that to someone in 1970. They’ll call it science fiction, and it is.
Just like 1970 is history. It’s a lot easier for me to understand that I am not ten years old any more and ten is a long, long, long time ago than it was to look back at eight from the distance of my mid-thirties. It’s pretty clear that my past took place in a historical time period, because the world looks-and sounds-nothing like it did then.
Except for the platform shoes. And seriously, why would someone revive those things?
Of course, they’re reviving the TV shows too. And that’s about it.
Because really, there isn’t much about 1970 that’s better than 2013. 1970 was smelly (cigarettes, cigars, b. o.), violent (5,000 successful bombings in the US alone), and isolating. Women were second-class citizens. In some parts of the country, minorities weren�
�t considered citizens at all.
It’s a great place, in some ways a natural place, to set a mystery. But it sure isn’t a place I’d like to live in again.
I like my science fiction world.
I can’t imagine what another 45 years will bring.
Online War
Frances Silversmith
With growing horror, Basil watched the tanks roll up to the former UN buffer zone separating the two parts of Nicosia. Enemy troops approached from the Turkish north. Greek ordnance advanced through the southern part of town, which belonged to the Republic of Cyprus. Basil's ears rang with the sound of the commands sergeants on both sides shouted to their soldiers.
Weapons were trained across the buffer zone, making it seem as if he stood directly in the line of fire. He adjusted the reality-mode setting on his Neural Interface. There was such a thing as too much realism, after all.
The newscast he was playing on his NIF turned from a real-life experience into a remote vid, but his fast-beating heart didn't slow. Ten months ago, things had been fine. And then a single incident involving a Turkish tourist attacked by street-toughs in Greece had triggered a series of ever-increasing violence.
Until it came to this. Athens would not tolerate the Turkish attack on the Republic of Cyprus. It was all too likely that they'd answer with a nuclear strike against Ankara. In which case Iraq would retaliate, which would cause the European Union to enter the war, which would draw the African League in. .
Basil cut that thought off before he could brood himself into a panic attack.
He activated his NIF's comm app and pinged his friend Daphne. Almost immediately, her pale face appeared before his inner eye.
"Hi Basil. I take it you've watched the news?"
"So I have. I think I'll go on a long vacation, say-to Antarctica, or somewhere equally far away. So should you."
She brushed a lock out of her eyes with unsteady hands. "Hmm. Actually, I've got a different idea. Mind if I visit you in person to discuss it?"
Basil felt his eyebrows rise. In all the years of their online friendship she had never suggested such a thing. "You want to come all the way to Cyprus just to meet me?"
She nodded. "I want to talk in private, where nobody can hack in and listen."
Had she still not forgiven him for his little demonstration a few months back? "Hey, just because I hacked into your Neural Interface that doesn't mean everybody can."
"It proved to me that my NIF isn't as secure as I thought. I'm not going to take any chances. So can I visit you, or not?"
Basil agreed, and they broke the connection.
He took a look around the room-and went into a cleaning frenzy. When the doorbell rang two hours later his apartment looked almost presentable. He picked up a sock he had overlooked and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he opened the door, and Daphne swept past him into the apartment.
She had an even more impressive presence in person than on the cloud. Her face wasn't exactly beautiful, and her curves weren't ample enough to suit current fashion. But she radiated an intense-and infectious-energy. Just watching her pace the length of his living room eased his exhaustion from that hurried housecleaning feat.
She turned and fixed him with a glower. "We've got to do something about this war."
He stared at her. "Do something? We? What could we do? I'm a cloud security expert, not a peacemaker. And you're an online game designer, for God's sake. What exactly do you think the two of us could accomplish that all the powerful politicians can't?"
Her glower grew darker, but all she said was, "Well, we won't know until we try, will we?" She plunked herself down on his sofa. "I've got an idea."
****
Around midnight three days later, Basil withdrew from a false persona he'd set up in the cloud environment the Neural Interfaces around the world connected to. This was the last fake user in a trail of other false identities, designed to keep people from tracing his activities back to him. If they went through with Daphne's crazy plan, he'd need those protections.
Daphne wanted him to hack into the NIFs of every powerful politician and military leader in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey, and install an online war game she and her co-workers at Shooting Star Games Ltd. had worked on over the last few months. The idea was to trap all the major players in the game, and have them start their war in the virtual world instead of the real one.
"Are you sure your war game will feel like the real thing to our victims?" he asked.
"I'm sure." Daphne sat in the corner of the sofa, working on the game design. "The app was developed by Shooting Star, after all. We're good at realistic games."
"I know," he said. He had played those games himself. A NIF game interacted directly with the user's brain. If the game was detailed enough, the experience was indistinguishable from reality. And Shooting Star was justly famous for its realistic war games. "But that's for settings outside the user's real-life experience. What we're trying to do is different. How can you convince people that they're in the real world when you don't know a thing about their actual surroundings?"
"But I do know everything about their current location. Every single one of our targets has retreated to their respective emergency bunkers. And I've got experience recordings for those bunkers."
"Somebody actually recorded their stay in a high security bunker and made it available to you?" Basil shook his head.
She gave him a forced smile. "There's a lot of money in the game industry, and the people who maintain those bunkers don't earn all that much. So yes, Shooting Star has been able to acquire top-security information on most of those bunkers world-wide.
"You didn't hear that from me, of course," she added as an afterthought.
"Of course," he echoed, still chewing on that unexpected piece of information.
The more he thought about it, the more feasible this insane plan seemed. He'd even found an outdated version of the Greek NIF security protocol, buried under terabytes of virtual trash at an obscure site that nobody claimed ownership to.
Based on what he'd been able to learn from that protocol, he thought he could see a flaw that he might be able to exploit-a flaw that any protocol evolved from that design was likely to share. And where there was a flaw, Basil was positive he could break in. If he dared.
Part of him wished that the plan was completely impossible. He did not sleep well that night.
He was bleary-eyed and depressed when Daphne knocked on the bedroom door the next morning.
"Have you watched the news?" she demanded.
"And a good morning to you, too," he said. "No, I've just woken up. What happened?"
Her cheekbones stood out on her pale face, making her look haggard. Basil wasn't sure she'd even registered his dig.
"Turkey is bringing in additional troops from the mainland, and Greece has no units close enough to match them. International analysts agree that the Turks will overrun the south within the week. If that happens, Greece will push the Button." Her eyes bore into his. "We've got to act, now."
Basil leaned back and pulled his pony tail with suddenly damp hands. His heart vibrated like a guitar string.
"Daphne, I'm just an ordinary guy," he said. "I've always had this nerdy tendency not to jump into adventures. You need a hero for this, not someone like me."
Daphne's shoulders slumped. "I know what you mean. I've always been a mousy little geek myself. But. . somebody has to do something, or we might literally face the end of the world!" The last few words came out as a squeak.
Basil stared at her. Melodramatic as that statement sounded, she was right. But he couldn't be the one to save the world. That kind of thing didn't happen to people like him.
Daphne returned his gaze imploringly, lips trembling.
Basil averted his eyes and exhaled. "Let's have some coffee, and I'll watch the news."
"You're not mousy," he added as an afterthought.
That earned him a watery smile.
Basil watched and
re-watched the national and Greek news. Then he activated a translation app and tried the Turkish news, then Syria and Egypt. All the commentators agreed that things looked very grim indeed.
"So are we going to do this, or not?" Daphne asked.
Basil cleared his throat, but it stayed uncomfortably tight. "Even if everything goes perfectly, and we save the world from certain destruction, we'll still end up in prison. What you're proposing has to be against every law on privacy protection that was ever passed."
Her jaw muscles clenched and unclenched. "I know. Not to mention the fact that trapping someone in a virtual world is a morally despicable thing to do." She met and held his eyes. "I still think we should do it. We can worry about the law later, if we live long enough." Her eyes were wide, and a hint of moisture gathered in the corners.
Basil swallowed. And swallowed again. Then he forced air into his too-tight chest. "All right. Let's get to work."
"Is that a desktop computer?" Daphne exclaimed a few minutes later. "How quaint!"
In spite of himself, Basil grinned. "Yes, that's a genuine desktop computer, complete with keyboard and monitor. And, more importantly, an off-switch. Unlike the apps on your NIF, this relict can be powered down, and becomes completely untraceable as soon as it's switched off."
Daphne looked thoughtful. "Oh. That's handy, I suppose."
"So it is. Plus, this ancient machine still has a lot of outdated software that allows me to access low-level functions that have been buried under layers and layers of modern apps on a standard NIF. That gives me tools to work on a level that nobody ever bothers to check these days." He gave her a mischievous smile.
Her answering grin looked a bit lopsided, but it was the first genuine smile he had seen on her face since this whole madness started.
Heartened, he set to work. Daphne watched over his shoulder while he activated the first set of false identities and started probing a ministerial assistant's NIF security app.
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