Free Web NovelChapter 230: Chapter 223:The Fw 189
The Fw 189 began as a skeleton, and skeletons are honest in a way finished machines never are.
For three days, it was nothing but a framework of welded steel tube clamped into an assembly rig at the heart of Skyforge’s longest hangar. Men circled it the way they might circle a horse that hadn’t yet decided what exactly it had to do.
The twin tail booms ran back from the wings like the bones of some enormous insect. Between them sat the crew cabin—a bare cage of struts waiting to be skinned.
Every morning, Brakka walked its length with a measuring tool in one hand and a scowl fixed in place. He paused at each joint to check that the rig hadn’t let anything drift a hair out of true in the night. A millimeter’s error here would grow into a finger’s width by the time the wings went on—and a finger’s width was the whole distance between an aircraft and an expensive way to die.(Kaboooom)
"The frame’s within tolerance," Brakka reported on the fourth day. From him, it was roughly a declaration of love.
The trouble started when they tried to give it a nervous system.
On Earth, Lucien remembered—dimly, like a half-forgotten language—an aircraft of this kind would be threaded with wiring. Thin copper veins carrying current to instruments, moving surfaces, lights, and gauges that told a pilot what his machine was doing beneath him.
Elarion had no such industry. It could draw copper, but not the fine, coated wire an aircraft demanded—not in those lengths, and not to that fineness. More importantly, it had nothing resembling the delicate electrical instruments that wire was meant to feed.
What it had was mana.(so big brain time)
"We run a channel here," Maerath said, dragging a finger down the length of the port boom, "and here. The instruments feed off it directly. No current, no wire. The gauge doesn’t measure electricity because there isn’t any—it reads the flow of mana and shows the pilot a number."
Gandalf frowned at the boom. "And when that channel crosses the engine’s own draw?"
That was the first real problem, and it cost them a day. The instrument channel passed within a hand’s breadth of the engine feeds, and the two streams fought where they crossed. Every time the engine changed its output, the readings jumped and swam. The altitude gauge insisted, brightly and with total confidence, that the aircraft chocked to the hangar floor was actually climbing through cloud.(quite the confidence the gauge got)
They chased the fault half the day before its shape came clear. In the end, they routed the instrument channels down the opposite boom, dragging the two mana streams as far apart as the frame would allow, and sleeved the few unavoidable crossings in the same warded alloy Titanworks used to line its furnace pots.
"Separate the streams," Maerath said when the gauge finally sat still and told the truth. "Obvious in hindsight."
"Everything is obvious in hindsight," Brakka muttered, not looking up. "That’s what makes hindsight useless."
The moving surfaces came next, teaching them the sharp difference between a drawing and a machine.
On paper, the pilot pulled a lever and the aircraft answered. In the hangar, the pilot pulled a lever and a chain of steel rods and joints—running the length of a boom that flexed under its own weight—answered slowly, vaguely, and with an alarming amount of slack.
The first time they rigged the controls, the tail surfaces lagged a full breath behind the pilot’s hand, then snapped to position all at once as the slack came out. On the ground, it was merely wrong; in the air, it could be fatal.
Ironbreaker, drawn to the workshop by the noise of construction, took one look at the sloppy linkage and made a sound of genuine disgust.
"You’ve built the nerves and forgotten the tendons," the dwarf said. "A machine that thinks faster than it moves is worse than one that can’t think at all. At least the stupid one is honest about it."
He spent the better part of two days proving his point. Joint by joint, he tightened the linkage, replacing the flexing rods with shorter segments and firmer bearings, until the tail answered the stick instantly.
It added weight. Everything that worked always added weight. But when they worked the controls again, the surfaces moved as though the pilot’s own will ran straight down the boom. Even Brakka allowed himself a small nod.
The skin went on after that, bringing its own fierce argument.
The crew cabin needed windows—the great, curved panels of the observation position. An aircraft built to see was worthless the instant its crew couldn’t. But glass that large, curved to the cabin’s shape and clear enough to pick out a gun position from two thousand feet, was far beyond Elarion’s current capabilities.
The first three panels cracked in the cooling ovens, splitting with a sound like a gunshot. The fourth survived, only to warp the view so badly that Gandalf, pressing his face to it, reported that the far wall of the hangar appeared to be gently melting.
"We can’t make glass this good at this scale," Brakka admitted, and the confession plainly cost him something. "Not yet. The glassworks simply isn’t there."
Maerath found the way around it—not through better glass, but by talking the glass into behaving. He worked a thin web of clearing runes into the frame around each panel. The magic did quietly what the ovens couldn’t: it smoothed the trapped stresses and coaxed the warp out of the curve after the panel had cooled and set.
The results weren’t perfect; a faint ripple still lived at the edges if you looked for it. But through the corrected windows, the hangar wall stopped melting and became a wall again—honest and flat. Clear enough to fly behind.
"You’re using magic to fix a glass problem," Ironbreaker observed, watching the runes settle.
"I’m using magic to fix an industrial problem," Maerath corrected. "The glass is only where it shows. We can’t build the furnace that would make the glass properly, so we make it badly and let the runes stand there apologizing for it."
Lucien, watching from the doorway, saw the dwarf’s gaze travel slowly along the runed windows, down the glowing channels threading the booms—across every single place where a spell had quietly taken the seat of missing industry. Something behind Ironbreaker’s eyes went still and thoughtful.
The engines were last, and worst.
The engines themselves behaved tolerably on the test bench (and only when watched), but the covers were the true nightmare. The compact aircraft engine ran dangerously hot under sustained output, and all that heat had to go somewhere else the engine would melt at some specific point.
Sealed inside a streamlined cover and mounted on a boom packed with instrument mana channels, the temperature climbed fast. As it rose, the nearby channels began to swim and gasp all over again—the same interference as before, arriving through heat instead of nearness.
"The engine cooks its own instruments now" Gandalf said grimly, watching a test gauge climb and begin to lie. "The harder it works, the more it blinds the pilot to tell how hard it’s working. Which is exactly also the time when he most needs the truth."
They fought it for two days. Vents spilled the heat but ruined the smooth airflow. Cooling plates drank the heat but paid for it in weight the wings couldn’t spare.
In the end, the answer was a marriage of both crafts:
The steel: A cooling channel carried the worst of the heat away through the boom’s structure.
The Magic: A run of steadying runes was laid along the instrument channels to hold the readings honest, simply refusing to notice the rising temperature.
Between the two, the gauges stopped lying, remaining steady even at full output.
By the end of the second week, the Fw 189 stood complete on its own landing gear. It was skinned, windowed, its controls crisp, its veins running mana instead of copper, its instruments reading true, and its engines cool enough to trust.
It hadn’t rolled a foot under its own power. It hadn’t touched the sky either. But it was, at last, a finished machine. The men who had bled over it drifted into a loose half-circle on the hangar floor, simply looking at what they had made.
Lucien walked its length slowly, counting not the problems this time, but the answers. Every place where Elarion had reached for an industry it didn’t have, closed its hand on empty air, and set magic into the gap instead:
The wire it couldn’t draw.(use magic)
The glass it couldn’t perfect.(use magic)
The heat it couldn’t engineer away.(magic slam)
At every point where the machine should have been impossible, a spell had quietly held the door open long enough for iron to walk through.
"It’s a strange aircraft," Gandalf said, coming to stand at his shoulder. "Half of it isn’t really engineering at all. Take the magic away and it drops out of the sky before the wheels ever leave the ground."
"Then we don’t take the magic away," Lucien said.
Across the machine, Ironbreaker stood incredibly still. His broad hand was laid flat against the crew cabin, staring through the corrected glass at the instruments waiting beyond. The thoughtful quiet he’d carried all week had curdled at last into something unmistakable.
An idea.
He said nothing that day. He only looked, frowned, and folded his thoughts away for later. And the finished aircraft sat gleaming in the lamplight, patient on its wheels, waiting for the ground to decide whether all that borrowed magic could truly hold it in the air.
