Free Web NovelChapter 233: Chapter 226:The Stormwing
The summons reached Gandalf and Maerath at Skyforge on a morning when the production line had just delivered its third finished Fw 189, and both mages assumed, walking into Lucien’s study in the capital(refers to duchy capital), that they were about to be congratulated.
They instead found the desk covered in sketches instead.
"Three scouts flying, nine more building, and pilots training faster than we can finish aircraft for them," Lucien said, waving them into chairs without looking up. "Which means the eyes are handled, and it’s time to talk about the next rung. Sit. This one is going to be an argument."
Maerath picked up the nearest sketch and turned it right way up. A single-seat machine, one engine in the nose, and a wing unlike anything on the scout — long, tapered, curving to its tips in an elegant sweep that looked less drawn than grown.
"The fighter," he said.
"The fighter. The scout sees the battlefield. This is what makes sure it lives long enough to keep seeing it — and what makes sure nobody else’s scout does." Lucien pulled the sketches around to face them. "So before your builders touch a single rib, I want the shape of it agreed in this room, because everything about this machine is a choice against something else, and I’d rather we fight about it here than discover it in the air."
"Then start with the wing," Gandalf said, tapping the sweep of it. "This is beautiful, and it will be miserable to build. Every rib a different length. Brakka will compose songs about his suffering."
"He will, and the wing stays." Lucien traced the curve. "Speed keeps a fighter alive, but turning wins the fight. This shape turns tighter at the edge of its strength than any straight wing can — the load spreads along the whole curve instead of piling up at the root. When two aircraft meet, the one that turns inside wins while the other gets the shot. I’ll pay forty manufacturing headaches for that."
"One engine," Maerath said, reading on. "Not two."
"One exceptional one. I told you months ago the fighter would need it — your research line’s first engine goes in this nose." Lucien leaned back. "Two engines means two of everything. Two feeds, twice the frontal area dragging through the air. A fighter is a gun that flies. Everything that isn’t gun, fuel, or wing is waste."
"Speaking of the gun." Gandalf had reached the armament page, and his eyebrows had reached his hairline. "Both of them? The rig experiment, twice over?"
"In the wing roots, one per side. The recoil buffer works. The mana feed works. You proved them on the ground — so its time for them to earn their keep. Two guns, paired fire, enough weight of shot to take apart anything flying in a two-second burst." Lucien watched him. "Tell me the problem, because I can see you holding one."(guns reffering to stripped down version of vulcan, i will choose a name and tell you by next Chapter in author thoughts)
"The problem is that a test rig was bolted to the earth," Maerath said, "and a wing is bolted to air and arithmetic. The buffer soaks the recoil into its mount — so the wing has to carry that soak-point through every burst without flexing. And that’s before we discuss two guns firing together. If the feeds drift out of step even slightly, one wing gets pushed harder than the other, and the aircraft wags its own nose off the target while shooting at it or maybe starts a good tornado rotation."
"Good. That’s a real problem, which means it has a real solution, and you’ll have a build schedule to find it in." Lucien slid another sheet across. "The wheels. They come up."
Both mages looked at the drawing — the landing gear shown twice, once down and once folded flat into wells inside the wing — and Gandalf exhaled slowly.
"A mechanism that has to work perfectly twice every flight," he said. "Up and down. Hundreds of flights. After gunfire, in cold, in heat. Tell me what happens the day it works once and a half."
"That’s the design question, and it’s the right one. Stuck down is a slow flight home. Stuck halfway is a coffin with a good view. So make sure whatever you and Ironbreaker build — and may fortune preserve you — if it fails. That requirement outranks weight, outranks speed, outranks everything."
"Ironbreaker will want pure hydraulics."
"And you’ll want pure mana, and you’ll meet in the middle the way you always do, and it’ll be better than either. I’ve stopped pretending that isn’t the actual method."
Gandalf gathered the sheets slowly, squaring their edges, and looked at the whole of it laid out in his hands — the wing, the engine, the buried guns, the vanishing wheels.
"You realize," he said, "that every one of these four things would be the most ambitious project Skyforge has ever attempted and you’ve stacked all four in one airframe."
"I’ve stacked all four in one airframe after you built an aircraft out of runes and apologies and flew it anyway on the first try." Lucien met his eyes. "I’m not guessing at what you can do anymore. I’m scheduling it."
"Flattery, from you, is somehow more alarming than criticism sometimes do you know it my lord."
"It’s not flattery. Flattery doesn’t come with a deadline." He walked them toward the door. "Full engineering review in ten days — I want Ironbreaker and Brakka read in before you leave the capital, because if Ironbreaker learns about a new aircraft from anyone but you, he’ll sulk into next winter and take the machine tools with him. The airframe programme starts this month."
At the door, Maerath paused.
"It needs a name. The scout kept its blueprint name, but this one’s ours from the first rib. It should have its own."
Lucien looked past him, at the sketch still lying on the desk — the long curved wing, built to live where the weather lived, built to be the storm instead of shelter from it.
"Stormwing," he said.
Maerath tried the word once, quietly, and nodded. Gandalf simply tucked the sketches under his arm like a man accepting custody of an expensive problem.
They were halfway down the corridor when Lucien heard, drifting back through the closing door, the beginning of the first argument:
"—the gear lock has to be mine, you know he’ll give Ironbreaker the hydraulics—"
"He’ll give Ironbreaker the hydraulics because Ironbreaker should have the hydraulics. Your last lock jammed a door, Maerath."
"That door was warped."
"For gods sake maerath,that door was in your own workshop."
Lucien returned to his desk, and to the papers waiting beneath the aircraft sketches — a report from Seastar, where a keel was waiting to be laid, and one from Ironhold, where the first medium tank prototype had at last rolled off its jig and onto the proving ground. A third paper sat beneath both: confirmation from Caelrith that the allied envoys had accepted, and would arrive within the month to see what their alliances had bought them.
