ispeacetoomuchtoaskfor

I'm always tired

but hey, I also have two eyes and two ears and a very patient head Demisexual | Heteroromantic | She/Her

94 posts

Wooden Ships And Obscure Disney Films

Wooden Ships and Obscure Disney Films

The RLS Warrior was three days out of Montressor, sails full of the solar wind, and her commander closed his eyes and felt the Etherium around him.

For a number of reasons – not least his old ties with Admiral Amelia – Jim had been heavily involved with the design of the ship, as well as the tradeoffs involved. For all that he wasn’t even twenty-five, yet, the ship was built as much to his ideas as to those of anyone else in the Navy, and after three days he was really starting to get a feel for her.

And he was proud of the work.

The yards had done right by them, and no mistake. She sailed the winds as sweetly as the old Legacy, and if that was partly due to her studdingsails to give her extra sail area – they’d calculated it out a dozen times, even getting Doppler involved, and every time it had come out that the sails were worth the hassle. And the engines sang a fine note, while the treated timbers making up her hull were finely seasoned and showed no sign of weakness or wear.

“Captain?” a nervous voice said, then the voice’s owner corrected herself. “I mean – Commander?”

“Captain is preferred,” Jim replied. “Can’t have more than one captain on a ship.”

Then he opened his eyes, and grinned at the young woman who was nervously clinging to the ropes around the mainmast crow’s nest. “But since there doesn’t seem to be anyone else up here, you can call me Jim if you want.”

“I couldn’t do that!” the woman said, astonished, and her ears flicked down. “You’re – you’re the Captain! And you’re a hero of the Second Procyon War…”

Jim chuckled.

“Midshipwoman Brooks, ten years ago I was a complete tearaway,” he said. “So, did our other midshipmen and women put you up to coming to ask the scary captain about his past? Or is this you personally with a question?”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind either way, I’m just curious. And come on, sit – it’s good you’re comfortable in the shrouds, but there’s no reason to hang there while we’re talking.”

“Right,” Brooks said, still sounding nervous, and clambered into the lookout spot.

For a long moment, there was silence.

“It was just me,” she said. “I was… I suppose I wondered about something, and – I wanted to ask, but it feels like a silly question now.”

“Take it from me, sometimes a silly question is just the question that needs asking,” Jim replied. “Or answering.”

The Warrior shivered a little as they came about, turning six degrees port and adjusting their vector four down as the helmsman pointed them at a different star.

“Well-” the midshipwoman said. “I… why are we on a ship like this?”

Jim raised an eyebrow, something he’d been practising, and Brooks flushed.

“I don’t mean that as a criticism,” she added. “It’s a good ship, of course! I’m just thinking of…”

“The ironclads?” Jim replied.

“The ironclads,” Brooks agreed. “I know they were important in the Procyon war. I also know the Procyons lost, but… the ironclads were so difficult to damage. It feels like even sailing ships like these is a strange choice, let alone building new ones.”

Jim nodded, doing a quick assessment of the girl.

She was… definitely less delinquent than he’d been. She sounded curious, and… realistically speaking, this wasn’t going to stay a secret for long anyway.

It was his decision, and… in this case, he was going to nurture the young officer.

“You’re not wondering anything that we didn’t,” he said. “I was heavily involved in the discussions, actually… perhaps we will end up building the same kind of ironclads as the Procyons were building – I wouldn’t be involved in those decisions, because they’re going on right now and I’m not exactly there.”

He stood, and looked out over the sails of the Warrior. They glowed with inner fire, both directly propelling the ship by catching the wind and also providing the power that let her engines burn at high power for long periods of time.

“I’ve already given you the answer,” he added, glancing at Brooks. “Your academy scores show you’re a bright young woman, midshipwoman – what do you think it is?”

Brooks frowned, and her tail twitched as she thought.

“I think…” she began. “You said… the same kind of ironclads. What other kinds of ironclads are there?”

Jim patted the royal mast, the highest of the four huge cylinders making up Warrior’s mainmast.

“You’re sailing on one,” he answered.

Brooks looked confused, then stood up herself to look down at the sails.

“...how?” she asked. “Ironclads – they don’t look like this!”

“What makes an ironclad?” Jim asked. “It’s the iron, that’s what… experiments showed that it’s actually helpful to have the iron backed by wood, that makes it more resistant to attack. So that’s what Warrior is. She’s a test ship, all right – an ironclad cruiser, with the masts and sails to travel long distances on patrol in a way the Procyon War ironclads never could, and with armour that’s almost as strong.”

He tilted his head, a little. “Midshipwoman, have you ever used a solar sailer?”

Brooks looked a little thrown by the sudden change of topic.

“...no,” she admitted. “I’ve sailed a cutter before, but those have a proper keel and mast… solar sailers seem too dangerous to me. They’re not much more than a board, an engine and a sail, aren’t they?”

“That’s right,” Jim agreed. “And they’re very able to manoeuvre, in ways you can’t even manage by just welding an engine directly to a board. The key is the sail – you’ve done vectors in your classes, the key point here is that you can combine the vectors from the sail and the engine, and the transverse resistance from the sail if you push it to go in a direction against the one it’s meant to go. You can pull some incredibly tight turns.”

Brooks was frowning, clearly processing that information.

“That sounds like it’s personal experience, Captain,” she said. “You’ve done that?”

“I’ve done both,” Jim agreed. “And I’ve captained wooden ships against ironclads… ironclads struggle to turn fast, because they only have differential thrust, and they struggle to move quickly as well. And the former is what let us run circles around them… and strategically, they were dependent on covert support ships carrying fuel. Do you think the Warrior is the same?”

Brooks shook her head.

“No,” she replied, then frowned. “So you’re saying that… the sails are an advantage?”

“They might not be forever,” Jim conceded. “Maybe some day all our line warships will have to be full ironclads, where even the risk of mast damage is too much. But I think even then there’ll be a place for cruisers to have sails, for some years longer.”

He clapped her on the shoulder. “And maybe we’ll both see that day – but right now, if we ran into an ironclad from the Procyon Wars, I’m sure we’d clean their clock. Because this is the finest ship and crew I’ve yet seen, and I’ve seen a few crews.”

Then he looked slightly awkward. “Admittedly, my first one had about ninety percent of it be pirates…”

“Pardon?” Brooks asked. “Was that during the war?”

“Before,” Jim replied. “During my misspent youth. Though… you may as well tell the others this, Miss Midshipwoman – I think I’m going to have all of you young officers, and perhaps the rest of the crew, have at least one go each on a solar sailer. I believe there’s four in one of the holds, and it’s a useful skill… once you’ve flown one, not much else can scare you.”

The feline midshipwoman looked at her captain, still not sure how to take the oddly informal conversation.

“Should I be worried?” she asked.

Jim shrugged.

“That’s more BEN’s department than mine,” he admitted. “He flat out refuses to come up to the crow’s nest, though, so I’ll have to ask him on deck…”