[X] Okay. An hour.
The plot thread isn't going to follow itself.
[X] Submariners, 1890-1900
Because how could I not give you an excuse to talk about the more sophisticated and successful gayaverse equivalent of the Fenian Ram that folks (admittedly mostly me) had been throwing around in the worldbuilding thread.
Also, we will be coming back to tanks, have no fear! There will be several lecture modules and then a dissertation over the course of the next, what... year?
I just wandered down a pretty deep rabbit hole on the submarines thing.
So, the Fenian Ram was pretty small. Small enough that arming it with self propelled torpedoes of the conventional sort would have been somewhere between difficult and impossible and might have required some kind of sketchy one-shot external mounting. Instead, it had what was essentially an air gun that shot six foot long, nine inch wide pipe bombs. I find that to be an alarming and dubiously practical weapon system, and question whether it could even fire far enough to avoid damaging the submarine.
One obvious way to make the gayaverse version better would be to make it larger. Expand it into something proper and give it conventional torpedoes. This is a valid choice, and I do think it ought to be larger than the real thing, but turning it into a Victorian proto-u-boat large enough for 14 inch torpedoes? Maybe not. It would be damn cool, but might be a bit much for the not!Fenian Brotherhood to fund. So what if we found a way to make smaller, simpler torpedoes?
It seems to me that the propulsion system has to be the, or at least a, limiting factor. Yes, the explosives are also clearly important, but there's a fair bit of room to try to make those go farther with improved guidance and various schemes to make them more destructive. Since this is before antisubmarine warfare even exists, most targets will not be especially fast, alert or torpedo resistant, and all it has to do is outrange and outspeed a pneumatic gun alone, compromises that would not normally be acceptable are probably options here. Brainstorming a bit, the really simple option that comes to mind is something based on a "pop pop boat", a kind of external combustion aquatic analog of a valveless pulsejet that works by water flash-boiling which is typically only used as a children's toy. But then that gets back into trouble because it requires figuring out a heat source, and those things are obviously not up to the challenge. So what if we make it internal combustion, and fuel it with a lump of potassium? This provides the heat, creates a really, really simple system, and should boost the efficiency quite a bit due to all of the hot hydrogen gas the reaction is producing in addition to the steam. It's also an entirely reasonable thing for someone to invent at the time, since both pop-pop boats and potassium were available and the principle isn't any great stretch.
Concretely, this ends up looking like a boiler of some sort with a lump of potassium in it, attached to two or more tubes which exit the rear of the torpedo. To fire, the safety caps on the tubes are removed and it is loaded into a conventional torpedo tube (or the Fenian Ram's pneumatic gun, which was much the same thing), then fired pneumatically. It should start fine as soon as water enters the boiler.
I expect that this would be pretty deficient as torpedo propulsion mechanisms go, but it has the advantage of being cheap and potentially quite small due to having no moving parts. And, of course, since this isn't an actual, real thing that has been done, it could very likely prove a complete failure in any number of ways. Entertaining to think about, though.
The thing that still gets me is the part where they stole it from the manufacturer after a payment dispute, and then asked the manufacturer for technical support after they realized they didn't know how to operate it. I hardly have words.
"You know you don't have to be so nervous around me." Alison says as you sit down with coffee and a slice of some sort of lemon cake that had looked delicious on the counter but now that you're sitting down and your guts are doing backflips you're wondering if cake was a good choice at all.
"I dunno, Alison, how often do you get the attention of a pretty girl all of a sudden?" You say with a shrug.
"All of a sudden? Babe I've known you six months now."
"Yeah, but-"
"Nah, no buts this time. C'mon, when you're not avoiding me because of some book, you're basically running away from any suggestion of hanging out."
"I'm not avoiding you."
"Hey, I'm not having a go at you, far from it. I came on to you, remember." She says with a grin. You stab a piece of a cake with a fork and chew on it with a dry mouth. It tastes of nothing. "But you've definitely been avoiding me."
"I don't know. I guess. So I'm not a girl, right?"
"No, I got that the first time you ran screaming from the shop." She smiles without malice, "So you're a…?"
"I'm non-binary."
"Right, non-binary. So… They, right?"
"Right." You take a sip of bitter black coffee and run it around your mouth, enjoying the way your mouth reacts to the sharpness. "You're into me because you think I'm a girl."
"Um… I guess? Hadn't really thought about it to be honest, I've mostly been thinking you're hot."
The heat rises in your cheeks in a flash, a blush to rival the greatest blushes of all time. The pretty girl with the eyebrow piercing thinks your hot. Ain't that a turn up for the books.
"Look, Bailey, I'm not gonna push this. I think you're cute. I wanna take you to shitty. gigs and make out or something. Here's my number." She scrawls a row of crunched up numbers on a napkin, slides it across the table. "You ring me sometime if that sounds like a date you wanna get taken on, okay?"
With that she leaves the cafe, and you, behind.
"So, um, submarines is it?" The nervous woman at the front of the class seems to consider the crowd of students watching her almost like a threat. She is not a high class, world renowned historian - but Professor Susan Utrecht is known around campus as the woman to go to when you want to know anything about late 19th century history. At least, she's known as that amongst the few people you talk too, all of them historians.
"In 1890, many nations already have submarines. The Dauphin provided the proof of concept, though many would try and replicate the spar torpedo instead of the later Gallian potassium torpedo or 'propulsive mine'. This led to the fate of the NAS Hunley, an Alleghanian 'Dauphin', recently found buried under a meter of silt in a Mexicoco inlet presumed lost to its own weapon during the sinking of the MSS Cortez."
She didn't look up as she spoke, instead looking directly at notes laid carefully on a lectern.
"By 1890 though, new developments were coming. The 1889 Caspian Forel took things a step further with two externally carried Whitehead minneschiffe and the very first electric battery to be taken to sea. This changed many things, not simply for the Caspians but across Gaya. The Cathayan's soon had several submarines of this style, as did the Albians, and many other nations followed in their footsteps. But this was simply a stepping stone. Suddenly we saw a decade of intense development, a miniature arms race, as the naval powers of the world strove for dominance in the submarine. Not least was this helped by the failings of the Forel design - the external clamps would often fail when submerged, leading many navies to treat them as submersible torpedo boats. Strategic plans from the early 1890's talk of squadron's of Forel type submarines approaching a port submerged before surfacing and firing massive spreads at enemy fleets. A fascinating idea not even slightly based in reality."
She clears her throat, chunky necklaces rattling in time to her movements.
"Then we see further developments in 1896 as the first word spreads from Dyskelande. They have launched the U-1, a Bonschliffe design which again revolutionises. With three torpedoes internally carried and a covered bow tube, it is the first submarine which can reliably operate as a submarine, rather than as a submersible. It could range five hundred nautical miles, perfect for the coastal warfare endemic in Europa, Lydia and on other continents. It was not perhaps what we expect of a submarine today, but it was by all accounts an effective design which operated capably within its bounds."
"By 1900, submarines had changed significantly. Gone were the external tubes, the submersible strategy, the other things that marked the Dauphin and the Forel. Now the submarine rules beneath the waves, as the Juggernaut would soon come to rule above them. Any questions?"
Your hand shot up, of course.
Are you going to ring her?
[ ] yes
[ ] No
What is your question?
[ ] What was the most important submarine action in the decade?
[ ] What was the largest submarine of the period?
[ ] What was the most unusual development of the period?
[ ] Write in.
Gallian potassium torpedoes? Fascinating. What a clever and unusual idea. I wonder where the idea could have come from?
In all seriousness, though, the whitehead torpedo was invented in 1866, even if it didn't see service in our time line until around 1870 and the initial versions were really bad. Potassium torpedoes should have lower costs because they don't need an air pressure engine, but I suspect the technology can't be taken nearly as far as the compressed air torpedo eventually was, and it doesn't really lead to anything else other than maybe the alkali metal ramjets that the Soviet supercavitating torpedoes supposedly use as a sustainer, according to some random guy on Quora. Would be interesting to hear how soon something like the Whitehead took over as the more common system.
Interesting historical tidbit: the last combat use of the whitehead torpedo was in 1940, when Norwegian shore defenses commanded by a guy who had retired in 1927 used them to blow up a Nazi heavy cruiser, causing the retreat of the fleet that was being sent to take Oslo by sea. You can't make this stuff up.
[X] yes
[X] What was the most unusual development of the period?
"The most unusual you ask?" The professor scratches her chin, a few grey hairs escaping from the bun tied at the back of her head, "Well that's an interesting question. What is unusual in this period? This is a time of sudden and rapid development where experimentation is commonplace. But that's not an answer, is it."
"Most of the largest nations were, as usual, focused on simply making the most torpedo boats they could with the slim budgets that submarines were allocated. Where do we look then? Well, as is commonplace, it is the minor nations which experiment, unable to compete conventionally and thus looking to non-conventional means to succeed."
"The Otrusians, in conflict with the Kyburg Union from 1895 to 1897 build a class of Forel's equipped with three mines apiece. In conjunction with conventional minelayers, these created a blockade around the Kyburgian ports which cut naval trade by seventy-five percent, leading indirectly towards the peace."
"Then of course there is the Cathayan Huojian Chuan, a boat that capitalised on the local expertise for rocketry and other experimental propulsion systems. With eight disposable launchers per boat fitted where the torpedoes were commonly carried, the intention was for them to be able to surface, bombard a land target near the coast, and then slip away into the night. Of course, the equipment made them poor sea boats, and reduced their submerged speed to a knot at best. Not ideal for performing night attacks, I'm sure you'll agree."
The music was… indescribable. In a tiny basement under a bar that hadn't seen clean floors since the '60's bands blasted sound that was unlike anything else. Guitars, drums, voices, it came together in a mind-wiping barrage, a wall of noise that took hold of your heart and your gut and made you want to cry. A woman screamed her pain into a microphone dancing so hard you thought she might collapse - if the stage held out that long. The people around you danced so close and so tight it felt like you could barely touch the floor.
The heat was something else. You were sweating more than you had in months in a cold underground room amongst at least a hundred other people focused entirely on the stage. Alison was… somewhere. Ah, there she was. She shoved a bottle into your hand, caught your chin, pressed her lips to yours. Her grin was infectious. You went back to dancing.
What will you study next?
[ ] The impact of the Naval Arms Race, 1900-1913
[ ] The birth of the aircraft carrier - pre-Great War
[ ] Air power and the Battlefield in the Great War
