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Pearls of Weber

A collection of posts by David Weber containing background information for his stories, collected and generously made available Joe Buckley.

Gauntlet's weapons fit

It's a combination of new weapons, new tech, and typos, unfortunately.

First, when I started writing the story, Gauntlet was going to be a BC, not a CA. As such, she started out with a bigger weapon's fit. In fact, she was going to be a class of BC I decided not to build after all for various reasons I will not be building after all. (Don't ask; it has to do with certain elements I'm not prepared to let out of the bag just yet.) At any rate, as the BC, she was supposed to have thirty tubes per broadside and be capable of firing MDMs. When I revised the novella (on a very short time clock) I managed to get most of the problems caught, but she should have been reduced to a broadside of 19 tubes and only 10 grasers. This still represents a significant increase in firepower over the old Star Knight-class's 14 tubes 4 grasers, and 6 lasers and is made possible primarily by the reduction in manpower requirements. (The original Star Knight carried a complement of over 900; Gauntlet carries a total company of 385 in a ship which is over a third again Star Knight's size. For that matter, Hexapuma's ship's comany is only 355, and she's 60,000 tons heavier than Gauntlet.) When I actually wrote the story, two things happened. (1) I was really pushed for time to get the changes made; and (2) I'd done the ship-to-ship sections first, and there'd been a sufficiently long interruption between the time I wrote them and when I wrote the rest of it that my brain wasn't as sharp as it should have been in eliminating the discrepencies. If you'll notice in the story, there's never a section in which the actual number of missiles fired specifically controls the amount of damage inflicted, and the single (I think) reference to a "60-missile" broadside didn't pop any warning flags. Another possible factor may have been that I was originally planning to introduce the 2-stage MDM for CAs with Gauntlet but decided the transition would have been too rapid under the Janacek Admiralty. So when I saw the "60-missile" broadside, I might have said to myself "Aha! Fired them in a staggered launch with the second broadside's first-stage drives set to a higher accel until both waves equalized velocity and switched over to their second-stage drives!" I'm not sure that happened at this remove, but it's certainly possible.

And, by the way, if you're wondering how even a BC could mount 60 tubes and in the neighborhood of 80 energy weapons, one reason is that she was going to be the lead ship of the new BC class I mentioned in another thread. She'd have been a reeeeeally big battlecruiser. But, again, she would have come into service far too quickly to be reasonable for the Janacek Admiralty, which is why I kicked the ship back to a CA. At the same time, Oversteegan got demoted from a very junior captain of the list (extremely junior for such a plum command) to a junior grade captain. Still very junior for his command, but not quite so pointed as skippering the lead ship of the new BC class would have been. That let me put a little more distance between him and his uncle's government.

At any rate, all of those adjustments got thrown into the pot at a very late stage, and I screwed up when it was time to make sure I'd converted all the hardware properly. And then I was too strapped for time because of other projects to give it the proofreading time it needed when the galleys came along. I looked for spelling errors, misplaced punctuation, etc., rather than counting missile tubes the way I should have been.

And of course you eagle-eyed readers caught me.

Sigh.