“What the hell are we going to do?” he exploded, when he first saw the specs. “Carry the bogie home in her belly?”
“Is that a bad idea?” J. J. asked.
“You’re compounding the problems,” Dom protested. “You’re giving me an impossibility on top of an improbability. How can I build a pressure hull with nothing inside but a huge empty space?”
“You can build as many bulkheads as needed,” J.J. said.
“Not if you’re going to carry the bogie in the hold,” he said.
“Dom, we’ve got to make everyone think she’s nothing but a giant tanker,” J.J. said.
“To carry water to Mars?”
“To carry water to Mars. To carry phosphates back. She’s too big to be built in secret. We’ve got to have the backing of powerful men, even if we keep her construction secret from the public. Can you see the senator from New Mexico buying the bogie-on-Jupe idea? Water to Mars he can understand. Even the most rabid antispacers are already half convinced of her economic value, because she can multiply the cargo tonnage between here and Mars.”
“But you can’t pressurize that much empty hull space,” Dom said. “She’ll have to be slim. Just about enough space inside the thick hull for a man to walk upright. The smaller and tighter she is the easier it will be to build her to resist pressure.”
“She has to be a tanker.”
“A tanker or nothing?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“That’s about the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard,” Dom said.
“I admit that,” J.J. said. “But she was sold to the movers and shakers as a tanker. If she can’t be built, then we’ll just sit here twiddling our thumbs and watch the whole space program go down the starving throats of the breeding billions in Asia and Africa.”
Dom started to tell him what he could do with his starving billions, but instead he went back to his office, had a drink, and went back to the specs. In the next few days he developed a sore neck from shaking his head in frustration.
Building a pressure hull was, in principal, a simple matter. Man had been building them for a long time for use in the ocean. In the first of the twentieth-century wars, German pressure hulls, submarines, had almost won a war for a tiny country in central Europe, and the feat was repeated in the second of the wars. Following that, the art of building pressure hulls was refined for submarines designed to travel fast and deep and launch nuclear weapons. The Polaris submarine program, begun in the 1960s, was tied in closely to advances in space. To enable submarines to cruise submerged for long periods, new techniques of communication were developed using ultra-low-frequency transmitters whose signals could be detected underwater. Refinements of those techniques would be used to try to communicate from the dense atmosphere of Jupiter. Moreover, much of the guidance work which was done during the Polaris program was applicable to space navigation. The jump from Polaris to space was a small one.
There were differences between designing a hull for underwater use and for use in open space, but there were also similarities. An underwater hull faces uniform pressure around the entire hull. Thus, it is simple to calculate the exact hydrodynamic load for any portion of the hull. Balance hydrodynamic load against the need for compression inside the hull, and you come up with figures for correct proportioning of the structural elements and the required thicknesses of various parts.
Dom Gordon’s pressure hull, which had worked and was still working in experiments and exploration in ocean depths of thirty-five thousand feet, was, essentially, a refinement of the hull design used by submarine engineers since 1918. It utilized a cylinder of circular section, which is another way of saying cigar-shaped, stiffened by ring-shaped frames with a longitudinal spacing of from one-fifth to one-tenth of the diameter. Dom’s greatest departure from traditional sub design was in the use of metals which were quite flexible. As the pressure increased, the external loading can cause an entire hull to change shape, thus putting more stress on certain members than on others. The result is excessive localized strain.
When the Polaris submarine Scorpion was lost in 1968, the implosion of her hull was heard at great distances by sensitive instruments. The Scorpion was operating in a mere ten thousand feet of water, but she was not designed to resist even half of that pressure. That’s how much Dom had to go to design a mobile and operable self-powered vehicle for resistance of the one-thousand-atmosphere pressure at thirty-five thousand feet. He did it by holding the size of the cylinder to a minimum and holding the spacing of the support frames to less than one-tenth of diameter. He moved pressure-hull science ahead in a quantum leap, and that leap was small compared with what he was being asked to do now.
Now they wanted him to throw away all of the knowledge gained from experience in the past and build a monster ship which, first, had to fly through space with a negative loading on the outside hull, since space is a near vacuum, then pressurize itself for resistance of not just one thousand atmospheres, but three thousand. In addition, there had to be a slight safety factor. The hull was to penetrate Jupe’s atmosphere to three thousand atmospheres, but what if there had been a slight miscalculation and the alien ship lay in three thousand and fifty atmospheres? To put it simply, they’d have to turn around and come home if the hull’s limit was a mere three thousand atmospheres, or they could risk becoming a Jovian Scorpion and implode.
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed that the task was impossible. J.J.’s tanker requirement compounded the difficulties, and the impossible demands swirled around in his head and left him feeling defeated. He pondered ways of welding seams and the construction of hogging girders, metal fatigue factors, twist and flex, plating thicknesses. The information coming from Art and Doris’ work on the newer high-tensile, special-treatment alloys was not encouraging enough.
The first process of putting a ship on the drawing board is to draw an outline of operational requirements. The outstanding and most demanding requirement of the TTS hull was J.J.’s huge cargo hold. A rough layout of the ship, drawn around that hold, made her far too big, even without making allowances for housing other functional requirements. Still, it was possible to make a drawing. After a few tries Dom had a tentative layout for a monster the size of some of the smaller Caribbean islands which could be built, without the TTS features, at a cost just slightly smaller than the national debt. From the impossible, he began to think of compromises, working components into cramped spaces, overlapping where possible.
The entire process was an exercise in futility, for the entire design was based on an illogical premise. It was an excellent example of Gordon’s First Law: “Start with crap, end with crap.”
Gordon’s Law of Agitation also applied: “The more you stir crap, the worse it smells.”
He’d been smelling the mixture for several days when Larry Gomulka arrived, a bit yellow from treatment of his malaria but smiling, his round face cheerful, his short body bouncy, his eyes alert, his brain already at work.
Larry Gomulka was a phenomenon. He was, by training, a physicist. He was nowhere close to tops in his field as a physicist. Doris was tops in her field, Art in his, and Dom was the world’s leading authority on pressure hulls, but Larry couldn’t, or wouldn’t, conduct a basic experiment with accuracy. Larry hated tedious, methodical work. His boredom threshold was low. In conversation, Larry jumped from one subject to another, dazing and confusing many plodding types.