Wing Sails

"Sails aren't all the same." Su Ming continued drawing various simulation circles on the sand table. "There are another 70 kilometers before we enter the Jade Sea and Tang Valley's maximum attack range of 50 kilometers. The wind is in their favor, and the Jade Sea and Tang Valley is sailing at full speed. As for her speed-"

Su Ming checked the time. Twenty minutes had passed since the first scan, and dawn was approaching.

"Run another radar scan!"

Invisible electromagnetic waves roamed through the other world. Once the scan was complete, Zijin reeled in the cable.

"Twelve knots." Su Ming finished his calculations. "Including the Sea Eagle Beasts' flight time, contact will come in four hours at the earliest. Just enough time."

Zijin understood too. "They don't know we can see them as well. If we make evasive moves at random, we'll only reveal that fact early."

"Exactly. So we'll wait until everything is ready before we act."

"But what comes next?" Zijin asked. "With sails and the steam engine, we'll be faster than them, but we only have enough fuel for seven hours. At full speed, our range will be even shorter. That's not enough for us to break through."

Chases at sea could easily last days and nights. Seven hours was just the beginning.

"I have an idea," Su Ming said. "Leave the ship to me. There are two things I need you to do right away."

"Okay, tell me."

The first thing Su Ming assigned her was to prepare food. The seabed was relatively shallow here, with abundant plants and fish that were easy to catch. But there was no telling what the open ocean ahead would be like.

Zijin immediately set about catching fish, while Su Ming continued his calculations and preparations.

As a magic-guide-level practitioner, Zijin was a calamity for the seabed's ecosystem. It didn't take her long to clear the waters around the Zhiyuan of fish, which she tossed to the zombies aboard for processing. When Zijin was present, the zombies were the most competent workers.

Of course, when Zijin wasn't around, they were all complete idiots. Only the skeleton servant that had been nurtured the longest was barely usable.

The scholar soon finished the task and asked Su Ming what the second thing was.

"Place a buoy each to the east and south, two kilometers from the ship, and fit them with calibration plates," Su Ming said. In the meantime, a marine rangefinder had appeared in his hand. "I need to calibrate the radar."

According to the manual, although the radar equipment had been preset at the factory, it still needed to be calibrated again when activated. He had skipped that step earlier because he was in a hurry, so he had to make up for it now.

"The technology from your world is quite troublesome."

"I think both sides are about the same."

The skeleton servant brought a broom out of the cabin. Zijin tied the buoys to it, then mounted the broom and rose into the air.

"Um, why do you have to ride a broom to fly?" Su Ming asked, puzzled. What happened to scientific magic?

"A broom? You mean this low-drag flight aid?"

"Low-drag? Aid?"

Zijin sighed. "Ever heard of cutting through the wind? The tip projecting in front breaks through the air during high-speed flight, reducing the wind pressure on the body. You can also lean forward against it while flying and flatten your body. If you're interested in aerodynamics, I have a few books on it."

"...No, there's no need. Thanks."

The scholar quickly put the buoys in place, and Su Ming began taking measurements.

The wind at sea was strong, just the weather sailing ships loved, but it made rangefinding very difficult. Su Ming struggled with it for a while. Fortunately, the distance wasn't too great, and he managed to read the data from the calibration plates embedded in the buoys.

Then he activated the balloon-borne S-band radar right there on the deck and ran a scan. Comparing the two sets of readings, he found a discrepancy of around ten percent, just as expected.

"Which one is right?" Zijin asked.

"The rangefinder," Su Ming replied. "I just calibrated it on deck."

Su Ming adjusted the radar's parameters and tested it again.

The conditions at sea limited the precision of this adjustment. Fortunately, they didn't need excessive accuracy at the moment; an error of around one percent was acceptable.

More than an hour later, Su Ming received the design plans as promised.

The sail configuration was intuitive, and his modeling skills had continued to improve recently, so he completed the model directly in his sea of consciousness using the data, without relying on the ship model.

He dissolved the bridge and other unnecessary structures and used them to build the masts and sails. There were six masts in total. The first at the bow slanted forward, while the other five stood upright.

Then he extended cross-shaped spars from the masts one by one and hung enormous bone sails on them.

One advantage of rigid sails was beginning to show: they didn't need a complicated system of ropes. Otherwise, a novice like Su Ming would never have been able to handle them.

Zijin was retrieving the buoys from the sea. Seeing this, she frowned slightly. No matter how many masts and sails a ship had, the total area exposed to the wind would not increase, which was why most ships in this world had three masts.

The six-mast configuration Su Ming had chosen overturned her understanding.

As she drew closer, she noticed that Su Ming's sails were rigid ones assembled from pieces of bone. That wasn't impossible, but they were heavy and difficult to raise and lower. What was strange, though, was that Su Ming had built the sails in an asymmetrical curve, like a mango cut open.

Wouldn't they really make the ship veer off course?

"Forty kilometers!" Zijin reported what she had learned on her trip to Su Ming. With its sails unfurled, the Zhiyuan had grown taller and larger, and could now be spotted from farther away. Zijin hadn't actually gone that far; time didn't permit it. She had made her estimate from a distance of 20 kilometers.

"That's about right." Su Ming estimated the current positions of the three fleets based on the time. "First, a question: can you still only fight a bishop now?"

The sails gradually began to take effect. The Zhiyuan started turning south and slowly picking up speed.

"You can add 'arch' to that," Zijin replied. "I was fighting while sick last time, and..." She summoned the Divine Favor Scepter. "I've also found time to study it over the past few days."

"Then are you confident you can take care of them?" Su Ming pointed to the fleet labeled "spectators eating melon seeds" on the sand table.

"Reconnaissance ships aren't equipped with much fighting power. I'm confident about that," Zijin replied. "But can you catch them?"

An early-warning unit's broad field of vision meant it would hurry away at the slightest sign of trouble. Just as on Earth, if a fighter got close to an early-warning aircraft, it would be meat on the chopping block-provided you could get close.

"Then it's settled." Su Ming started the steam engine and began accelerating the Zhiyuan.

"Steam engine power at 60 percent."

A few minutes later, the propulsion system began approaching its economical operating state, and the propeller churned up enormous white waves. Su Ming turned the ship southwest, bringing it to a 90-degree angle to the sea breeze. Its speed gradually rose to 12 knots.

Operating a ship was a very troublesome business. Now, besides the steam engine, the sails needed to be controlled as well. Fortunately, the studio had provided a software program and initialized its data.