A Landing That Was Hard to Describe

The terrain for this landing was completely different from the time they had raided Gray Ridge and seized control of the goblin leadership. Back then, the Pansy had not been nearly as large as it was now, and they had chosen a sea cliff where the water was deep enough for the ship to approach directly and deploy a short gangway.

The coast at the Meiladas Tidal Flats, however, sloped very gently. Given the Pansy's draft, it would run aground about five hundred meters offshore, so the plan for this operation was to beach it.

As a twenty-eight-thousand-ton warship, the Pansy had tremendous inertia. It could not approach the beach too fast, or it would run too far aground. But it could not go too slowly either, or it would fail to hold its position on the beachhead and be pushed back by the waves.

No one in the other world had experience with this, so the Earth Support Team had calculated the data based on the underwater terrain, the softness of the sediment, and the tidal patterns at the Meiladas Tidal Flats.

"Speed eleven knots, heading straight for the coast!" Su Ming ordered, watching the radar as he calculated their distance from shore.

The helmsman quickly made the adjustments, bringing the Pansy onto the correct heading. Once its speed reached eleven knots, the propellers began slowing from their high rate of rotation, and the spray they threw up gradually diminished.

At a distance of three kilometers, Su Ming pressed his radio.

"Feather the propellers and shut down all equipment unrelated to the landing!"

"Roger." Replies came in from every section, and some of the humming equipment began to power down.

Once the propellers were feathered, their blades were parallel to the flow of water and no longer produced thrust,