Read Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella for Free Online

search for the Wasp .  Now he went back to those early entries.  They showed the fleet of Earth.  Battleships had pride of place.
    “Look at these battleships.  Have you ever worked on the design of one of them?” he asked the engineer.
    “No.  Not even in college.  They’re obsolete.  No one has built one since the Iteeche War.  There are scads of them left over from then.”  She paused for a moment.  “Well, almost no one. There are reports that Greenfield has built a few of them.  They didn’t do much in the war and they don’t have all the relics in orbit that most of us have.  Anyway.  No, I’ve never worked on something like that.  Corvettes, destroyers.  Yes, we make them.”
    “Look at the notation on these battleships.  What’s 15 RPM mean?  This one is 20 RPM.”
    “Revolutions per minute.”  Annie spoke the words as if from pure rote, something she had memorized long ago but saw no application here.
    Then she shook her head.  “You don’t rotate a ship.  The Santa Maria , one of the first exploration starships launched from Earth, did a bad jump because it had a bad thruster and took on a rotation as it did its first jump.  They ended up way across the galaxy.  It took another ship on a bad jump to find it.”
    “How’d that happen?”
    “You must have read about it.  Ray Longknife’s ship was sabotaged.  We never did find out who did it.  Anyway, he and his ship ended up way the hell and gone and stumbled onto the lost colony the crew of the Santa Maria had set up.  At least the survivors.  All I know is that we engineers design ships to stay steady as rocks when we approach a jump.”
    “So, why do these battleships advertise how many revolutions per minute they can do?” Taylor asked.  Now he knew why you didn’t want to do RPMs.  He still didn’t know why these particular ships did them.
    “Oh,” Annie said, and Taylor could almost see a light bulb above her head light up.  “Lasers.  These battleships have thick ice armor.  See, three meters thick.  Three and a half for this big bruiser.  That’s to absorb laser hits.”
    “So?” Taylor said, still not enlightened.
    “Even with that much ice, if you hit it with a big enough laser, it will melt through, so they rotated the ship to force any laser hits to burn through more ice.  It creates a hell of a problem keeping the ships balanced.  You burn off some armor on a fast rotating ship and you’ve got the devil’s own time keeping your ship from spinning itself to destruction.  Now I remember this problem in class.  A classic first year problem.  How fast do you need to redistribute reaction mass and how much pumping power do you need?  I aced it.” she said with a proud smile.
    “Are they asking you to figure out how much pumping you’ll need to redistribute weight on this rotating ship?” Taylor asked.
    “No.  No one’s raised that problem.  I wonder if I should.”
    “Please don’t do it tomorrow,” Taylor suggested, trying to sound as helpful as he might.
    “Yeah.  Right.”
    “So, let’s see what have we have here,” Taylor reflected.  “Merchant ships that are huge, and, unlike everything that was put forward for the last five years, have excessive power plants.  They also are designed for higher gee and we have this RPM issue, but no thought of armor.”
    “No.  We’re not putting ice armor on them, though I did overhear some folks at lunch from the Navy side of the yard talking about having the new Smart Metal do its own rotation thing.  With this new stuff, we can get it spinning around on the outer skin of the ship without the crew inside having to spin with it.  It will even redistribute itself as it takes hits.  Fantastic stuff!  Oh, you didn’t hear that from me.”
    “Hear what?” Taylor said, allowing himself a small but friendly smile.  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t heard anything.”  Then he frowned.  “Anything that I can connect the