Military grand strategy in ancient chronicles was celebrated as an art of psychological terror, royal majesty, and martial glory.
To a licensed civil engineer, the Grand Imperial Sky-Armada was simply an appalling exhibition of unfit fleet spacing, total wind-cutting wake rough churning, and criminal disregard for sky clear sight standards.
Lord Giles Croft stood upon the open cantilevered balcony of the six-sided flight control tower, squinting through the crosshairs of a sight fine-scale sighting scope mounted upon a brass leveling tribrach.
The instrument was leveled with dual spirit bubbles filled with colored alcohol, its silvered level circle graduated to single seconds of arc.
Through the thirty-two-power coated optics, every rivet, rust patch, and smoke plume of the approaching armada was magnified with needle-sharp clarity.
High in the northern clouds, lit up like polished beetles by the searing white beams of the four carbon-arc searchlights, hung sixty royal capital dreadnoughts.
They were stacked into three tiered echelons, stretching six miles across the mountain horizon.
From their massive coal funnels poured dense, greasy torrents of black bituminous smoke that rolled across their own decks, choking their gunners and obscuring their own signal lanterns.
