Artillery warfare assumed that the air between the cannon’s muzzle and the target was a passive, uniform void through which an iron projectile traveled in an unbending curved curve.
In reality, the air was a fluid medium of massive mass, variable thickness, and ferocious heat-powered driving force.
When a hundred-pound artillery shell traveling at faster-than-sound speed met a rising wall of white-hot steam and churning hot air moving upward at eighty miles per hour, the projectile didn’t punch through cleanly.
Its wind-cutting nose cone experienced violent asymmetric boundary layer separation, generating huge wind-cutting lift that threw its flight path into the clouds like a dry leaf caught in a chimney draft.
Lord Giles Croft stood upon the flight tower balcony, his hand resting upon the master underground steam pipe hub lever.
Beneath the stone wharfs, inside the cavernous turbine halls carved from the granite roots of Grey Crag, four massive steam storage tank tanks stood high-pressure to one hundred and forty pounds of pressure.
Each storage tank held thirty tons of white-hot water banked at one hundred and eighty degrees. It ran on the Ruths steam storage tank principle.
Under soaked high-pressure conditions, the liquid water acted as a heat flywheel. When the discharge valve cracked open, the sudden pressure drop caused twenty percent of the liquid water to flash in a heartbeat into dry, high-speed vapor.
