Naval warfare theory assumed that a warship’s power lived in its heavy guns, its iron armor plate, and the ferocious driving force of its charge.
In the confined waters of a commercial harbor, a warship’s greatest weakness was its appalling lack of maneuverability. Its massive turned radius, and its utter vulnerability to low-profile harbor tugs pushing against its water-flow steering pivot points.
A three-hundred-foot warship was built for linear speed and broadside bombardment in open skyways.
It was never designed to resist forty-five tons of packed, cushioned lateral thrust applied directly to its rudder pintles by a vessel that sat too low to be targeted by its guns.
Lord Giles Croft stood upon the flying bridge of Municipal Harbor Tug One. He held a dual-lever engine telegraph and a leather-bound harbor chart.
The tug was a small, brutally powerful machine. Eighty feet of thick, resin-bonded oak and pine, sitting low in the cloud chop like a bulldog.
Nearly eighty percent of the vessel’s internal hull was occupied by a twelve-hundred-horsepower overload steam turbine. He drove twin three-hundred-and-sixty-degree steerable compass bearing thruster pods beneath her keel.
Across the tug’s blunt, square bow sat an eight-foot tube-shaped hardened rubber air-powered fender, packed with sixty pounds of tightly packed air to absorb titanic moving collisions without scratching paint.
