The dry dock at Port Haven looked like a shipyard designed by a madman who had forgotten what a boat was supposed to look like.
Instead of curved keels and flared oak bows, three huge grey cylinders lay side by side in the granite basin.
Each metal tube was three hundred feet long, forty-two feet in width. Then he shaped with a flattened, elliptical cross-section that looked like a huge, elongated steel lozenge.
Giles Croft walked along the top curve of Segment One. His check hammer tapped the welded seams with sharp, metal pings.
“Double-walled construction,” Giles called down to Master Borin, who was standing on the dry dock floor beside a portable electric welding dynamo.
“Three-quarter-inch boiler plate on the outer skin, half-inch plate on the inner skin, and eighteen inches of high-thickness water-setting concrete shook between the shells.
If an ironclad rams this tube at full speed, the ship’s ram will crumple like an empty tin mug.”
Borin wiped soot from his beard, squinting up through his safety goggles.
