The heat streaming from the water was thick even two hundred yards from the plume.
Giles Croft stood on the forward overhead frame of the Imperial Pride, checking the rigging on the massive grey rig suspended between the ship’s dual sheer-legs.
It was a huge structure, forty feet tall, shaped like a truncated cone of heavy nickel-steel armor plate.
Inside the cone, visible through the lower intake skirt, hung a dense maze of corrugated Inconel alloy tubing, twelve hundred feet in total length, arranged in six nested helical coils that spiraled down toward a circular mounting pipe rim.
“The Closed-Loop Cryogenic Heat Exchanger Siphon,” Giles announced to the assembled building crew.
“A twin Rankine cycle evaporator. The outer skirt seats directly over the burst star-fire pipe hub, channeling the two-thousand-degree star-fire jet through the tube bank.
The Inconel tubes carry liquid anhydrous ammonia at three hundred pounds of pressure.”
Aldous Swift-Current was checking the high-pressure ammonia valves with a soapy water brush. It looked for gas leaks.
