"Eric Flint - Grantville Gazette - Vol 7" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Eric)

situations to be act outside of those rules and procedures was ever astonishing.
John rubbed his eyes again.
Bottom lineтАФthe local cable TV team, the communications team and the Voice of America team all
had enough up-time resources to keep going for a few years, more or less, unless a major disaster
occurred. The problem was preparing for what would happen when those up-time resources began to
burn up, blow up, or otherwise quit functioning and the spares were used up.
John fingered the screwdriver he kept in his shirt pocket, thinking hard. Everything depended on
tubes. Everything. The sniping and the infighting at the staff meetings was starting to move from sarcastic
to vitriolic. If they didn't make some real progress soon, he didn't know what he was going to do,
especially since his only real tube-head, Gayle Mason, was stuck in the Tower of London.
Opening a drawer, John rooted around until he found his aspirin. Dry swallowing three of them, he
looked at the clock on his desk. Six p.m. Time to leave. Maybe something would happen tomorrow . . .
correction, maybe something good would happen tomorrow.
***
Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover
thee? Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we
are?
(King James Bible, Job 38:34-35)

Claude Yardley had been a power plant operator for a lot of years. He had torn apart his share of
alternators and put the pieces back together. But he had never seen anything like this. He pushed back
from the paper and debris covered table. "I'd say Murphy got to you again, John."
John snorted. "Yeah. He really got behind us on this one. This design should have been a non-starter.
Look at this stuff." John gestured. "Wires stretched beyond their breaking points, coils ripped from their
armatures, and we got what? 1000 Hz out of it?"
"Something like that." Claude looked at his notes. "3600 RPM router feeding a sixteen lobe
alternator gives 960 Hz."
"We need seventy-five times more."
Claude pointed at what was left of the radio team's latest creation. "You won't get it this way. I
understand why you came to me. Bill Porter and I probably know more about alternators than anyone
else in the world at this point." He chuckled. "Not that that's saying much. But you need something like no
alternator we've ever heard of. I think it was fictional."
John pushed the photo of the Brant Rock installation across the table.
Claude shook his head. "I don't care, John. Look, walk through it with me one more time. That thing
is what? Five feet across?"
Nod.
"Okay. That makes it fifteen feet eight inches around. Times twelve is a hundred eighty-eight inches.
Assume one inch coils around the rim. There's no way to modulate the coil less than it's full width, so if
you assume that they alternate north and south, then you have eighty-four sine waves per rotation."
Nod.
"So, to get eighty thousand waves per second, you have to rotate the thing a thousand times per
second, or sixty thousand RPM."
Nod.
"So, any one coil is going around a fifteen foot circumference a thousand times a second, or traveling
fifteen thousand feet per second, or call it three miles a second, or something in the neighborhood of
eleven thousand miles an hour. Just under mach twenty, in other words. And they say it was done in
1906?"
Nod.
"It's impossible." Claude shook his head. "It must have been a fake."
John pushed the photo across the table again.