able to find out many details, unfortunately. I did learn that they are now enclosing them in metal cases and apparently spin them in some fashion. They are said to be more powerful and more accurate.”
Spinning rockets…
If Janos remembered correctly, the rockets the Jews used against Holk’s army when he tried to cross the great bridge in Prague had spun also. The Jews hadn’t designed the rockets themselves, though. They’d been provided to them by the notorious up-time revolutionist Sybolt.
Had the Turks somehow gotten their hands on such a rocket? Or the designs for it?
There was no way to know, at the moment. Whatever information existed on the rockets would have to be found in Bohemia—with which Austria was still officially at war, because Ferdinand was being pig-headed about that also. Not much chance Wallenstein would respond to any queries Janos sent him!
“What else?” he asked Grassi. It was obvious from the doctor’s expression that there was more bad news coming.
“They have new artillery also. Their own volley guns.”
“They’ve had volley guns since the last century.”
Grassi waved his hand. “Yes, I know. Those great cumbersome things with nine barrels. I saw one once, in Istanbul. But these new ones are said to be quite different. Much more like the ones the USE uses.”
Wonderful. Janos hadn’t faced those weapons in combat himself, but they’d become rather famous over the past year and half. The USE volley guns were credited in most accounts with having broken the French cavalry charge at Ahrensbök.
“And what else?”
“They do in fact have an air force, as I told you they might.”
“It needed only this,” Janos muttered. “And the nature of it is…?”
“Apparently they have no airplanes like those of the USE’s air force. What they have instead are lighter-than-air craft.”
“Ah, yes. ‘Zeppelins,’ I think they’re called.”
“Not quite, Baron. I investigated the matter and discovered that zeppelins are difficult to make. They’re the best such craft, but there are many obstacles to overcome. On the simplest side is what are called ‘blimps.’ Those have roughly the same elongated shape but the big envelope that lifts them is like that of a balloon—without any internal structure. Just a big bag, basically, filled either with hot air or some kind of light gas.”
“So these are blimps, you’re saying?”
The doctor held up his hand in a staying gesture. “Give me a moment, please. Somewhere in the middle is a hybrid design. They are only partly rigid, with a much simpler structure than that of a zeppelin properly so-named. They have what amounts to a sort of keel, but most of the bag is left to its own shape. That is apparently what the Ottomans have.”
He opened a pouch hanging from his shoulder and dug out some papers. “I have some diagrams here, which I got by bribing a Turk cavalryman. I wouldn’t count too much on its precision, because it’s just something the man drew from memory. Still, it gives you an idea of what they look like.”
Janos spent a couple of minutes studying the diagrams. There was no point spending more time than that, since it was obvious from the drawings themselves that they were only approximations based on memory.
“There is no sense of scale. How big are they?”
Grassi shrugged. “Hard to say. The cavalryman claimed they were enormous, but I imagine a device like that would inevitably seem enormous to someone who’d never seen one before. When I pressed him on the weapons they carried, though, he claimed they only occasionally dropped explosive devices and those were not large ones. Mostly, it seems, the Turk used the things as flying scouts.”
Which was quite bad enough. Janos had spent a lot of time over the past few years studying the campaigns and battles fought by the USE—and before it came into existence, by the little nation created by the up-timers in Thuringia, when they first arrived. The New United States, as they’d called it. One of the things that had quickly become obvious to him was how difficult it would be to fight an enemy who always knew where your own forces were because of their aircraft. Except in bad weather, at least. The Poles under Koniecpolski had been successful because they’d been able to take advantage of storms, when the airplanes were grounded.
Possessing aircraft of any type gave an army an enormous advantage, whether or not those aircraft could carry weapons. The real danger the things posed was their extraordinary expansion of an army’s reconnaissance capabilities.
He leaned back