ship’s CIC, or Combat Information Center, the compartment from which the captain “fought” the ship. All the weapons systems were controlled from this large space. The SPY radar display was found on three side-by-side displays about the size of a good big-screen TV. The problem was the computers that drove the systems.
“You know,” Gregory observed to the senior chief who maintained the systems, “an old iMac has a ton more power than this.”
“Doc, this system is the flower of 1975 technology,” the senior chief protested. “And it ain’t all that hard to track a missile, is it?”
“Besides, Dr. Gregory,” another chief put it, “that radar of mine is still the best fucking system ever put to sea.”
“That’s a fact,” Gregory had to agree. The solid-state components could combine to blast six megawatts of RF power down a one-degree line of bearing, enough to make a helicopter pilot, for example, produce what cruel physicians called FLKs: funny-looking kids. And more than enough to track a ballistic reentry vehicle at a thousand miles or more. The limitation there also was computer software, which was the new gold standard in just about every weapons system in the world.
“So, when you want to track an RV, what do you do?”
“We call it ‘inserting the chip,’ ” the senior chief answered.
“What? It’s hardware?” Al asked. He had trouble believing that. This wasn’t a computer that you slid a board into.
“No, sir, it’s software. We upload a different control program.”
“Why do you need a second program for that? Can’t your regular one track airplanes and missiles?” the TRW vice president demanded.
“Sir, I just maintain and operate the bitch. I don’t design the things. RCA and IBM do that.”
“Shit,” Gregory observed.
“You could talk to Lieutenant Olson,” the other chief thought aloud. “He’s a Dartmouth boy. Pretty smart for a j.g.”
“Yeah,” the first chief agreed. “He writes software as sort of a hobby.”
“Dennis the Menace. Weps and the XO get annoyed with him sometimes.”
“Why?” Gregory asked.
“Because he talks like you, sir,” Senior Chief Leek answered. “But he ain’t in your pay grade.”
“He’s a good kid, though,” Senior Chief Matson observed. “Takes good care of his troops, and he knows his stuff, doesn’t he, Tim?”
“Yeah, George, good kid, going places if he stays in.”
“He won’t. Computer companies are already trying to recruit him. Shit, Compaq offered him three hundred big ones last week.”
“That’s a living wage,” Chief Leek commented. “What did Dennis say?”
“He said no. I told him to hold out for half a mil.” Matson laughed as he reached for some coffee.
“What d‘ya think, Dr. Gregory? The kid worth that kinda money in the ’puter business?”
“If he can do really good code, maybe,” Al replied, making a mental note to check out this Lieutenant Olson himself. TRW always had room for talent. Dartmouth was known for its computer science department. Add field experience to that, and you had a real candidate for the ongoing SAM project. “Okay, if you insert the chip, what happens?”
“Then you change the range of the radar. You know how it works, the RF energy goes out forever on its own, but we only accept signals that bounce back within a specific time gate. This”—Senior Chief Leek held up a floppy disk with a hand-printed label on it—“changes the gate. It extends the effective rage of the SPY out to, oh, two thousand kilometers. Damned sight farther than the missiles’ll go. I was on Port Royal out at Kwajalein five years ago doing a theater-missile test, and we were tracking the inbound from the time it popped over the horizon all the way in.”
“You hit it?” Gregory asked with immediate interest.
Leek shook his head. “Guidance-fin failure on the bird, it was an early Block-IV. We got within fifty meters, but that was a cunt hair outside the warhead’s kill perimeter, and they only allowed us one shot, for some reason or other nobody ever told me about. Shiloh got a kill the next year. Splattered it with a skin-skin kill. The video of that one is a son of a bitch,” the senior chief assured his guest.
Gregory believed it. When an object going one way at fourteen thousand miles per hour got hit by something going the other way at two thousand miles per hour, the result could be quite impressive. “First-round hit?” he asked.
“You bet. The sucker was coming straight at us, and this baby doesn’t miss much.”
“We always clean up with Vandal tests off Wallops Island,” Chief Matson confirmed.
“What are those exactly?”
“Old