What If the South Had Airpower?--New Historical Novel

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

A tip to writers-- using a public forum for name-calling people commenting on your writing-- even when they are negative comments-- does far more damage to your image as a writer to be taken seriously than the original comments could possibly do. It makes you look like some amateur. If you have to reply to a point, be polite-- even if the commenter isn't.

This is true, by the way, no matter how famous a writer you might be. Remember Anne Rice's Amazon meltdown? In an instant, her reputation went from "great writer" to "hysterical flako".

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

This is true, by the way, no matter how famous a writer you might be. Remember Anne Rice's Amazon meltdown? In an instant, her reputation went from "great writer" to "hysterical flako".

Then there is the similar Laurel K Hamilton meltdown.

http://www.journalfen.net/community/...k/1041659.html

And how well reviewed the latest books are:

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Anita-Bl...rBy=addOneStar

http://www.amazon.com/Flirt-Anita-Bl...rBy=addOneStar

http://www.amazon.com/Bullet-Anita-B...rBy=addOneStar

[Worldwalker]

Empress Laurell: Only those who are truly worthy can see how good my books are.

Generally you only get that sort of thing from bad fanfic writers who think they're "artsy" because their writing doesn't make any sense. It's scary when the pros do it. Then again, I don't read LKH (just not my thing) but from the reviews you linked, it appears that she's essentially started writing very, very bad fanfic of her own work. There's something just plain scary in that.

[GlenBarrington]

Then maybe it's a good thing Karl got his meltdown out of the way first off!

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

Then maybe it's a good thing Karl got his meltdown out of the way first off!

Well, I suppose it is more efficient that way. Sort of like eating dessert first, to make sure you've got room for it.

[ficbot]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Empress Laurell: Only those who are truly worthy can see how good my books are.

I remember reading a similar screed by John Dunne back in the days of my undergraduate degree, and it was about the only fun thing we read in that class, which was the dullest class I took for my degree. It was the preface to his collected poetry and it was all about how the poems were brilliant and, anyone who didn't think so was clearly too stupid or uneducated or unsophisticated to see how great they are. The restoration/18th century was probably the dullest period in all of literature (lots of 'Pope writing poems that were really making fun of Johnson' followed by 'Johnson writing poems that were really about making fun of Pope') but that preface was hilarious just for the ego involved.

[rblover]

The south HAD air power during the US Civil War. They just didn't have enough of it, or use it properly...again because of state's rights rivalries. The balloon was available, and could have been used to: spy, drop bombs, serve as sniper posts, etc. The Rebs didn't do any of that to a large enough extent. Their minds were not open to balloon warfare, and were too focused on canon duels, and cavalry charges.

[Worldwalker]

Well, this guy's got a zeppelin.

I haven't been able to endure enough of the excerpt to find out if there's anything in there about the way they built it, but historically, the two necessary technologies were the Hall-Herault process and the internal combustion engine -- the former to produce aluminum for the frame, the latter to produce motors with an adequate power to weight ratio for lighter-than-air craft. Both of those postdate the Civil War considerably.

Without aluminum, or better yet aluminum/copper alloys, it's going to be nearly impossible to produce a rigid airframe that is light enough to get off the ground. Something like a spruce skeleton with bamboo spars might be light enough to fly, though it would cut into the payload capacity drastically, but would it be able to remain rigid enough? Rigidity is essential; a wiggly zeppelin will tear itself apart.

Power is another problem. While early internal combustion engines existed, they were extremely heavy and low-powered. An engine adequate to power a farm tractor just isn't sufficient for aviation use. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, threats to the zeppelins that bombed England in WWI was the weather. Their motors were not powerful enough to fly against strong winds, so many were blown off course and crashed. It's hard to envision what the Confederacy could have produced which could perform as well as what a country noted for its technology had 50 years later. Again, engine weight cuts into your payload capacity.

There's also fuel for those motors. Again, we're looking at power and weight, and nothing that would have been available to the Confederacy would have an energy density anywhere close to petroleum products. The Texas oil fields were still years in the future; oil was a northern resource. Alcohol would really be the only alternative, but you have to carry a lot more of it, and feed a lot bigger engine, for the same power output. Never mind payload capacity, the question of whether this thing can even get off the ground is becoming critical.

What are the gas cells made of? Historically, zeppelins used a form of parchment made from the intestines of cattle, called goldbeater's skin because it was used in the making of gold leaf. It's strong, flexible, and light -- and enough to build a single zeppelin requires the guts of tens of thousands of cattle, and the requisite production facilities. The more likely alternative would be doped silk, which is not nearly as light and leaks hydrogen like a sieve.

Would it even be hydrogen? Or would it be illuminating gas (coal gas)? If the latter, we've lost even more lifting capacity; if the former, there's the problem of keeping it in that silk envelope for long periods of time.

There's also the question of the effectiveness of said dirigibles in warfare.

For observation, yes, they'd be handy, but whether they'd be enormously more useful than fixed balloons is another matter entirely, especially since a tethered balloon could supply observations in realtime via telegraph, while a dirigible would be limited to dropped messages. They might actually be more effective as portable balloons, traveling to where they were needed and dropping a tether/telegraph line to a ground crew.

Bombing, on the other hand, would only work as a terror weapon, if that. Again, look at the WWI zeppelin raids. They were doing well to hit the right city. If they flew low enough to have any accuracy whatsoever, someone shot them full of holes, which is a bad thing when you're flying around with a ginormous bag of explosive gas. Precision bombing was a concept yet to come. Now go back 50 years. No TNT, no Lyddite, not even dynamite. The only practical explosive was black powder. The amount of damage that could be done against an industrial target -- say, a shipyard -- would be fairly low, even if the zeppelin could actually hit the thing. The resources required to repair the damage would be a fraction of the resources required to inflict the damage, and the Union had more reserve industrial capacity than the Confederacy.

The technical limitations of this zeppelin would probably limit to operating at much lower altitudes than its real brethren 50 years in the future. Wind shear could tear it apart in seconds. If that brought it within range of Union sharpshooters, well, a giant flying gasbag is a pretty good target. Nobody had invented incendiary bullets yet (possibly because they didn't have much of a need for them) but a few rips in the gas cells could be enough to disable it. It's going to have gas pressure issues to begin with -- remember how well silk doesn't hold hydrogen.

The technologies required to produce an effective military zeppelin include the mass production of aluminum, lightweight internal combustion engines, petroleum production and distillation to fuel those engines, and either an effective high explosive for bombing or a means of long-range communication for observation. Resources required include fuel, goldbeater's skin, and lifting gas. It's going to take a lot to convince me that these, or any effective substitutes for the, would be available to a primarily agricultural country half a century before they were employed by a heavily industrialized country.

Maybe this author has explanations for where the Confederacy would get these things, or what they would substitute for them. I guess I'll never know, because I simply can't plow through enough of his book to find out.

A lot of amateur writers (and a disturbing number of professional ones) forget that no invention, no technology, exists in isolation. There are necessary precursors, there are supporting technologies, there are spin-offs ... there's a whole structure required. And there, I suspect, this author has failed as well.

[ardeegee]

(Channeling KarlKlein)

Oh, yeah? Well, you're a poopyhead!

[montsnmags]

I have previously requested politeness in this thread. Mockery is NOT politeness. Consider this last notice.

Cheers,
Marc
Moderator

[jaxx6166]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Well, this guy's got a zeppelin.
SNIP
-History Lesson-

Ww,

I just gained a whole new level of respect for you. Seriously, that was probably the best history lesson I've ever had. And I've made note of it for future uses

On topic,

I had an interest in the IDEA of the story for about 10 seconds. And then the walls came crashing down. It's actually kind of frightening when you consider the level of...for lack of a better word, exposure, the internet has given people.

And even more now that e-Readers are out. Imagine the number of biographies, racial bias, manifestos, and anarchist cookbooks people now have access to.

It's frightening.

Which could quite possibly be what his "novel" is. Propaganda in disguise?

[KarlKlein]

I get the distinct impression that this critic started out not wanting to like my book and he succeeded admirably. This disappoints me. I am pleased that it interested him enough to take the time to research the books premise. He didn't however do his research to support the premise but to refute it. Had he wanted to find facts to support it they exist in great numbers. I'm afraid he assumed Germany was the cradle of lighter than air flight when nothing could be farther from the truth. Had his research led him to France in the 1800's he might have discovered that dirigibles were being flown there as early as 1852. Henri Giffard's steam powered, propeller driven craft comes to mind. There were even a couple of electric airships as early as 1881. They had banks of heavy batteries -- imagine that.

A dirigible would indeed have had serious problems if it encountered wind sheer, just as everything from a Piper Cub to a 747 does today. There are inherent dangers associated with any kind of flight. As far as ground weapons are concerned, mounted guns could not be elevated to fire at an airborne object overhead, not to mention tracking it; and if one had been fashioned to fire up at anything like a critical angle it would have destroyed the gun carriage. Recoil was handled by letting the gun roll back. Bombing was not an insurmountable problem nor were explosives, but that’s all covered in the book. I'm sure it’s an exercise in futility to explain all these things to this particular critic. He seems to have made up his mind all without reading the book. I'm afraid when a person criticizes a book without reading it, it says more about the person than about the book. All other things aside, I might remind the critic that it is a novel, a work of fiction--not a text book. It makes one wonder if Jules Vern would have finished the novel if he had someone of this fellows ilk explaining to him at great length how unlikely it was that an atomic submarine could be built when he wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.

Hopefully he'll hitch up his plow one more time and discover that although there were indeed ironclads afloat, most ships were still made of wood and quite susceptible to the explosives of the time. He might also discover that doped silk does quite well in low pressure conditions and considering that this particular dirigible was not involved in trans-atlantic flight it would not be a big problem.

But there I go again trying to convince someone whose mind is already made up. It was comforting to know that he thinks my failings are shared by many professional writers. I'm sure they will be enlightened as well. I'll only add one more thing: an aeronautical engineer of my acquaintance reviewed my ideas and thought them quite workable in theory. I truly do appreciate this gentleman taking the time to write this critique unflattering as it was and I wish him well.

[Book Hub]

What a bunch of bunk. I never read so much silly nitpicking in my life.

I downloaded the book last week and have read enough to know I like it. Everyone else seems to be commenting on something they haven't read.

[GeoffC]

Please don't add petrol to the flames !!!! Please ....


Move on ....

[Worldwalker]

The past few weeks have involved things like a hospital and ICU, which I'd really rather forget. Due to this, I've been seriously behind in my MR reading.

To respond, briefly, to Mr. Klein, I read the first 20 pages of the sample, neither to like nor dislike the book, but to find out what kind of a book it was. That is the same thing I do with every author, amateur or professional. I was planning to read more of it, but I couldn't endure it. This has nothing to do with the technology involved (I never got far enough into the book to really evaluate the technology) and everything to do with the style and content of the writing. It is in desperate need of a proofreader and an editor, not to mention brutal excision of at least 3/4 of its content. I am not being kind here; I am being honest. Take it as it's meant.

You obviously think it's perfect as it is, of course. There comes a point, however, when you need to look at hard facts and decide which matters more to you: a book exactly the way you wrote it, even if the market rejects it in that form, or a book that a significant number of people will actually read. If the former, then by all means keep the book exactly as it is, accept that people who are looking for something other than your personal statement are going to be dissatisfied with it, and move on. If the latter, however, then it behooves you to listen to the people who post on MR, who have read more books than you have written, and take their advice very strongly to heart. They are -- we are -- your market, and it is a market which must be wooed, not bullied, into reading your work. Are we losing something by not reading your book? Possibly. But there are hundreds of books published every day, and we can only read a small number of them; it is the job of the author to convince us that we should read this and not that. So far, many other authors have done that job much better.

In the past few weeks I have read at least 50 books. I read fast, and I've had little else to do. You did not successfully prove to me that yours should be one of them.