Free Lion Resurgent by Stuart Slade Page B

you General. Gentlemen, I’m here today to discuss the topic that has been of concern to us all ever since the B-70 first entered service. I refer, of course, to bombing accuracy.” A ripple of hostility ran around the room. The B-70 crews were well aware that their average bombing error from the Valkyries was substantially greater than that from the old B-52s. In fact, the surviving BUFF groups still won the bombing accuracy contests at Red Sun, year after year. Doctor Kailie seemed oblivious to the reaction. “Of course, this is quite understandable. The Valkyrie flies at three times the speed of the B-52 and twice the altitude so a degradation of accuracy when using gravity bombs is only to be expected. We note that in the bombing of the Caliphate biological warfare facilities a decade ago, some of the bombs dropped missed their targets by between three and five miles.”
    Doctor Kailie looked at his audience, blissfully unaware that he was being measured for a lynching. “That’s worse than an ICBM, you know.”
    This time the hostile growl was unmistakable and couldn’t be easily ignored. Kailie suddenly realized he was trampling all over very tender corns. “Since then we have managed to correct the situation to a great extent. The new generation of gravity bombs have an inertial stabilization system that detects deviations from the planned ballistic arc and corrects for them. This eliminates errors from varying cross-winds and other atmospheric disturbances. However, this does not change the degree of error built in by the use of higher speeds and altitudes.”
    “Then give us bigger bombs!” A voice called out from the increasingly restive audience. In a dimension humans know nothing of, deceased General Thomas Power smiled affectionately.
    “That is only a temporary solution, and in any case there are many cases where the use of larger nuclear devices would be inappropriate. In fact, it would be of great benefit if, in some cases, we could replace nuclear devices with extremely accurate conventional weapons.”
    “We’re not going to ask the ladies to haul trash!” A different voice, but equally hostile. The audience was beginning to surge forward in reaction to Kailie’s remarks.
    “The ladies?” Kailie was confused.
    “The B-70s. Most of them are female.” General Carson looked at his assembled crews severely. “Settle down, right now! We have a problem here and, while it might have been addressed more tactfully,” now Kailie got the severe look, “it is, nevertheless a serious problem that we have to face. So hear Doctor Kailie out.”
    Kailie wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “As I was saying, the problem is a combination of speed, altitude and the reaction time of the bombing system. These are fixed constraints and, as you gentlemen have shown, even the finest training and most highly developed skills in the world cannot compensate for them.” He took a chance and looked at his audience. They seemed a little more mollified that they had a few minutes earlier. He heaved a quiet sigh of relief.
    “Since the source of error at the drop end is beyond the control of either the crews or the - ahem - ladies, then the answer is obvious, we have to find a way of changing the course of the bomb on its way down so that any errors at the drop point can be corrected as the weapon descends. It is to achieve this end that we at Hughes have been working for the last few years.
    “Attaining this end is of ever-increasing importance. Faced with the threat of our bombers, those who would challenge world peace have undertaken to make your tasks as hard as possible. They have hardened installations, buried them deep underground, made the vulnerable areas of them as small as possible. This is why just using devices of ever-increasing yield is no longer a viable approach. If the area of the target is halved in each of its dimensions and the same amount of material is used to build it, then that target