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Chapter 252: The Ashvane Workshop
Workshop journal of Torin Ashvane, metalsmith, House Ashvane — Ironhold.Subject: Directed Propulsion via Chemical Detonation.Commenced: Year 313 AF. Current entry: Year 316 AF.
Prototype 1 — Year 313, Month 3 Open iron tube, no chamber. Black powder charge at base. Lead ball seated by hand. Result: Tube split on ignition. Ball did not leave the barrel. Powder charge insufficient or tube wall too thin. Mild burns, left forearm. Note: Iron cannot contain the pressure. Need stronger alloy.
Prototype 2 — Year 313, Month 9 Stonesteel tube, cast by House forge. Thicker walls. Same charge. Result: Ball ejected. Traveled approximately 8 meters before hitting the ground. No accuracy. Tube intact. Progress. Note: Ball does not fit the bore tightly. Gas escapes around the projectile. Wasted force.
Prototype 3 — Year 314, Month 2 Stonesteel tube with tighter bore. Ball hammered in with a ramrod. Result: Ball ejected with force. ~20 meters. Hit the target wall. Did not penetrate. Note: Distance improving. Penetration requires velocity. Velocity requires a longer barrel or more powder. More powder risks the tube.
Prototype 4 — Year 314, Month 6 Longer barrel (forearm-length). Double powder charge. Result: Penetrated a pinewood board at 15 meters. Did not penetrate oak. Barrel shows stress fractures after 3 firings. Note: Stress fractures at the chamber base. The detonation point takes all the force. Need to reinforce the base without adding weight the user can’t hold.
Prototype 5 — Year 314, Month 11 Reinforced chamber base. Added a flared touch-hole for fuse access. Result: Consistent penetration of pine at 25 meters. Oak at 10. Barrel survived 7 firings before fracture. Note: Seven firings — still far short. A crossbow lasts years. This lasts minutes.
Prototype 6 — Year 315, Month 4 Experimental closed-breech design. Powder loaded from the rear. Result: Breech seal failed on second firing. Explosion vented backward. Broken wrist, right hand. Three months recovery. Note: Do not load from the rear. The seal technology does not exist yet. Muzzle-loading only until metallurgy catches up. The wrist is a lesson I will not repeat.
Prototype 7 — Year 315, Month 10 Return to muzzle-loading. Consulted Tikk Copperwire (Goblin artificer, Ironhold) re: barrel composition. Tikk suggested cinnaite lining — the mineral that converts iron to stonesteel during smelting. Theory: a thin cinnaite layer inside the barrel would absorb thermal stress and reduce micro-fracturing. Result: Cinnaite-lined barrel. 14 firings before fracture. Distance: 35 meters. Penetration: oak at 20 meters. Note: Tikk is right about the cinnaite. The lining changes the thermal profile. But the ball still drifts. At 30+ meters, I cannot predict where it lands.
Prototype 8 — Year 316, Month 1 Same as 7 with a slightly longer barrel. Accuracy remains poor beyond 25 meters. Result: Consistent but inaccurate. The ball leaves the barrel spinning unevenly — I can see the wobble at distance. Something about the bore’s interior surface is imparting inconsistent rotation. Note: A defective casting from last week had a spiral groove scored into the bore — a flaw in the mold. I cut a ball for it out of curiosity. The ball flew straighter. I don’t understand why. But I kept the barrel.
End of journal entries.
The workshop was cold at this hour.
Torin Ashvane stood at the central bench, the defective barrel of prototype 8 clamped in a vise before him. Ironhold’s forge-heat rose through the stone foundations during the day, but at three hours past midnight the smelting levels had banked their fires and the residual warmth had bled away into the mountain.
He was thirty-two. Human. Unremarkable build for a metalsmith — shoulders broadened by years of hammer work, hands calloused from casting, a permanent squint from staring into forges. His right wrist was wrapped in a leather brace that he no longer removed. Prototype 6 had broken it fourteen months ago, and the bone had set crooked. The guild physician had offered to re-break and reset it. Torin had declined. He couldn’t afford three more months away from the bench.
The defective barrel sat under the lantern light. Stonesteel — dark grey, almost black, matte finish. The spiral groove ran the interior length of the bore in a slow, consistent helix. A casting flaw. The mold had shifted during cooling, scoring the interior wall.
Any other smith would have melted it down.
Torin had fired it once. The ball — a lead sphere, hand-cast, slightly undersized — had traveled forty-three meters in a straight line and embedded itself two inches into an oak target. No wobble. No drift. Forty-three meters, dead center.
He’d spent the last six weeks trying to understand why.
The groove imparted rotation. That much was obvious from watching the ball’s flight. But why did rotation stabilize trajectory? He’d asked Tikk, who’d stared at the barrel for ten minutes, muttered something about gyroscopic inertia in Goblin, and then spent two days covering Torin’s workbench in mathematical notation that neither of them fully understood.
The answer, as far as they could determine: a spinning projectile resisted lateral deflection because the groove forced the ball to rotate on a consistent axis. The rotation acted as a stabilizer — deeper groove, faster spin, straighter flight.
Torin had filed the groove deeper. Cut a second groove parallel to the first. Then a third, then a fourth — four helical grooves running the length of the bore, evenly spaced. He’d cast a new ball, slightly larger, with raised ridges that seated into the grooves.
Prototype 9.
He picked the barrel up from the vise. Heavier than the previous versions — the cinnaite lining added weight, and the grooves had required thicker walls to maintain structural integrity. It was forearm-length, with a reinforced chamber base and a flared touch-hole.
He loaded it. Nine grams of Skrit Vekkol’s black powder — the military-issue supply, delivered to Ironhold’s testing range in sealed containers marked with a bronze flame stamp. A paper wadding. Then the ball, seated with a ramrod, the raised ridges clicking into the grooves with a precision that made his smith’s heart ache.
It fit. Perfectly.
He set the device on the testing cradle — a wooden frame with a pivoting mount, designed to absorb recoil. The cradle sat at the far end of the workshop, aimed through the open door at the outdoor range: fifty meters of cleared ground terminating in a stone wall with a fresh oak target bolted to its face.
Torin stepped back. Looked at the device. A stonesteel tube on a wooden frame, loaded with powder and a lead ball.
Three years. Eight failures. A broken wrist that clicked when the air was cold. A spiral groove from a defective casting that any competent smith would have discarded.
His hands were steady. They always were, right before a test. The shaking came after.
He walked outside. The night air over Ironhold was sharp with altitude and forge residue. Dawn in three hours. He’d fire at first light, when the range officer arrived and the test could be witnessed.
He sat on the workshop step. Pulled his coat tighter. The wrist ached.
An hour before first light, Tikk arrived.
She came up the approach path in the dark carrying a lantern, a leather satchel, and the particular focused expression she wore when she had been thinking about something all night and had arrived at a result. She was three and a half feet tall and moved with the efficient purposefulness of someone who had learned not to waste motion on ceremony. She set the lantern on the step beside Torin, set the satchel on her lap, and opened it.
Inside: a notebook, three pages of dense mathematical notation, and a small clay model of what appeared to be a ball with raised ridges running its surface in a spiral.
"I made this last night," Tikk said, holding up the clay ball. "The ridge pattern. I’ve been calculating the optimal pitch for the rifling — the angle of the groove helix relative to the bore length. Too steep and the ball strips instead of spinning. Too shallow and the spin rate is insufficient to stabilize at range."
"You did this overnight."
"I couldn’t sleep." She set the clay model down. "The math is in the notebook. The short version: the pitch your prototype uses is close to optimal, but not quite. I think the casting flaw gave you a pitch angle of roughly one turn in fourteen inches. The theoretical optimum for this bore diameter and powder charge is one turn in twelve."
"Two inches difference."
"Two inches per fourteen inches of barrel. That compounds. At fifty meters, the ball is rotating slower than ideal. At a hundred meters, the deviation would increase significantly." She paused. "I want to score the next mold at one turn in twelve. It will require a new scoring template. I can have it done by end of week."
Torin looked at her. Tikk had been his collaborator for two years. In those two years she had consistently understood the physics of his work faster than he understood it himself. He made the devices. She understood why they worked.
It was, he had decided, an excellent division of labor.
"End of week," he said.
Tikk opened her notebook and began writing by lantern light, the night air over Ironhold sharp with cold. Dawn was coming in grey and gradual over the eastern peaks.
He waited.