Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

By order of Pope Pius XII, an order of nuns specific to the task was formed, the 35th Teutonic Order of Solemn Vows, Daughters of Olaf, the Nordic war hero, but otherwise officially referred to as the Schwesterkriegerine, to serve the purposes of the Reich, and to weaponize as it deemed necessary.

Die Kuppel, referred to by its thousand residents as the Bunker, was an evolved and expanded form of its little sister, La Cupole, in Normandy that had a similar purpose. The difference was that its creators had learned this lesson the hard way: rockets invite Allied bombers.

The rocket under development at Die Kuppel was as tall as a grain silo, and officially designated the A10, but for those hopeful of its extended reach affectionally attached the moniker Amerika Rakete. One looking down from above might have imagined the circular opening surrounded by the circular dome as the iris and eyeball of the Earth. For those few who knew its true purpose, however, the image conjured instead was of Earth’s sphincter expelling suppositories on selected populations, even as far as half a hemisphere away.

Wishing to avoid the latter comparison, the architects gave the center hole a more glamorous title, Die Oculus, inspired by the round opening in the dome of the Roman Pantheon, aspirations for salvation of the Reich by the gods of Prometheus being coddled within the dome not totally dismissed.

But unlike the ballistic, up-then-down, trajectories of rockets launched from La Cupole, the warhead placed into orbit atop the A10 from Die Kuppel would remain in orbit, waiting for a target to be assigned to it, at which point it would ignite small thrusters to retard its velocity, according to the mathematics of Kepler, fall out of orbit and on top of the inferior race de jour populating the selected geography below.

As with its little sister in Normandy, the idea was that launches could take place every few hours, by night or by day. Calculations on not just a few chalkboards suggested that with a few modifications, the Amerika Rakete could send a small payload beyond Earth orbit, perhaps even to the Moon.

As a result of the compounding failures of the Wehrmacht during this war, the list of inferior races was no longer constrained to just Washington D.C., New York, London, or Moscow, but was extended to include anywhere on Earth, including Berlin.

The Amerika Rakete built on the success of the infamous V2, known as Aggregat 4, or A4, to the von Braun circle of rocket elites, modified with some weight savings innovations, such as the walls of the propellant tanks also serving as the fuselage, replacing the kerosene with liquid methane for increase weight to thrust performance, gimbaled engines to stabilize the 50-meter-tall cluster of rockets, eliminating the sinister looking but needlessly weighty aerodynamic fins. Four of these upgraded A4s, their characteristic fins removed, were strapped together in a cluster around a central, also finless, A4 core. Stacked on the central A4 was a sixth A4, and on top of this was the orbital warhead. To the astonishment and dismay of the Reich Ministry of Armaments, an extravagance of six A4s was required to make a single Amerika Rakete.

In German engineering tradition, each major subsystem of the Amerika Rakete was referred to as an apparatus and assigned a specific number. Apparatus 14, for example, contained the hydraulic fixtures to gimble the engines. Apparatus 11 was responsible for opening valves to adjust the rocket’s attitude. All apparatuses have been designed, flight proven, and adopted to the Amerika Rakete, with one important exception.

The apparatus assigned to controlling flight mechanisms was designated Apparatus 33. Other than the turbo-pumps of the rocket motors, Apparatus 33 was perhaps the most important system of the entire project. For example, Apparatus 33 was responsible for instructing the other Apparatuses to tilt the rocket stack at the right point of its trajectory to achieve orbit. It would command a rotation of the stack as align its telemetry antennas with ground controllers at Die Kuppel, or perhaps even U-boats at sea. When the rocket approached the maximum dynamic air pressure on its ascent, it would command the other apparatuses to throttle back the engines as necessary to prevent the rocket from slamming too hard into the still thick atmosphere.

Apparatus 33 would command the four strap-on A4s to be jettisoned when their fuel was spent, which occurred just before leaving Earth’s atmosphere, at the so-called Karman Line, to reduce mass and keep the center of mass behind the center of pressure or thrust during the boost phase and after launching.

Apparatus 33 was the brains of the rocket, and the one system for which no working solution had been conceived.

The stack that passes beyond the Karman Line, according to the flight plan, was now the remaining fifth and sixth A4s topped by the arrowhead-shaped warhead. This configuration would finish the assigned journey into a permanent orbit, or at least that was the story told by an orchestra of German scientists playing with their slide rules like magical slip whistles.

Flight planners were aware that the A4 side boosters, each the size of a train locomotive and weighing not much less, would be jettisoned at an altitude of fifty kilometers, huffing toxic gases at elevated temperatures, falling upon the local population like harpies at four hundred kilometers per hour. And as parachutes were deemed too weighty and expensive, the spent side boosters would explode and spill what remained of the highly toxic hypergolic fuels onto the erstwhile verdant forests and farmlands. Those unfortunate enough to be underneath were, by design, Poles and their livestock, and therefore of no consequence.

The possibility that more Poles would likely be killed by this rocket offal than anyone under the warhead occasionally crossed the scientific minds within Die Kuppel briefly, but was remarked upon only in hushed whispers, as such talk was considered defeatist and quickly punished by the SS guards posted there with orders to listen.

The original plan anticipated