Repeating "oval" in the first line comes over as clumsy; I'd suggest "clustered at the centre" (or center), but you've already used this word for the black dots, so in turn you might want to change that to "each marked with a single, black, dot".

You've also got some comma issues.

By the way...

It is Gettysburg. Missev is an historian from the thirtieth century who's trying to see if can't bring about a Confederate victory there. It's just a game. There's no time travel or anything like that.

His opponent, however, is the ship's computer who plays an important role in the rest of the story (very little of which has anything to do with Gettysburg or American history).

Thanks much for the comments. Now, I've got some re-writing to do.

Mechwarrior -- Your suggestion is more or less what I think I'm going to have to do. It is a pretty fair consensus that something has to be done to make this particular boat float.

Thanks again, all, and please do harken back once I dig myself from this hole.

True, anything's possible. A meteor shower could have annihilated the Federal line minutes before the attack opened. Gen. Meade, having enjoyed a very rich breakfast, could have inadvertantly released a cloud of toxic gas that would have forced his army from their positions in confusion. Someone could have given Lee a Pazer division in exchange for his signature in blood.

The peace overtures which formed the basis of his party's platform (and there is no serious reason to believe that McClellan wouldn't have made those overtures once in office) would have left Great Britan no real excuse for not recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation. France would have followed on that almost eagerly.

Of course, the war wouldn't have ended. Ongoing cavalry raids would have been impossible for the Confederacy to stop, even had they tried. With the glorification of Southern horsemanship and the large numbers of slaves that had either run north or been captured by Union armies, there would be zero respect for the borders of the Union, especially if the United States continued to refuse to recognize the Confederacy. Almost the entire boundry between North and South would have been a matter of "lines on a map" rather than defensible terrain features.

The only question would be whether McClellan would respond to resurgent pro-war sentiment or whether resumptions of hostilities would wait on the next election. In either case, the respite would have allowed the Confederacy to retrench considerably both militarily and politically. In pursuing the matter, the US could have persuaded England to stay out of things but France would definitely have pursued their toehold in Mexico in exchange for some form of support to the Confederacy.

Unfortunately for the Confederacy, the industrial disparity between North and South would only have continued to worsen, and the North was just beginning to exploit its massive manpower advantages too. By Gettysburg, the conflict was already attracting attention from the upper "military caste" of Europe, and immigrants were contributing heavily to the war efforts both directly and indirectly.

Worse, the underlying moral conflict over slavery would only have increased, just as it had for the previous half century. With the apparent victory of the Confederacy in the "first" war, almost no abolitionist sentiment could have remained in the South. Indeed, despite the positions taken by a few prominent generals (and Lee might well have died by then anyway) historically there was almost no desire to abolish slavery in the South by Gettysburg (some of that was accomplished by war fervor, a good deal of it by persecution and forced emigration of persons expressing anti-slavery opinions).

On the other hand, living side by side with a nation based on slavery could only have rankled more on the Northerners as time passed. Particularly one that trumpeted its military prowess in the face of the North's overwhelming military and strategic advantages.

Once hostilities resumed, the North would probably have crushed the South militarily in just a few campaigns (though more than it too historically). But reconstructing the Union would have taken far longer. Not only would a few years of technological advance have worsened the scale of destruction--possibly by an order of magnitude, but the resentment over the destruction of their independent nation (both physical, political, and military) would have been that much greater as well.

In our own history, something like of quarter of the free men of military age (which was being defined pretty broadly by the end of the war) were killed or crippled by the end. In a much longer war, more destructive and bitter in all aspects of its course and prosecution, it is unlikely that even a quarter of the men in the South would have been left whole at the end.

If there had ever been an end. Confederate terrorist activity remained a serious problem in our own history well into the twentieth century. Had the war been worse, we might still be fighting it.

However, you wrote in another message that "any 'historian' who suggests that the Confederates could have won at Gettysburg on the third day loses so much credibility that it's an unrecoverable blow" and that "Serious historians do not waste time on these sorts of 'possibilities'."

The historian in my story never seriously suggests that the Confederates could have won at Gettysburg. Rather, he's simply amusing himself with a scenario which, as an historian, he knows to be exceedingly difficult. This isn't any more a waste of his time than is any other sort of entertainment (these forums come to mind). Indeed, I would suggest that my historian's choice of entertainment is quite appropriate and, in my opinion, sounds like a helluva lot of fun. Given the opportunity, wouldn't you give it a go?

I'd play the second day of Gettysburg, or the first day with minor variations like Stuart doing what he was supposed to be doing rather than joyriding about the countryside. I might play out the maneuver that Lee should have made on the third day rather than his attack, to see how well it would really have worked given that Meade's subordinates were being quite alert.

But the attack on the third day, it isn't "exceedingly difficult". It is a simple impossibility barring some kind of miracle. It's like me giving a pro player a nine stone handicap at Go. Why would I do such a thing? Why would a pro even bother to play me under that circumstance?

But I firmly stand by the general opinion that Gettysburg was a critical lynchpin in the Union victory. A defeat there would have made the victories of the next year (the the exception of Vicksburg, which was already decided by that time) impossible, and Lincoln would've stood almost no chance of being reelected. However little the Confederacy stood to gain, the Union had a lot at stake in that battle.

As for Lee...the man had an unshakable, irrational belief in the power of chivalry. In some ways it was his best quality, even when it was his worst. It led him to fight for a cause he regarded as unjust, because of his attachment to the soil where he was raised. It made him order an entire army to commit suicide en masse, because death was preferable to retreat. It endeared him to everyone that knew him. And it saved the Union, both at Gettysburg and at Appomattox.

The beginning is full of info-dump that, if I were not familiar with military symbols used for wargaming and maps in military history books, I would have no idea what was going on. The first 13 doesn't pull me in because it's not interesting yet. All I get from this is that somebody is in a situation room. I get that because I read past the blue squares and the concentric oval stuff that I didn't understand at all until I had the context of the later sentences.

To me, this information will probably be necessary, but not as the first 13 lines. Maybe the general needs to frown while pacing along the table with the map showing the dire situation of.... or whatever. this is just too dry for me at the start of a story. Were I an editor, I probably wouldn't have read past the first sentence.

Right now I'm working on getting a novella ready for submission. Once that's done, I'm going to turn back to this piece and see if I can't recover it from its first-13-line-itus.

Thanks again!

Slavery was on it's way out all over America, including the South. It was only a matter of time until slavery was abolished there in favor of cheaper machinery that you don't have to feed, clothe, house, or worry about as far as escapes and uprisings. The American Civil War was not a war about slavery. The Generals Lee and either Forest or Jackson had already freed their slaves some time before the war. Forest/Jackson even built a schoolhouse for his. Interestingly, General Grant had not freed his slaves. The North didn't want to give jobs to the freed slaves. They didn't want to live with them, or have anything to do with them. The North had plenty of racism, but Abolitionists were the louder voice. Funny how that works.

The Civil War was about states rights. The argument was only started by the slavery issue. Lincoln made it a war about slavery with the Emancipation Proclaimation. The South felt that state government should be stronger. They also felt that states who no longer wished to be part of the Union had the right to secede. So they did, or tried to atleast. They were not fighting simply to keep slave labor. If they were, generals who freed their slaves and continued to help those free slaves would not have participated.

These 13 lines consist almost entirely of dense metahphor. The POV character is seeing artillery and flags--not abstract shapes. It's fine that the formations and flags look like shapes from a distance. It might even help the reader to make an analogy. But to descbribe these things (which the reader could imagine) in metaphorical and highly abstract terms, with only passing reference to what the things described actually are, is confusing and off-putting. It seems a bad way to start--an anti-hook, of sorts.

Slavery wasn't on it's way out in the South, it was retrenching. When the Constitution was first written, it contained (actually, it still contains) an early version of the now infamous "Sunset Provision". The provision in question was that, in twenty years time, moves to abolish the slave trade into the United States could be enacted. By the outbreak of the Civil War, slavery had gone from being an embarrassing temporary economic expedient to a "moral cause".

It was the main reason that the South was so poorly industrialized compared to the North, so overwhelmingly agrarian, and so utterly immersed in the notion that the white Southerner was worth ten times as much as a Northerner on the battlefield.

Like I said, Lee (along with a number of others, though not so many as some Southerners will tell you) didn't believe in the cause of slavery. But that was "The Cause" for which he was fighting, and he knew it as well as anyone. The truth is that Lee was even less sympathetic to the idea of "States' Rights" taken in the abstract. He understood and respected his "countrymen's" desire to perpetuate slavery, he did not appreciate any talk of "States' Rights" in a practical sense of giving States within the Confederacy powers which the Confederacy needed for itself.