Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/237

 of the older high explosives. These nitric and picric acid mixtures are all about the same thing, really, whether they happen to be called Melinite or Maximite or Cordite or Ballastite or Turpinite or Lyddite or any other old thing ending in 'ite.' Chemically, they've reached their topmost limit of power, and the problem has been to build guns strong enough to stand their fire (where a pressure of twelve thousand pounds to the square inch is now considered low) and at the same time resist their heat, when less than two hundred discharges burns out a sixteen-inch gun."

"Sixty-four discharges did for the Sider coast gun," amended Wilsnach.

"This man Strasser has apparently hit on a new idea. He realized that our naval guns couldn't be made much heavier, for such a rifle has to have three feet of length for every inch of caliber. This means that our new sixteen-inch gun, for instance, has to be at least forty-eight feet long. Each gun, Brubacher tells me, weighs almost ninety-four tons. To mount heavier guns than that in the turret of a dreadnaught means the displacement of the ship has to be enormously increased, since the projectile of each rifle weighs two thousand pounds and a