Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/214

 America's First Thirty-Five Knot

Battle-Cruiser

��COMMON sense teaches everyone that speed, range, striking power and adequate armor protection, are essential in a fighting vessel and the ship in which these are combined to a pre-eminent degree most fully meets the ideal. But it is no easy matter to unite all these attributes in a single craft of a given tonnage. If a battleship is excessively armored, weight must be saved elsewhere — in guns, en- gines, etc. And so it happens that every fighting ship is more or less a compro- mise effected by the advocate of speed with the advocate of heavy guns and thick armor.

Although the developments in battle- ship construction have been exceedingly rapid, the greatest impetus was given about ten years ago when Great Britain came to the fore with the Dreadnought, a ship which mounted only big guns, namely ten twelve-inch rifles. She was fast too, for her speed was twenty-one and one-half knots, something unprece- dented in battleships.

Soon the superdreadnought appeared, a vessel still faster, mounting still bigger guns, and still more heavily armored. Then came the battle cruiser, a formid- able craft with a speed of twenty-eight knots — a type also first introduced by Great Britain.

These battle cruisers — vessels which mount somewhat fewer heavy guns than the superdreadnought, but of the same caliber, and' which have somewhat lighter armor and the greatest speed that can be given to a warship are at last to be intro- duced in our own riavy. If we were to engage now in a naval war with a foreign power, we would be hopelessly at a dis- advantage, not only because of the few- ness of our superdreadnoughts, but be- cause we utterly lack battle cruisers.

W'hile no official announcement has been made of the principal features of these new ships, the Popular Science Monthly is in a position to present de- tails which may be accepted as accurate.

Profiting by the lessons taught by the engagements fought oft" the Falkland Islands and in the North Sea, this new

��battle cruiser of ours is to have a speed somewhere between thirty-two and thir- ty-five knots. Obviously engines of enormous power are required to attain that speed, and so we may expect that one hundred thousand horsepower must be generated. Every additional knot means an inordinate increase in engine capacity.

Our unbuilt and unnamed battle cruiser will have eight fourteen-inch guns and twenty five-inch guns. At first blush it would seem as if the Queen Elizabeth's fifteen-inch guns must carry the day if these two ships were ever opposed. But our ordnance officers have made the state- ment that the new fourteen-inch guns which they have developed are the su- perior of the fifteen-inch guns at present used in the British navy — or statements to that effect.

The armor protection of the new United States battle cruiser is to be twelve inches amidships and four inches at the ends. The Queen Elizabeth has thirteen and one-half inches of steel on the waterline, ten inches above that and a top layer of eight and one-quarter inches. It is here probably that we had to make our sacrifice in order to gain the engine power and, therefore, speed. But if speed will enable our ship fo pick out her own position and our guns have the greater range, the loss in armor pro- tection is more than compensated for.

The Lion and Tiger are battle cruisers in the true sense of the word. Our ship will easily outdistance them. In tonnage there is not much to choose, for they displace thirty thousand tons as against the thirty-one thousand tons of our ves- sel. In armament we will be far supe- rior. The Lion and the Tiger each mount eight fourteen-inch guns which are prob- ably inferior in range to the guns of equivalent caliber on the proposed Amer- ican ship. The Tiger has twelve six- inch guns and the Lion sixteen four-inch gtms ; but weapons of such small char- acter play no part in a long range en- gagement and are serviceable chiefly for the repulsion of torpedo boats.

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