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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