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OF BATTLESHIP DESIGN. 103 
personnel and matériel, and can be more minutely subdivided. The matériel can be better 
safeguarded against accidents and breakdowns. It is concluded that on the whole the risks 
incident to navigation and ordinary service are not enhanced by going to large displacements. 
As regards the risks peculiar to war conditions, the intensity of attack, to which war- 
ships are exposed, will be in a broad sense directly proportional to their size, because, again, 
the number of units is reduced in the same ratio as that in which the displacement is in- 
creased. Larger ships, therefore, would be more liable to damage and destruction than 
smaller, unless the means of protection and defense can be developed and strengthened in 
the same measure as the intensity of attack is increased, but this, in fact, appears to be 
quite feasible. The degree of protection that can be obtained by passive means, such as 
armor, subdivisions, under-water bulkheads of special construction, nets, and other appli- 
ances, is fairly proportional to the displacement. The active means of defense, whether car- 
ried by the ship herself, such as guns and torpedoes, or extraneous, such as patrolling vessels 
and aircraft, can be likewise rendered proportionately more effective in a fleet consisting of 
a smaller number of larger vessels than in a more numerous and more scattered fleet of 
smaller vessels. 
Mine attacks, being of a passive nature, are in this connection analogous to the dangers 
of navigation, under which large and small vessels are exposed to practically the same risks. 
I conclude that the risks of peace and war are no greater for large battleships than for 
small, and that, hence, the one great objection to large vessels so familiar to all, of “put- 
ting too many eggs in one basket,” cannot be sustained. This, of course, does not preclude 
the possibility that battleships, as we know them now, may some day, perhaps sooner than 
we suspect, be driven from the ocean, as they have already been driven from the smaller 
seas, but that time is not yet. 
Captain A. P. Nipiack, Vice-President:—I had not intended to say very much about 
this paper, except in praise of it, not only with regard to the subject-matter, but with refer- 
ence to the breadth with which it has been treated. It is a splendid paper, and the question 
is considered in a way that I think the Society ought to get used to. 
In a Society of this character, whose members belong to various professions and have 
various interests, the one element which is excluded from the discussion is the political. For 
instance, in the design of ships—from the shipbuilding standpoint, of course—it may be, in 
developing a program of shipbuilding, as an example, that one of the arguments in favor of 
building ships of a certain type (which was true many years ago) was that certain shipyards 
could build that type and no others. We have been governed in the United States by a 
good deal of exigency in our program with regard to shipbuilding. 
One argument in favor of the large ship, for instance, might very reasonably be that 
Congress would only give a certain number of ships, and therefore it would be advisable to 
get the biggest ships that could be procured. That is one phase of it. 
We can argue these questions of design from so many standpoints, I think it is impor- 
tant that we discuss these questions on broad lines, as Mr. Gatewood has done, that is to 
say, strategically and technically. There has been, in fact, a series of papers presented to the 
Society on this same general subject and published some years ago. At the meeting in 1895 
we had a paper entitled “Tactical Considerations Involved in Warship Design.” At the 
1899 meeting we had a paper on “Tactical Considerations Involved in Torpedo-Boat De- 
sign.” At the 1902 meeting we had a paper on “The Tactics of the Gun,” and at the meeting 
in 1907 a paper on “Further Tactical Considerations Involved in Warship Design.” 
