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power, which would necessitate a deeper draught or a lighter 
armament. If the ship is made larger to make room for these 
heavy engines and the requisite boilers and coal-bunkers, there 
will necessarily be a corresponding increase in the difficulty of 
forcing the great curved bow through the water. The screws 
are unprotected, the men working the guns in the open breast- 
work are very imperfectly sheltered, and the structure of the 
Popoffka makes it difficult to substitute a closed turret. The 
ship, then, cannot cruise ; and even for coast defence she is a very 
imperfect engine of war. For the latter purpose gunboats of 
the Staunch class would be equally, if not more, efficient. These 
gunboats are small, low, unarmoured vessels, carrying one gun in 
the bow. Being fought bow-on they present a very small mark to 
an enemy ; and if the gun were mounted on the Moncrieff 
principle, the gunners would be at least as well protected as 
those who will man the open breastwork of the Novgorod . 
There would be no difficulty in mounting and fighting a gun of 35 
tons or even more in a gunboat of the Staunch class ; the 18-ton 
gun is the heaviest yet mounted in these gunboats in our navy ; 
but Messrs. Armstrong are, we believe, now constructing for a 
foreign government one which will carry a 25-ton gun. These 
gunboats have twin-screws, the gun is pointed by means of the 
helm, and with a bow-rudder the gunboat can reverse her 
engines and run astern fighting her gun, and still keeping her 
propelling power protected by being turned away from the 
enemy. Additional protection for the engines could be secured 
by the use of one or more armoured bulkheads. We have thus 
already in our navy a good type of a small light-draught vessel 
for coast defence, and we do not see what further advantage is 
to be obtained by the adoption of the Popoffka system. 
As for Mr. Feed’s suggestion that we should adopt the 
Popoffka as a central citadel for a cruiser, with a lightly-built 
bow and stern added to it, it must be considered on quite a 
different basis. The system of an armoured central citadel with 
unarmoured ends has already been adopted in our navy, and 
very highly developed in the plan of the Inflexible , which we 
described in these pages in January last. There is no prohibi- 
tory reason why the central citadel should not be round instead 
of oblong, as in the Hercules and the Inflexible ; but, for our 
part, we prefer the oblong form as affording more room and 
fitting more easily to the ordinary form of the ship. But such 
ships in any case would not be Popoffkas ; and the real question 
with regard to them would be the old one of the relative merits 
of short-broad ships and ships of ordinary proportions — a question 
which we do not intend to discuss here. We have endeavoured to 
show that the Popoffka is practically a useless form in naval 
architecture. We have only touched upon a few points, but 
