'Torpedoes are all rot on this class unless they're submerged. Two more four-inchers 'ud be a lot better. They're as handy as duck-guns. I say, did you see that last shrapnel of mine burst over the target? I laid it myself.' Twenty-Three looks round for applause, but the other guns deride.
'That's all luck,' says Twenty-One, irreverently.
'Mine burst just beyond. It would have been dead right for an end-on shot. It would have snifted her just on the engine-room hatch. Sound place that. It mixes up the engines.'
'Mahan says, somewhere, that broadside fighting is going to pay with our low freeboards, because most shots go wrong in elevation. Of course, broadside-on, a shell that misses you misses you clean. It don't go hopping along your upper works as it would if you were end-on.'
'Oh, I meant my shot for an end-on shot, of course,' says Twenty-one; and some one promptly sits on him.
'No-o,' says Twenty-Four, meditatively. 'What we _really_ want if we ever go into a row is weather--lots of it. Good old gales--regular smellers. Then we could run in and beak 'em while it's thick. I believe in beaking.' (That belief, by the way, is curiously general in the Navy.)
'D'you mean to say you'd ram with a tea-tray like ours? I'm glad you aren't the skipper,' I interrupt.
'Oh, _he'd_ beak like a shot, if he saw his chance. Of course, he wouldn't beak anything our size--it 'ud be cheaper to hammer her--but take the ---- (he named a ship that does not fly Our flag). If you got in on _her_ almost anywhere she'd turn turtle. And she cost about a million and a quarter. It's just a question of L.S.D.'
'And what 'ud _we_ do afterwards, please?'
'Ah, that's our strong point. What happened when that collier drifted down on us at Milford? It only improved our steaming power, didn't it? We're a regular honeycomb of compartments forward. I believe you could swipe off twenty foot of her forward, and she'd get home somehow,' says an expert, enthusiastically.
'Bit risky,' says Twenty-One. 'That ship you talked of is awfully plated up topside, but all her underpinnings are pretty weak. If you could lob in a few shell under some of those forward sponsons of hers, I believe she'd crumple up with the weight of her own guns. But (sorrowfully) you'd need a nine point two to do that properly.'