Curved thick armour deck.
Ammunition service by Hydraulic power.
Oil right fore and aft the whole ship. Enough to go round the earth!
Very high double bottom—honeycombed.
Coffer dams everywhere stuffed with cork.
This, then, is the Fast Battle Cruiser “Incomparable” of 32 knots speed and 20-inch guns and no funnels, and phenomenal light draught of water, because so very long and built so flimsy that she won’t last 10 years, but that’s long enough for the War!
I have just found copy of a letter I sent Mr. Winston Churchill dated two months later, when those two very eminent men, having cogitated over the matter, very kindly informed me that the Visionary was justified. I omit the details they kindly gave me, as I don’t wish to deprive them of any trade advantage in the furtherance of their great commercial intentions with regard to the oil engine, for it is just now the commercial aspect of the internal combustion engine which enthrals us. A ship now exists that has a dead weight capacity of 9,500 tons with a speed of eleven knots (which is quite fast enough for all cargo-carrying purposes) and she burns only a little over ten tons of oil an hour. Having worked out the matter, I conclude she would save roughly a thousand pounds in fuel alone over a similar sized steamship in a voyage of about 3,000 miles (say crossing the Atlantic); and, of course, as compared with coal, she could carry much additional cargo, probably about 600 tons more. Then the getting rid of boilers and coal bunkers gives another immense additional space to the oil engine ship for cargo, as the oil fuel would be carried in the double-bottom. A Swiss firm has put on board an ocean-going motor-driven ship a Diesel engine which develops 2,500 indicated Horse Power in one cylinder, so that a quadruple-screw motor ship could have 80,000 Horse Power with sixteen of these cylinders cranked on each shaft. I don’t see why one shouldn’t have a sextuple-screw motor ship with a hundred thousand Horse Power. So it is ludicrous to say that the internal combustion engine is not suited to big ships. For some reason I cannot discover, “Tramp” owners are hostile to the internal combustion engine. I hope they will not discover their error too late. I sent two marvellous pictures of a Motor Battleship to Mr. Winston Churchill on November 17th, 1912, saying to him:—
“These pictures will make your mouth water!”
However, this type of ship is obsolete for war before she has been begun, as we have got to turn her into a submersible—not that there is any difficulty in that—it has already been described that in August, 1916, a submersible vessel with a 12-inch gun was proposed and after extreme hesitation and long delays in construction was built, but she was completed too late to take part in the war. She might have sunk a goodly number of the German Fleet at the Battle of Jutland. But our motto in the war was “Too Late.”[10]
The whole pith and marrow of the Internal Combustion Engine lies in the science of metallurgy. We are lamentably behind every foreign nation, without exception, in our application of the Internal Combustion Engine to commercial purposes, because its reliability depends on Metallurgy, in which science we are wanting, and we are also wanting in scientific research on the scale of 12 inches to a foot. We have no scale at all!