The armour on the conning-tower is 10 inches thick, and weighs 65 tons, the weight of a Great Western express engine. It cost £7500—a sum equal to the lumped salaries for one year of all the Sea Lords of the Admiralty. The 10 inches of nickel steel of which it is made can stand a harder blow than the 17 inches of iron armour on the turrets of the old Inflexible. The conning-tower is the main 'fighting station' of the ship, the nerve-centre of the mighty organisation. Thence in action, from behind a ring-fence of solid metal, are controlled the huge engines, far down below, impelled by
The strength of twice ten thousand horse
That serve the one command,
—if one may vary Mr. Kipling,—engines of the power of twenty-two thousand horses, the strength of an army corps of cavalry; also the steering of the ship and the firing of the guns. By means of a simple arrangement in the three primary colours—red, blue, and yellow—painted in bands round the walls of the conning-tower inside, the captain can tell at a glance, at any moment, which of his guns, and how many of them, can train on an enemy at any given point.
The Monmouth's 'fighting-weight' is another matter. Fourteen 6-inch guns, Vickers-Maxims of the latest pattern, contribute something to that. This is the sort of weapon the 6-inch gun is. Imagine one set up in Trafalgar Square to fire with extreme elevation. Its 100-pound shells would drop on Kingston Bridge in one direction; beyond Harrow, ten miles off, in another. Other shells would burst over Barnet; sweep the woodland rides of Epping Forest; startle the tennis-players on the trim lawns of Chislehurst in Kent. And not many seconds would elapse between the flash of the discharge and the shell doing its work. Ten miles, of course, is the farthest that the gun could shoot, its 'estimated extreme range.' In war-time that sort of firing would not be worth while, as it would be impossible to mark the shots. Seven miles, roughly, or 12,000 yards, is the limit the gun is sighted for. Then again, imagine our gun firing at a mark. At 2000 yards, the minimum engaging distance in naval war because of torpedoes, aiming from Trafalgar Square at a target set up, say, in Ludgate Circus or at Hyde Park Corner, the shot would smash through a slab of wrought iron 14 inches thick as easily as a stone goes through a pane of glass. Firing at 6000 yards, the maximum distance for opening action in ordinary circumstances, at a target set up at Hammersmith, for example, the shot would cut a hole clean through 6½ inches of wrought iron—armour 2 inches thicker than our first ironclad, the Warrior, had on her sides. Fired with a full charge of 25 lbs. of cordite, the shot leaves the gun at a speed of 2775 feet (or half a mile and forty-five yards) a second—a pace capable of carrying it in a minute as far as Reading; with energy sufficient to toss Cleopatra's Needle 30 feet into the air as lightly as a schoolboy flings up a wicket, or heave the biggest railway express engine 100 feet high, to hurl an elephant over the Eiffel Tower, or a cart-horse out of sight to three times the height of Snowdon.
Every round from one of the Monmouth's 6-inch guns costs the country £12. The gun itself costs £1700. As a fact, each gun takes five months of work, night and day, to make; and weighs 7½ tons, like all modern naval guns of any size, it is a 'wire gun,' constructed of steel tape wound round an inner tube or 'barrel,' in the same way that the string is laid round the handle of a cricket-bat, and jacketed over by an outer steel tube. Upwards of 18,200 yards of steel 'wire' are used for each 6-inch gun, 10½ miles of it—a length that, pulled out straight, would stretch for half the distance between Dover and Calais. The set of sights for each gun, as an item by itself, costs £80.
The Monmouth's 6-inch guns are each capable of firing from five to eight shots a minute, and there are on board, besides, ten 12-pounders, three 3-pounders, and some Maxims. The 12-pounders cost £300 each, and take four months to make.
In action, the Monmouth, fighting both broadsides at once, would let fly at the enemy at each discharge two-thirds of a ton of projectiles; within the first minute 3½ tons weight of metal; every five minutes, 18 tons—all bursting shells. That is the Monmouth's 'fighting-weight.'
To supply her guns the Monmouth carries, stowed away in the different magazines far down in the recesses of the hold, 200 tons weight of ammunition—30 to 40 tons of it in cordite cartridges; the rest in shot and loaded shell, with each projectile painted its differentiating colour—white-banded 'armour-piercers,' red-tipped shrapnel, yellow lyddite, and so on.
Electricity works the great hooded turrets on the forecastle and quarter-deck, each of 4-inch nickel steel and carrying a pair of 6-inch guns, mounted side by side in double-barrelled sporting-gun fashion on a twin mounting, training the eighty odd tons of dead-weight to right and left, or from one side of the ship to the other, through three-quarters of a circle, as easily as one wheels one's arm-chair in front of the fire after dinner. Electricity also 'feeds' the guns, both in the turrets and in the casemates, as fast as they can be fired, bringing up the ammunition to the guns directly from the magazines.
The 4-inch Krupp steel armour on the Monmouth's sides at the water-line, from the ram for three-quarters of the ship's length aft, cost to manufacture, in round figures, £60,000—equal to the total yearly income of four Archbishops of Canterbury or six Lord Chancellors. Two 'turtle-back' decks of thin steel armour further help to keep out shot. Altogether, in dead-weight, the armour all over the ship—on the sides, decks, bulkheads, conning-tower, casemates, barbettes, ammunition-supply tubes—amounts to 1800 tons, a fifth of the ship's entire displacement weight in sea-going trim.