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.'
'Beak her! Beak her! Catch her in a gale, coming out of harbour' (the speaker named the very port). 'It takes their people a week to get their tummies straight.'
'Yes, but they never come out of harbour. At least they didn't in the old days. And if they do, we sha'n't be allowed a look-in. We shall be used for scouting—coaling all day and steaming all night. But we want those deck-tubes taken out all the same.
'I'd like target-practice every week,' says another. 'Say four times our present allowance of practice-ammunition. It 'ud wear the guns out, but it 'ud pay.'
And so the talk goes on; varying with each ship. Some of them are all for torpedoes, and have submarine vaults the size of a small church devoted to this game; but we, being what we are, are mainly for guns, and the Gunner who is in charge of the torpedoes has a hard time of it when he runs his quarterly trials.
