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We were launching battleships which cost $42,000,000 to build, which cost $2,000,000 a year to maintain and which, in a few years, would be towed out to sea to be used as an experimental target to try out some new armour-piercing shell. I wonder if our children's children will look back on that spectacle and call it practical. In 1912 the naval expenses of this country were about $136,000,000.
Fire had been opened with the guns laid to eight thousand yards, and all four heavy, armour-piercing shells had found their billets. The historic battle of the Yalu had commenced. Nor were the Japanese behindhand in accepting the challenge.
Finally, the shell-proof gratings were slid over the engine-room hatches, watertight doors were closed, and in grim silence the Chinese fleet steamed ahead, waiting for the word which would start the mighty guns roaring and the great, armour-piercing shells hurtling through the air on their errand of destruction.
But all things considered, it is concluded that more successful results are likely to be achieved by the armour-piercing bullet striking the mechanism than by an explosive projectile. The Krupp company fully realised the difficulties pertaining to the projectile problem in attacks upon aerial craft.
It projects a formidable missile which in fact is an armour-piercing bullet 1/2- to 3/4-inch in diameter. It is designed for use with an automatic machinegun, which the inventor has devised more or less upon the well-known French system. The bullet has a high velocity about 2,500 feet per second and a maximum range of 6,000 to 8,000 feet at the maximum elevation.
A 4.7-inch armour-piercing shell punctured her side on the main-deck line, tore up the wooden deck, and, striking the steel deck under this, glanced upward, went through the after engine-room hatch, and, emerging, struck the cylinder of the port 6-inch gun on the quarter-deck, temporarily rendering the gun unfit for use.
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