The Sun.
London, England, 1866-02-05 00:00:00

On Saturday Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Talbot,
Acting Commander-in-Chief at the Nore, accom-
panied by his suite, inspected the screw steamer
Conqueror, 2,845 tons, 500-horse power, Capt. W.
B. Luard, on her return from China and Japan,
with the battalion of Royal Marines. The Admiral
was received on board with the customary honours,
and inspected the principal parts of the vessel, mus-
tering the whole of the ship's company, and wit-
nessing their exercises at quarters. Before leaving,
Sir Charles Talbot expressed to Capt. Luard and
the officers his satisfaction with the appearance of
the vessel after the lengthened period she had been
in commission, and the nature of the service on
which she had been engaged. The Conqueror has
taken up moorings in the harbour, and will be
placed in the steam basin, where she will be dis-
mantled and put out of commission.
A falling barometer and a stiff southerly gale in
the Channel during Thursday night offered another
chance for the trials of the 121-ton guns and their
carriages on board the Minotaur on the succeeding
day, Friday. As soon as the atmosphere cleared
sufficiently to admit of objects being seen within
moderate distance of the ship, she weighed her
anchor at Spithead, and, with Capt. A. C. Key and
staff on board, steamed out to the southward in
search of rough weather. A sea heavy for the Chan-
nel was soon fallen in with, but, as on previous oc-
casions, the ship was found much too large to be
strongly influenced by it, her utmost motion when
she lay in the " trough" was not quite ten degrees.
Rolling thus, at what may be fairly termed a maxi-
mum swing of nine degrees each way, the motion
of the ship was easy and regular, and without that
sudden lurching movement which has been sought
for by the ship on her trips, but which she
seems destined never to fall in with. The Mino-
taur is, in fact, as we have stated before, a ship
of too large a tonnage for the present trials. A
Channel sea produces but slight effect upon her, and
a cruise into the Bay of Biscay she is not in
a fit state yet to enter upon, nor could Captain
Key spare from his other duties the necessary time
for such a trial. A continued gale entering the Chan-
nel from the Atlantic may occur and bring with it
such a sea south of the Isle of Wight as may yet
supply the necessary conditions, and if such an op-
portunity does occur we may depend upon its being
taken due advantage of. It is, however, considered
that enough has been done already to demonstrate
satisfactorily to the most sceptical the possibility of
working 12i-ton guns on a ship's broadside when-
ever a ship's gunports can be opened at sea. This is
of the gravest importance, but it is the opinion en-
tertained by Capt. Key and his officers, and all who
have conducted or witnessed the trials of the guns
so far as they have yet gone. It is also an opinion
that will be confirmed in its soundness by the intro-
duction of improved mechanical aids in mounting
and working the guns, for, if with the present crude
ideas that direction now being developed by practice
on board the Minotaur so much has already been
achieved, it may very confidently be presumed that
with these same ideas perfected, or possibly super-
seded altogether, by new and better forms, 12i-ton
guns will in future be worked as securely and fired
as rapidly on the broadsides of our ironclads as were
the 6-inch and 8-inch guns on the broadsides of our
earliest wooden built screw frigates, before iron-
planked frigates were thought of. From the results
of the experimental firing on board the Minotaur on
Friday no other opinion could indeed be entertained
even if all consideration of what had been done pre-
viously was discarded for the time being. What
practice took place was made from the gun mounted
on Commander Scott's iron carriage and slide, and
the gun mounted on the Admiralty pattern wooden
carriage and slide, the latter fitted with eccentric
rollers, &c., on Capt. A. C. Key's plan, and with
Cunningham's running in and training chain and
winch. The guns were held, in both instances,
under perfect control, under greater control, indeed,
than the old 8-inch or 32 pounders, as usually
mounted and worked, would have been under similar
circumstances. Up to the present time nothing more
need be said about the competitive gun carriages
and their fittings on board the Minotaur than that
the iron box-girder carriage and slide has a very
great advantage over the only rival it can be said
to have at present on board—the iron carriage and
slide from Woolwich arsenal. This is due to its very
superior finish, and is the more remarkable as the
former was made in the factory of the dockyard and
the latter in Woolwich arsenal. The running-in
gear and the compressor fitted to this gun have thus
far answered admirably, but the training gear wants
simplification. The Cunningham training and
running in chain gear is simple, and there is no loss
of force by friction ; but it also is open to improve-
ment in some of its details. A part of the chain
gave way on Friday, but the damage was merely
temporary. From the confined space between the
ports on the Minotaur's main deck, where the 12i-
ton guns are mounted, there is not room for work-
ing efficiently proper chain training gear such as
Mr. Cunningham's, or, indeed, the triple descrip-
tions of training gears fitted to the Scott gun, but
with a greater space between the guns, which must
be given where they are permanently carried, the
training of the guns in rapid firing from one extreme
angle to the opposite will be carried out with much
greater care, regularity, and rapidity than it can be
at present on board the Minotaur. The 12i-ton
gun has become so associated with the turret prin-
ciple of shipbuilding, from the fact of the Royal
Sovereign carrying that description of gun, for want
of a heavier weapon, in her turrets, that some may
imagine if we succeed in carrying and fighting this
description of ordnance on the broadsides of our
ironclads at sea there will be then no need of turret-
ships. No idea could well be more fallacious.
Whatever the weight of the gun may be which
will be carried on a broadside gun on board
ships of war, all our experience goes to prove that a
turret-built ship constructed on the same lines
would carry guns in her turrets of treble the weight,
yet necessarily fewer in number. The Minotaur
returned to Spithead from the Channel on Friday
evening, and remains anchored there in readiness
for further experiments.
Two 6-inch armour-plates for the double-screw
frigate Penelope, building at Pembroke dockyard
from the designs of Mr. E. J. Reed, were tested at
Portsmouth on Saturday, under the supervision of
Capt. A. C. Key, C. 8., of her Majesty's gunnery
ship Excellent, and under the new conditions of trial
as recently laid down by the Admiralty. Under
the old conditions the armour-plate to be tested was
bolted on the side of some old wooden ship selected
for the purpose and fired at from the deck of a gun-
boat moored at a distance of 200 yards, with a
95cwt. 8-inch smoothbore gun, throwing a spherical
shot with a powder charge of 161 b. Under the new
conditions the plate and the gun are but 30ft. apart,
the same Weight of shot being thrown at the plate,
but now
Propelled by 1:31b. instead of 161 b. of
powder
as before. To carry this into effect a line-
of-battle ship, Previously used as a target-ship, has
lower
been cut down to her low d
beams and 30ft. ,
of the lower deck amidships stripped of the overhead
planking and converted into the " proof room." At
the fore end of this roofless
space of the ship's deck
is a massively built athwartships timber bulkhead,
supposed to give supporting strength to the plate
under trial equivalent to the strength given by the
side of our best constructed ironclad. Thirty feet
aft of this bulkhead is the battery bulkhead, f aced
with 44-inch plating, and pierced.withfour gu'npo rts
through which peer 95 cwt. guns. hive sh '
ots at
each end of each plate under trial is the tea, and the
shoot distance enables the gunners to plant these
shots so that all overlap each other. Utter disin-
tegration of the metal in the centre of the smallspace
where these five. blows are delivered as a matter of
course follows, but upon the exact nature of this
disintegration, and the presence or absence of ex-
tended fractures depends the passing and classifica-
tion of the armour-plate. On Saturday the guns
being loaded and pointed at the
plates magnetic
tubes were placed in the gun vents, and all hands
were ordered to the deck below. Here a small mag-
netic instrument was connected by wires with the
magnetic tubes in the guns. A few turns with
the handle of this instrument was succeeded by
a deafening explosion, followed in a few seconds
by a shower of iron, the remnants of the broken-
up shot falling on the deck overhead. This