An examination of the design of the perfected truck carriage and a glance at the records of its performances in action show that the advocates of rival gun mountings were not altogether incorrect in their contention that the manner in which the broadside armament of our ships was mounted was wrong in principle and unsatisfactory in actual detail. The many defects of the truck carriage were indeed only too obvious. In the first place, the breechings were so reeved that the force sustained by them in opposition to the recoil of the gun tended inevitably to cause the piece to jump. The reaction of the breeching acted along lines below the level of the gun-axis; the breeching therefore exerted a lifting force which, instead of pressing down all of the four trucks upon the deck and thus deadening the recoil, tended to raise the fore trucks in the air and reduce the friction of the carriage upon the deck. The larger the gun and the higher the gun-axis above the trucks, the greater was this tendency of the gun to lift and overturn. If the rear trucks, about which the gun and carriage tended to revolve, had been set at some distance in rear of the centre of gravity of the equipment, it would have been rendered thereby more stable. But space did not permit of this. And actually they were so placed that, when discharge was most violent, the weight of the equipment was scarcely sufficient to oppose effectively the tendency to jump. Again, the anchoring of the breeching to two points in the ship’s frames, one on either side of the gun, was wrong and liable to have serious consequences. For with this arrangement not only had the breeching to be continuously “middled” as the gun shifted its bearing, but even when accurately adjusted the “legs” of the breeching bore an unequal strain when the gun was fired off the beam. In other words, the horizontal angles subtended between the gun-axis, when off the beam, and the two lines of the breeching were unequal; one side of the breeching took more of the blow of gunfire than the other; and not infrequently the gun carriage was thrown round violently out of the line of recoil, with damage to the equipment and injury to the crew. The design of the carriage was in no way influenced, apparently, by a desire to obtain a minimum area of port opening in combination with a maximum traverse of the gun. For the broad span of the front part of the carriage soon caused the gun to be “wooded” when slewed off the beam. And a further disadvantage of this broad span was in the effect it had of automatically bringing the gun right abeam every time it was hauled out after loading: the front span of the carriage coming square with the timbers of the port-sill.