Perhaps the principal improvements due to Sir Charles Douglas were those which had as their object the firing of ships’ guns on other bearings than right abeam. He realized the importance of possessing a large arc of training for his guns; and with this object he cleared away all possible obstructions on the gun decks of the _Duke_, removing and modifying knees, standards and pillars to allow his guns to be pointed a full four points before and abaft the beam: a degree of obliquity hitherto unknown in the navy for broadside armament. To traverse the carriages quickly to the required line of bearing he had eyebolts fitted in line between the guns for attachment to the tackles; and to shorten and control the recoil and thus allow of firing on an extreme bearing in a confined space, and also to improve the rate of fire, he shod the carriage-trucks with wedges designed to act as drags. “We now dare to fire our guns without running them out,” he wrote to Lord Barham, “and so as to admit of the ports being shut, with certain impunity, even to the obliquity of three points before or abaft the beam. A wedge properly adapted is placed behind each truck, to make up for the reduction of space to recoil in, in firing to windward or in rolling weather. The gun first ascends the wedges by rotation, and when stopped, performs the remainder of her recoil as a sledge, so feebly as scarce to bring her breeching tight. The bottoms of the wedges, to augment their friction against the deck, are pinked, tarred, and rubbed with very rough sand or with coarse coal dust. This method has also, I hear, been adopted in the _Union_.”