“Imagine a floating castle, 110 feet long and 75 feet wide, rising 10 feet out of water, and having above that again two round turrets, planted diagonally at its opposite corners. Imagine this castle and its turrets to be heavily plated with armour, and that each turret has two guns of about 80 tons each. Conceive these guns to be capable of firing, all four together, at an enemy ahead, astern, or on either beam, and in pairs towards every point of the compass. Attached to this rectangular armoured castle, but completely submerged, every part being 6 to 7 feet under water, there is a hull of ordinary form with a powerful ram bow, with twin screws and a submerged rudder and helm. This compound structure is the fighting part of the ship. Seaworthiness, speed, and shapeliness would be wanting in such a structure if it had no addition to it; there is, therefore, an unarmoured structure lying above the submerged ship and connected with it both before and abaft the armoured castle, and as this structure rises 20 feet out of water from stem to stern without depriving the guns of that command of the horizon already described, and as it moreover renders a flying deck unnecessary, it gets over the objections which have been raised against the low freeboard and other features in the _Devastation_, _Thunderer_, and _Dreadnought_. These structures furnish also most luxurious accommodation for officers and seamen. The step in advance has, therefore, been from 14 inches of armour to 24 inches; from 35-ton guns to 80 tons; from two guns ahead to four guns ahead; and from a height of 10 feet for working the anchors to 20 feet. And this is done without an increase in cost, and with a reduction of nearly 3 feet in draught of water. My belief is that in the _Inflexible_ we have reached the extreme limit in thickness of armour for sea-going vessels.” Seeing that the _Inflexible_ had armour two feet thick, the belief of her designer that the limit had been reached was justifiable. She was the only one of her class built for this country, though Italy, as will be seen, tried to copy and even to improve upon her. Her displacement was 11,800 tons, and her engines of 6,500 indicated h.p. were designed to give her a speed of twelve and a half knots, though on occasion she attained nearly fifteen knots. Her length was 320 feet, beam 75 feet, and draught 26 feet 4 inches. Her armament consisted of four 16-inch muzzle-loading rifled guns in her turrets and eight 4-inch breechloaders, besides twenty-one anti-torpedo boat guns and four torpedo tubes. The weight of a single discharge was 6,800 lb., which was not exceeded until 1906, though the energy in foot tons in that interval was increased several times over. She was, moreover, the first vessel in which the turrets were placed _en echelon_, i.e. diagonally, instead of one behind the other on the centre line.