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8

the weapon, but as due to the superior tactics, skill or fortune of one side.

The accuracy of a projectile in actual use depends upon several important factors.

1st. There is the maximum accuracy: or practical accuracy attained under the most favorable conditions in the hands of experts - (on the range ground)

2nd. The standard of accuracy thus fixed is subject as we all know to painfully large reductions under the inevitable difficulties of actual service at sea and in battle.

the gun labors under the difficulties of an unsteady platform, and probably rapidly shifting target, the principle difficulty being due to the former (unsteadiness) which causes large vertical errors in the trajectory.

In the particular of rapid shifting the target is the same as for the gun, for the ram and torpedo, but there is nothing in them corresponding to the vertical errors due to unsteady platform. The auto-mobile torpedo, when it has settled down to its flight, [mai] maintains a practically flat trajectory; the trajectory of the ram regarded as a missile corresponds always with the surface of the ocean.

The case is reversed when we come to lateral errors. The highest speed as yet claimed even in idea (within my knowledge) for