THE AERIAL BATTLESHIP.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 355, 26 April 1911, Page 3

THE AERIAL BATTLESHIP.

"The aerial battleship" forms the subject of an interesting article in "M'Clurc's Magazine" by Carl Dionstbach and T. R. MacMeehen. The authors explain the principles on which Count Zeppelin airships are constructed, and, in regard to German aerial warships now being built, they point, out that the structures will probably be 510 feet long and 51 feet wide, and could carry a dozen men a mile high in the air over a radius of miles. That is to say, they could reach every principal capital of Europe from the borders of German territory and return. Each could in addition devote at least five tons of cargo weight to arms and ammunition, including ten machine rifles, equipped with ammunition enough for a full hour's work, and two machine guns of the type built for Zeppelin 1., with 200 shells for each weapon. Two and a half tons of dynamite torpedoes could be substituted for half of the machine guns and their ammunition if it were desired to attack fortifications or cities. Forty craft of this kind could be built and armed at a cost of one Dreadnought battleship. At the moment such a fleet is launched, the authors declare, the standing armies of Europe become an anchronism. Navies would also be relegated at once to a new and inferior position. Considered in a larger way, the aerial warship is simply an advance in the development of war that started with the modern battleship. Up to the present time war has been a conflict of armed populations : it is now to be a duel between fighting machines, operated by trained experts.