An invention which has. revolutionized ant raft gunnery is the highly complicated and technical fire-control instrument.
One is supplied to each p: r of guns It requires a crew of.six men, and calculates the speed and course of the aeroplane and time of flight of the shell. It reduces as far as possible the error in aiming the gun so that shell and aeroplane meet in the r. The cost of a predictor is several thousand pounds.
Thomas was caught as the ship went down. I kicked out with my legs for all I was worth, he said.-but down, down I went. I came up again in a rush and down I went once more. I swallowed the whole Mediterranean. But I came up again all right and found the life-buoy The thing that killed more of us than anything else was the loose stuff stowed on board the boat. It went down first with the boat and then shot up to the surface with terrific force. striking those in the water."
I saw one Spanish seaman in bed in the hospital with a crushed hip. He had been caught by the steamer's funnel as it came up.
The predictor does not estimate the height of the target. This is done by two men working a "height finder," which solves the problem by optical means. The searchlights have their gadget, too. This is the sound locator. n instrument which picks up an aeroplane long before it can be seen.
With the locator giving an approximate position it is much easier for a concentration of searchlight beams to have effect.
Bombers escaping the British lers will be engaged by our antiaircraft guns, assisted by searchlights, and. as a final barrier, there will be the balloon barrage. estimated at about 80,000.
At first the men rather liked the idea of taking a furnished room and keeping their families nicely installed out in the provinces. They were granted a special allowance to pay for this double house-keeping. But now a great part of the "double housekeeping" allowances are being stopped, and the out-of-towners have joined the wild chase for an abode.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.