The sacrifice of the HMS Thunder Child

This was written by me as a freshman undergrad at Case Western Reserve University in 2006 for PHYS 123, Physics I Honors. It is reprinted in full, original form, with no attempt made to make the conclusion more realistic. Some of my assumptions were silly and made the problem trivial, but these were never graded for strict accuracy.

“About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a water-logged ship. […]It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping."

~H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

The prelude:

The year is approximately 1900.  The Dreadnought is not yet conceived, and in the late 1890s, ironclad rammers still represent the pinnacle of naval technology.  Fighting desperately for survival against the Martian war machines, the Royal Navy selects the finest ramming ship they had in their arsenal, and the one with the greatest nimbleness and speed. 

She was the Thunder Child, blessed of agility and formidable guns and armor, yet of size small enough to make a tactical naval battle with the Martians on its own terms.  Indeed, her skirmish would be the single bare victory had by the humans of the Victorian era Earth that attempted to fight for their lives against extraterrestrial invaders.  In the Thunder Child they found a symbol- she was built with amazing care and represented the pinnacle of the technology of the world in 1900.

 

Now was the time.  There would be no other.  Thousands of refugees were fleeing after London fell, and the entire British merchant marine could be destroyed by the horrendous Martian war machines.  Three of these devices were dispatched to the seas around England to intercept any and all human vessels, killing them with black smoke.  The lives of thousands were at stake.

The engagement:

Thunder Child was at full steam when she sighted the Martian war machines.  Not used to water, the Martians were not quite sure what to make of the ramming warship.  They had seen no mechanical device at the humans’ disposal that was as large as a warship.  They made the assumption that the device was organic, and deployed the sinister black smoke against it.  Thunder Child’s crew retreated into the ship and they did not inhale any of the poison.  The smoke clouds gave cover to the Thunder Child, and she steamed on a direct collision course with the first war machine, at full 20 knots:

The Martians finally wised up and attempted to strike it with their Heat Ray.  One hit was successful, and the Thunder Child was extremely damaged; still she steamed on.  The pointed bow, with an edge merely an inch thick and twelve feet high, struck hard and pierced the extraterrestrial metal.  The impact was devastating and Thunder Child cleaved the war machine in half very jarringly, losing half of its momentum within a second. (Assumptions made regarding the dimensions and characteristics of the ramming action are all guesses by me.)

(As we find, the armor of the Martian war machines had a tensile strength of greater than 280MPa- superior to modern rolled homogenous steel.  Steel of this quality was nonexistent in 1900, and may have seemed alien.)

The Thunder Child tried then to open up with her six inch guns, but the range was too short for them to be effective.  Instead she, with foundering keel but usable rudder and engines, accelerates to full speed again, to attack the second war machine.  Persistent and desperate salvos destroy the Thunder Child before she can ram the second ship, but the ships boiler and ammunition explode into a massive hailstorm of steel that crushes the second war machine with thousands of tons of molten iron and wounds the third.

The outcome:

A marginal victory for humanity… the destruction of two Martian war machines.  This raid saved the lives of thousands, but there was to be no respite in the struggle to survive against the extraterrestrial invaders.