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War of the Worlds - Oh dear...


Harlequin
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Watched it now.

 

The Beeb has provided a rich filling for the outline drafted by Wells, providing quite a lot of detailed specifics, probably more, in fact, than was necessary.  What have they introduced and why?

 

Interestingly, the BBC choose to be very specific about when it's set. 1905, we're told. My layout is set in 1905, so I was immediately alert at this point! 

 

It is well known that Wells lived on Maybury Road, Woking.  His narrator refers to Maybury Hill in the book. Maybury Hill runs at an angle from Maybury Road on the other side of the railway line, which passes over the road. 

 

The Maybury Road house was a semi-detached suburban villa named 'Lynton' and now numbered 141.  It faces, across the road, the railway line, and the train movements could clearly be heard from the house.  The line, of course, was the LSWR main line, "where all night long the goods trains shunted and bumped and clattered – without serious effect upon our healthy slumbers".

 

Wells moved to Maybury Road in 1895.  Famously he did so in order to shack up with Amy Robbins, which was a bold move considering that he was married to someone else, his cousin, at the time. The 'G' in H G Wells stood for George and the BBC makes our journalist "George" and pairs him with "Amy", reproducing Wells' own domestic situation.

 

Wells wrote many of his best known works there, including WotW (1898).

 

I believe this picture is of Wells and Amy, outside Lynton in 1895. 

 

IMG_5626.JPG.846ad62f5277d96e34273045711325a8.JPG

 

The oldest map on the National Library of Scotland site is a 1912 survey, though the previous survey had been 1894, published 1896, which would have been spot on.  The 1912 survey shows a continuous line of semis, I reckon that Wells's semi probably stood alone in 1895.

 

Why did the BBC choose 1905, not 1895?

 

If you are interpolating Wells's own story with WotW, which seems to me to be quite a neat idea on the part of the Beeb, why not set it at the time Wells was living in Woking and writing the story?  At most you might say that, if the Martians are, according to Wells, drawing their plans against us in the closing years of the Nineteenth Century, the logical time to set the story is the turn of the Century.This would fit in with the Wells narrative, giving events a "near future" setting, from the point the story was imagined.  The BBC narration moves this forward, saying the Martians are plotting against us in the early Twentieth Century, as if desperate for some reason to push the invasion itself forward to 1905.  Why?

 

I don't know.  That is not yet obvious to me.  Looking forward, however, it still places HMS Thunderchild in the pre-Dreadnought era, not that Wells made her a battleship (IIRC she was a "torpedo ram"). 

 

Well, for one thing, 1905 means that we are potentially dealing with specific real world events (the Russo-Japanese conflict gets some mention) and people.  

 

We have scenes at the Admiralty.  Here we are introduced to another BBC character, a rather one-dimensional pompous and self-agrandising "Minister".  Well, given the date, we are under a Conservative & Unionist administration, led by PM Balfour. The Admiralty suggests the First Lord, in this case Frederick Campbell, Earl Cawdor (the nearest, so far, to a connection with a Collett Goods!), but I doubt it's him we're after and I doubt he'd be called "Minister". 

 

Anyway, the government of 1905 was unpopular.  The Conservative & Unionist party was split over the issue of Free Trade versus Tariff Reform (protectionism), with potential BBC Imperialist bogieman "Pushful Jo" Chamberlain resigning over the issue in order to campaign for TR.  The Conservatives were identified with the less than satisfactory outcome of the Boer War, and news had broken of the British "Concentration Camps". The Rowntree study of 1902 had shown a significant portion of the population under the poverty line, fuelling the impetus for social reform.  In short, the Government was getting caned as "the Nasty Party" and the Liberals (Free Traders to a man) were returned to power in a landslide general election victory in 1906.

 

So, it's this unpopular Tory government that ended with Balfour's resignation in November 1905 that the BBC is apparently choosing to reference here!  So I suppose that now we know that one of the key factors in the 1906 election defeat was the Balfour administration's poor handling of the Martian invasion!!!!!  

 

The other establishment figure (unkindly) portrayed is the Astronomer Royal.  Here, again, the BBC offers us a rather unsympathetic one-dimensional character. As we know we are specifically in 1905, this must be Sir William Henry Mahoney Christie, who evidently survived the events of Horsell Common (and the failure to spot the coming invasion), remaining in office until 1910, and on earth until 1922. 

 

What Christie might have done to attract the BBC's ire is uncertain, but he seems to be collateral damage in what, so far, appears to be a portrait of an Edwardian England in which the only tolerable males are socialist adulterers and gay astronomers (yes, it's hinted strongly that 'confirmed batchelor' Olgilvy is gay)! 

 

Personally, I have no problem with making changes, or even with these particular changes, and found the programme mildly entertaining and certainly not aggravating.  I will watch it again, if only to see where the 'new' parts of the story go. The somewhat transparent BBC wokeness does raise a wry smile, as you can tell from this post, largely because it is so transparent.  I don't mind it, however, just find it wryly amusing. What was it someone here said about every re-telling ultimately telling us more about the pre-occupations of the period of the re-telling than of the time at which the story was first told or set?! ?    

 

Some nice touches include the Astronomer Royal playing Elgar's Cockaigne Overture on a wind-up gramophone. The piece was premiered in 1901 and its theme is London, presenting "various aspects of turn-of-the-century London and Londoners" in the words of Wiki. This, then, is a pointer to the narrator's subsequent journey to London and the scenes there. 

 

Anyway, all good fun.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Edwardian
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1 minute ago, Mark Dickerson said:

I thought the reference to the Russo -Japanese War (and Dogger Bank Incident?) was a neat nod to current geopolitical affairs and the inspiration of e.g. The Battle of Dorking on the novel. I'm not expecting too much of the next episode but we shall see...

 

I agree; this might at least provide a pretext for moving the Martians' preparations to the 1900s and setting the actionin 1905,  but I'm not convinced for two reasons. 

 

First, I do not think that we need to subject the Government to misdirection via the Dogger Bank incident to explain why it didn't react adequately to the extra-terrestrial threat. Wells doesn't see the need.  Rather, his point is that humanity is completely outclassed by the invader and that this is the fate of a complacent civilisation. Having new character politicos chasing Phantom Russian invaders does not aid Wells's point, and risks detracting from it.

 

The second point is that, if you're making the Dogger Bank incident integral to the plot, you'd set the story in October 1904, as that was when these events took place. 

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Have you seen any signs of Auntie Beeb folding Climate Change into the story yet?

 

I wonder if, instead of succumbing to bacteria, the Martians might consume all the planet's resources in a reckless and wasteful fashion!?

 

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16 minutes ago, Harlequin said:

Have you seen any signs of Auntie Beeb folding Climate Change into the story yet?

 

I wonder if, instead of succumbing to bacteria, the Martians might consume all the planet's resources in a reckless and wasteful fashion!?

 

 

I suspect they did so to Mars and are coming here to do the same!

 

Bless the Beeb, though, sometimes it just can't seem to help itself.  So, by choosing a specific, but not obviously logical, time at which to set the story, it's managed to make a Conservative government an unnecessary target in a period Sci-Fi drama that it is screening during a general election campaign! 

 

I'm just waiting for Greta Thunberg to turn up in episode 3 and save the day!

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In the original book HMS Thunderchild was influenced by the real world HMS Polythemus built in 1881 though thoroughly obsolete by 1895. She was a torpedo ram which means a ship armed with torpoedos, armoured to pretoct it from fast training light guns but carrying very little gun power herself. A sort of submarine that cannot submerge! She also had a ram as a last resort (though many ships of the time did anyway). 

 

The problem was that guns which could train and shoot fast soon got bigger and made her armour useless. She seemed to have gained a reputation as a technical marvel (true when first built), that Churchill asked for an updated verison in 1940 (nearly 60 years later!). I'm not sure how a torpedo ram is supposed to take out a tripod. Torpedos have fat chance of hitting the thin legs and her gun power is nothing compared to other ships of the time.

 

Now if the series is set in 1905, you are really just months away from HMS Dreadnought and making Thunderchild as a Dreadnought (state of the art for the time), the only ship to archieve something would have fitted well with the story. Mind you if Edwardian/Victorian weapons can do some damage, I would not give the Aliens much hope of invading 50 years later! They always struck me as being farmers chasing unwanted wolves from land rather than a military force per-se.

 

 

Edited by JSpencer
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2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

The second point is that, if you're making the Dogger Bank incident integral to the plot, you'd set the story in October 1904, as that was when these events took place. 

 

I noted the inclusion of the Dogger Bank Incident, but perhaps we were supposed to take that as NOT the Russian Fleet getting jittery over some trawlers, but a mis-targeted Martian capsule splashing down in the North Sea, with the Russians and the trawlers in the wrong place at the wrong time!  After all, a white-hot Martian capsule would make quite a big bang hitting the water, encouraging the Russkies to lob a few shells in the general direction.....

 

Talking about things Naval, it was a pity that the Thunderchild was the only RN unit close enough to move to guard the refugee ships, even a pre-Dreadnought with its 10"-13" main armament could stand off far enough to shell the Martian machines into submission without suffering extreme damage from the Heat Rays (Inverse-square law and all that...)

 

11 hours ago, James Harrison said:

Shortly after the Thunderchild, there's a description of gunfire and dark shapes on the horizon.  I read that as the end of the Channel Fleet. 

 

Or, the battleships stood off and took them to bits.

 

In the book, one of the first field gun batteries wrecked a Tripod at close range, so they weren't completely invulnerable.  Of course, after that early success, the Martians used the Heat Rays and Black Smoke to defeat subsequent batteries.

 

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On 20/11/2019 at 14:50, NIK said:

Hi,

 

The chances of an accurate train appearing on TV or film is a million to one they say:D.

 

Regards

 

Nick

But remember that million to one chances turn up nine times out of ten :)

 

Andi

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I have to say, the sequences of the Giant Dirty Golf Ball approaching Earth made me think of the (much better) title sequence of Mars Attacks!, a sadly wayward film that left me bored well before the end, but with a great opening sequence with superb scoring by Danny Elfman.

 

 

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9 hours ago, Hroth said:

In the book, one of the first field gun batteries wrecked a Tripod at close range, so they weren't completely invulnerable.

Indeed. By it's nature, a tripod is a very stable structure , whilst all 3 legs are intact. Hence it's use for cameras, theodolites, etc.

Take one leg out, however, and they fall over. :mosking:

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11 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

Talking about things Naval, it was a pity that the Thunderchild was the only RN unit close enough to move to guard the refugee ships, even a pre-Dreadnought with its 10"-13" main armament could stand off far enough to shell the Martian machines into submission without suffering extreme damage from the Heat Rays (Inverse-square law and all that...)

 

 

 

Gunnery systems back in 1905 were not capable of hitting much beyond 4000 yards. Just look at the Russian incident, 20 minutes of gun fire for just 5 dead, 1 trawler sunk and some minor damage. One ship let off 500 shells and hit nothng. The RN had better training, but fire control tables and effective data feeds had still yet to be developed and installed. 

10 years would have been a different story.

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12 hours ago, JSpencer said:

Now if the series is set in 1905, you are really just months away from HMS Dreadnought and making Thunderchild as a Dreadnought (state of the art for the time), the only ship to archieve something would have fitted well with the story. Mind you if Edwardian/Victorian weapons can do some damage, I would not give the Aliens much hope of invading 50 years later! They always struck me as being farmers chasing unwanted wolves from land rather than a military force per-se.

I read it that the Flying Machine drove off/knocked out the Channel Fleet; I find it interesting that John Christopher's Tripods in When The Tripods Came they resorted to hypnosis (via TV) to conquer.

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Regarding artillery, Wells seems to have been fairly well up on technical matters.

 

He would presumably have known, I'm sure, for instance that British field batteries of his time would have been equipped with high-explosive (HE) shells.  These were probably air-burst shells, fused to explode before ground impact in order to maximise their effectiveness.  Pre-tank artillery had, after all, been designed to kill people and horses.  There were no land-based armoured fighting vehicles, and, therefore, no armour-piercing rounds to combat them.  

 

With the Tripod, Wells introduces the British Army's first armoured battlefield opponent  It would have been difficult to bring one of these down with conventional HE airburst army ordnance.  Wells's description of the one successful kill was of a Tripod toppled by a shell smashing its leg.  This sounds to me like a lucky strike by a shell hitting the leg rather than completing its trajectory and exploding. This point was made by a military man on a BBC radio documentary and makes perfect sense to me. The battery brings down a single Tripod before it is destroyed, and this appears to have been a unique event.

 

Nevertheless, as a result, the Martians became sufficiently cautious of the artillery threat to change their tactics, as they thenceforth destroyed conventional forces from a distance using their black smoke.

 

EDIT: Reference Mark's post above, the construction and deployment of the flying machine is, thus, a further example of the Martian's ability to change tactics and equipment in order to neutralise an unexpected threat. Clever fellow, Johnny Martian.

 

 

Edited by Edwardian
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35 minutes ago, JSpencer said:

 

Gunnery systems back in 1905 were not capable of hitting much beyond 4000 yards. Just look at the Russian incident, 20 minutes of gun fire for just 5 dead, 1 trawler sunk and some minor damage. One ship let off 500 shells and hit nothng. The RN had better training, but fire control tables and effective data feeds had still yet to be developed and installed. 

10 years would have been a different story.

 

Indeed.  Naval gunnery in 1905 was very much of the 'luck and gunner's judgement' school.  There was no such thing as a fire control system until around 1911/ 1912 (and even that was then fairly rudimentary).  R A Burt's British Battleships of WWI covers the topic quite well. 

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3 hours ago, F-UnitMad said:

By it's nature, a tripod is a very stable structure , whilst all 3 legs are intact. Hence it's use for cameras, theodolites, etc.

Take one leg out, however, and they fall over.

 

1 hour ago, JSpencer said:

 

Gunnery systems back in 1905 were not capable of hitting much beyond 4000 yards. Just look at the Russian incident, 20 minutes of gun fire for just 5 dead, 1 trawler sunk and some minor damage. One ship let off 500 shells and hit nothng. The RN had better training, but fire control tables and effective data feeds had still yet to be developed and installed. 

10 years would have been a different story.

 

1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

Regarding artillery, Wells seems to have been fairly well up on technical matters.

 

He would presumably have known, I'm sure, for instance that British field batteries of his time would have been equipped with high-explosive (HE) shells.  These were probably air-burst shells, fused to explode before ground impact in order to maximise their effectiveness.  Pre-tank artillery had, after all, been designed to kill people and horses.  There were no land-based armoured fighting vehicles, and, therefore, no armour-piercing rounds to combat them.  

 

With the Tripod, Wells introduces the British Army's first armoured battlefield opponent  It would have been difficult to bring one of these down with conventional HE airburst army ordnance.  Wells's description of the one successful kill was of a Tripod toppled by a shell smashing its leg.  This sounds to me like a lucky strike by a shell hitting the leg rather than completing its trajectory and exploding. This point was made by a military man on a BBC radio documentary and makes perfect sense to me. The battery brings down a single Tripod before it is destroyed, and this appears to have been a unique event.

 

Nevertheless, as a result, the Martians became sufficiently cautious of the artillery threat to change their tactics, as they thenceforth destroyed conventional forces from a distance using their black smoke.

 

EDIT: Reference Mark's post above, the construction and deployment of the flying machine is, thus, a further example of the Martian's ability to change tactics and equipment in order to neutralise an unexpected threat. Clever fellow, Johnny Martian.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, James Harrison said:

 

Indeed.  Naval gunnery in 1905 was very much of the 'luck and gunner's judgement' school.  There was no such thing as a fire control system until around 1911/ 1912 (and even that was then fairly rudimentary).  R A Burt's British Battleships of WWI covers the topic quite well. 

 

Thanks for the info on Edwardian Naval Gunnery!

 

However...

 

Even if the Fleet didn't get lucky with a single hit from a large calibre shell on a Martian Tripod/Fighting Machine  (which description should we use?) , near misses in the relatively shallow waters of the areas in which they would be wading would produce powerful shockwaves which would disrupt the structure of the legs.  After all, this is the principle by which depthcharges damage submarines.  And as F-UnitedMad notes, once a tripod leg goes, down comes the lot.

 

The other thing is that the seabed isn't always suitable for tripoddy things to be wandering about.  Unless the Martians could see through the water, they would find it difficult to avoid tangles of fishing nets, old wrecks, rocky outcrops, soft muddy depressions. And if they were being distracted by the shelling, they might just mis-step...

 

The other thing I wondered about was the effective range of the Heat Ray. On land, the Martians were using it at fairly short ranges and in the case of the Thunderchild, the distruction occured as the ship drove towards the Martian, which brings into effect the Inverse-square law.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

 

Quote

The inverse-square law, in physics, is any physical law stating that a specified physical quantity or intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source of that physical quantity.

 

Let us suppose that the most destructive effect (Thunderchild) happened at approximately 1 mile range.  The strength of the Ray on a ship at 2 miles range would be 25% of the intensity, and at 3 miles 11%.  A warship keeping a 5 mile distance should be able to continue to shell a Martian until luck/a near enough miss caused enough damage to bring it down, even if the heatray was powerful enough to injure unprotected sailors on deck.  One would hope that some of the Captains might keep off enough, especially after seeing a colleague or two turned to molten slag from taking the Nelsonian line and attacking the enemy more closely!

 

According to JSpencer, effective range was limited to about 4000 Yards, which is approximately 2.25 miles so battleships of the Channel Fleet should be able to be effective at a fairly safe range.

 

Of course the depth of the sea might induce the Martians to return to land and if battleships continued to shell them there from a "safe" distance, a large amount of collateral damage might be caused by approximate targetting.

 

Anyhow, Episode 2 will be upon us this evening.  I for one will be watching to see how thinly the original story is spread!

 

 

 

 

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16 hours ago, JSpencer said:

Mind you if Edwardian/Victorian weapons can do some damage, I would not give the Aliens much hope of invading 50 years later! They always struck me as being farmers chasing unwanted wolves from land rather than a military force per-se.

The irony is that people like the BBC could have a field day of metaphors with a story of aliens invading the Earth, and then being used as target practice by the British and American militaries.

 

But instead we get aliens with fiendish super weapons, who rarely encounter any opposition other than infantry with small arms.

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I have done what I should have done to begin with; not rely upon memory, but go back to the text.

 

A couple of points emerge.

 

First (i) plans in the last years of the 19th Century and (ii( attack in the first years of the Twentieth:

 

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely ... And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

 

Second, we are given one date to work from:

 

During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.

 

This was reported in the English scientific press in early August, we are told.

 

Now, I know b8gger all about astronomy, but I gather from a NASA website that an opposition occurs when: 

 

Mars and the sun are on directly opposite sides of Earth. From our perspective on our spinning world, Mars rises in the east just as the sun sets in the west. Then, after staying up in the sky the entire night, Mars sets in the west just as the sun rises in the east. Since Mars and the sun appear on opposite sides of the sky, we say that Mars is in "opposition." 

 

How often do they occur?

 

NASA says

 

Mars oppositions happen about every 26 months

 

Wells counts 2 oppositions on - when the "peculiar markings" were to be seen, which probably takes us to Autumn 1898, and then says

 

As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. 

 

It seems reasonable to assume that this is the third opposition since 1894.  Again, using NASA's rule of thumb, that takes us to something like October 1900. 

 

Obviously, it took some time for the cylinders, but this, albeit rather amateurish attempt at a chronology, seems to confirm my impression that Wells, writing in 1898, saw the invasion coming around the turn of the century, at the beginning of the Twentieth.  This, by the way, would have involved much the same military technology in opposition to the Martians, but would pit a Victorian army in scarlet and blue against the invaders. 

 

So, the book seems to offer me no clue as to why the BBC chose to change the opening words to ... 

 

No one would have believed in the first years of the Twentieth Century we were being watched .... 

 

... or why 1905 in particular was chosen for the invasion date. Jules Verne died and it was a good year for Alfred Einstein, but I'm still struggling to discern meaning and intent here. 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

or why 1905 in particular was chosen for the invasion date. Jules Verne died and it was a good year for Alfred Einstein, but I'm still struggling to discern meaning and intent here. 

Because nobody in tv or film can ever bring themselves to just make what the author wrote without messing it about for no reason or benefit?

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4 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

Even if the Fleet didn't get lucky with a single hit from a large calibre shell on a Martian Tripod/Fighting Machine  (which description should we use?) , near misses in the relatively shallow waters of the areas in which they would be wading would produce powerful shockwaves which would disrupt the structure of the legs.  After all, this is the principle by which depthcharges damage submarines.  And as F-UnitedMad notes, once a tripod leg goes, down comes the lot.

 

 

 

 

The biggest of the time, carried by 40 or so pre-dreadnoughts was the 12in. The HE shell had 180lbs of explosive, armour piercing shells 83ld. The near miss would need to be within 6 feet. Near misses on ships at Jutland had no effect except splinters.

Shells don't explode on contact with water, the shock triggers a time fuse, it will probably reach a depth of about 5 metres then boom.

 

The French at this time had torpedo shells whereby their large AP caps (a shell has 3 parts, a thin wind shield, an AP cap that breaks the hardend surface of armour, and finally the main shell body with explosive) caused the shell the swing back upwards to a certain depth and torpedo the ship below the waterline. The Japanease discovered the same in the early 20s. But this was at a cost in Armour Piercing performance. 

Despite all the shells shot in both world wars, under water hits were fairly rare, the Japanease type having only one known case against a US cruiser which is far bigger than a tripod leg.

 

IMHO, the RN was huge in 1905, I'd close in with a swarn of smaller ships armered with torpedos and smaller guns and shot the legs from under them. Or alternatively mine an area and draw the tripods into them.

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I'm also reminded that the 1905 period was when Fisher was swinging the axe on the Victorian navy; scores of elderly and obsolete gunboats, corvettes and cruisers being recalled to home waters for scrapping and their crews redistributed as a prelude to building his new fleet (of which dreadnoughts were only a part).  Thunderchild could (and knowing the BBC's values on getting things right* probably will be) portrayed as something closer to HMS Warrior or HMS Gannet than top of the range 1905 cutting edge, much as I personally would love to see her presented as a Highflyer or Challenger-class protected cruiser.  

 

Incidentally, in the book, the tripods are described as having waded out deep enough that only their hoods show above water.  A slightly bigger target than a slender leg to aim a torpedo or a shell at. 

 

*sarcasm.

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