Pinned post for Q&A :)

The third turret should be referred to as being 'super-duperfiring' instead of super-superfiring.

Artist: Why didn't the engineers think of this?!?
Engineer: I did, but I sobered up.

Popular Mechanics method - The <insert name> of the future - just the existing thing with curves, concealed equipment, and no thought to how anything actually functions.

This is the leading design for the grand Elbonian navy's flagship.

"That torpedo is going to detonate".  This is a US magazine, and in the 1940s the US Navy didn't appear to realise that a torpedo might be intended to explode.

Judging by the vulnerable exhaust, it would come as no surprise to me if this ship was conceived by a distant relation to one of the Death Star design team.

There's an old quote from futurist G Harry Stine "Never believe anything on the cover of Popular Mechanics".

The only possible explanation for the baffling exhaust is that the designer decided that this mega Boss Battle ship needed a huge glowing weak spot

This concept makes the Tillman Battleships more feasible to build.

As we used to say in the US defense business, "The most frightening thing was a young project officer with the latest Popular Mechanics magazine ". Retired defense engineer 1985-2012.

About the trunked exhaust, I just re-read "Ignition" by John Clark, where he noted Admirals in particular out of the flag officer species seemed to be the most insistent that physical laws were mere suggestions and the chemists just needed to try again, but better, somehow.  Spectacular demonstrations of chemical bond energy usually dissuaded them.

Ironically, the two most truly futuristic features of this design were the covered capstan gear and the concealed boats--two vital features of modern "signature management" designs to keep radar cross section down, demonstrated years before anyone (even the radar geeks) knew what RCS even was.  Just about any warship designed after about 2000 has its boats concealed within an expanded superstructure, along with their cranes and davits, to hide them from radar, and some of the newest ones use covered capstan gear to hide the anchor chains and all handling equipment from radar even if they don't use whaleback/wave-piercing bow designs.  Both items are massive radar reflectors over a wide range of angles, so hiding them is vital to help the ship survive in a heavy radar environment.

Missing Popular Mechanics disclaimer, "No actual naval architects were involved in these designs."

The exhausts actually have a bigger problem than draft because they cool off. The heavy residual fuels used for ships in this era inevitably had high sulfur content, which makes its way into the exhaust when burned. Once the temperature of the exhaust gets low enough, you begin condensing water vapor, and that water vapor takes some of that sulfur with it. So that design would end up condensing sulfuric acid into its own exhaust pipes and corrode through them in a couple of years.

4:21 funnily enough, this same issue has plans to build a model of a Whaleback Great Lakes freighter as well.

This is just a better-done example of the battleships I sketched when I was 14, and was never intended too seriously. But I get 40 minutes of drach, so all good.

I love how the artist drew so many turrets... that can't rotate

Drach + Battleship = instant like

45 minutes of content from 2 pages of source material, that's the kind of content stretching The Hobbit movies wished they could have perfected.