combat, making her a smaller target. Again, the ship was to be semisubmersible, able to submerge herself down to the gunwales, also to make her a smaller target. Her armament was to consist of two 10-inch (254-millimeter) rifled guns mounted on pivots fore and aft and five 15-inch (381-mm) smoothbore guns mounted on the deck above an armored casemate. The guns were to fire 425-pound (193-kilogram) shells. The gun crews, protected by the casemates, would load the guns from below through holes in the deck protected by armored hoods; the gun's muzzle would be pointed into the hole, and a steam-powered cylinder would use a ramrod to load the gun for the next shot, allowing a high rate of fire. Water was to be injected into each gun automatically after it fired, to cool the gun and prevent it from being damaged by extended, rapid firing. The ship was to have eight steam engines generating to drive two propellers and give the ship a maximum speed of , breathtakingly fast for the time. She would have consumed a lot of coal, and her 1,000-ton coal capacity suggests that she would have had a very short operating range. She was to be the first ship equipped with fan-driven ventilation, to increase crew comfort by extracting fumes and hot air from below decks. The Stevens brothers made significant progress on the newly designed ship between January 1854 and September 1855, but then work slowed again. When Robert Stevens died in April 1856, worked stopped entirely, and did not resume until 1859. The Navy by then was losing interest in the ship. By 1861, it had spent $500,000 (U.S.) on the project, and the Stevens family had spent another $228,435 (U.S.). That year, Edwin Stevens and his brother John C. Stevens offered to pay for completion of the ship themselves if the Navy would agree to pay for the ship if it was completed and proved successful, but a Navy board rejected the offer, finding deficiencies in the project. It was not clear when the ship would be completed, and in 1862 Edwin Stevens estimated that it would take another $730,484 (U.S.) just to complete the ship enough for to be launched. The Civil War and USS Naugatuck When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Edwin Stevens claimed that a completed Stevens Battery would have a decisive impact against Confederate forces.