"blunt tails rather than blunt noses that cause eddies" (and therefore involve a loss of power), is applicable only to bodies having already some approximation to streamline form. It is
Fig. 17.
obviously useless to provide a nice sharp tail if previous attention has not been given to the shoulder and buttock lines. Mr. Froude probably meant that in a well-designed streamline form the tail should be finer in form than the head, a matter that up to his time had presumably been neglected.
The primary importance of easy shoulder lines has been long recognised as a fundamental feature in the design of projectiles. A full-sized section of a Metford .303 bullet, illustrating this point, is given in Fig. 18, and a streamline form of which it may be regarded as a "mutilation" is indicated by the dotted line.
Fig. 18.
§ 28. Streamline Flow General.—Let us suppose an approximate streamline form to be built of bricks, and, in the first place, we will assume that the bricks are so small as to merely give rise to a superficial roughness. Then this roughness will add to the skin friction and will give rise to some local turbulence, but the general character of the flow system remains as before. We may go further and suppose the bricks so large as to form steps capable of giving
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