HMS Thunder Child

HMS Thunder Child is a fictional ironclad torpedo ram of the Royal Navy, destroyed by Martian fighting-machines in H. G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds whilst protecting a refugee rescue fleet of civilian vessels.

[4] According to Gomel, the scene involving Thunder Child, with its "scriptural descriptions" of events, also demonstrates how The War of the Worlds as a whole is "permeated" by a metaphorical apocalypse that "echoes of the Bible".

[6] Along similar lines, Nathaniel Otjen uses Thunder Child as an example of how Wells' writing "imagines the collapse of fossil fuel modernity and explores alternate forms of energy".

[7] Larrie D. Ferreiro describes how Thunder Child's use of a ram, while a "standard fixture" in ships between 1870 and World War I and extensively discussed by naval officers of the era, is in reality an "illusory" "armchair tactic".

Ferreiro bases his stance on an observation that such ramming attacks were "almost never" used effectively in real life, with the notable exception of the sinking of the Chilean corvette Esmeralda during the Battle of Iquique.

In Orson Welles's famous 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber replaces Thunder Child; it collides with a fighting-machine after being critically damaged by its Heat-Ray.

The first adaptation to feature HMS Thunder Child was Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of ''The War of the Worlds'', which was released in 1978 and retains the novel's Victorian setting, characters, and situations.

The album's cover art depicts a Canopus-class battleship fighting a Martian tripod.The War of the Worlds was written as an account of fictional events early in the 20th century (possibly the summer of 1901) and the lead ship of the class, HMS Canopus, entered service in 1899 and thus fits the timeline.

In Steven Spielberg's 2005 film adaptation, War of the Worlds, contemporary American military forces use tanks and attack helicopters against the alien Tripods, again without success.

The low-budget direct-to-DVD Pendragon feature adaptation of the novel, released in 2005, uses poor CGI to portray HMS Thunder Child as a Royal Navy Havock-class destroyer.