Last week's poll: HMS Queen Elizabeth's maiden voyage

Britannia may no longer rule the waves, but the Royal Navy is still clearly a matter of some interest for readers of The Engineer, or maybe it was the scale of its largest engineering project for many years that helped our poll last week on the maiden voyage of HMS Queen Elizabeth for initial sea-trials to gather 773 responses. No single option on the poll attracted a majority of votes, but the two options indicating approval of the project between them attracted a total of 61 per cent.

The most popular option, agreeing with the government's official line that the carriers will enhance national security, attracted 38 per cent of votes, while the second, that it will improve ability to respond to emergency situations including humanitarian disasters, brought in 28 per cent. Another 14 per cent thought that the QE-class itself was ill-conceived, but carriers were still needed; while the international prestige conferred by the carriers was most important to 13 per cent and was discussed in the comments section. Only 10 per cent concluded that the UK does not need the carriers at all, and two per cent declined to pick an option.