SS Great Eastern
She also had six masts (said to be named after the days of a week – Monday being the fore mast and Saturday the spanker mast), providing space for of sails (7 gaff and max. 9 (usually 4) square sails), rigged similar to a topsail schooner with a main gaff sail (fore-and-aft sail) on each mast, one "jib" on the fore mast and three square sails on masts no. 2 and no. 3 (Tuesday & Wednesday); for a time mast no. 4 was also fitted with three yards. In later years, some of the yards were removed. According to some sources she would have carried . This amount of canvas is obviously too much for seven fore-and-aft sails and max. 9 square sails. This (larger) figure of sail area lies only a few square metres below that the famous Flying P-Liner "Preußen" carried – with her five full-rigged masts of 30 square sails and a lot of stay sails. Setting sails turned out to be unusable at the same time as the paddles and screw were under steam, because the hot exhaust from the five (later four) funnels would set them on fire. Her maximum speed was 24 km/h (13 knots).
Siegfried-class coastal defense ship
The ships were powered by two sets of 3-cylinder triple expansion engines, each in its own engine room. These engines drove a pair of three-bladed screws that were in diameter. The ships had eight marine type boilers, with the exception of "Hagen", which was equipped with eight Thornycroft boilers. The ships had similar maximum speeds, with "Beowulf" the fastest at and "Heimdall" the slowest at . Each ship had three electric generators that provided between 29–26 kilowatts at 67 volts. The ships stored up to of coal and of fuel oil, which enabled a range of at a cruising speed of . At , the ships could only steam . With the refit, fuel bunkerage was more than doubled, to of coal and of oil. This dramatically increased the sailing range, to at 10 knots and at 14 knots.