Regarding midship mounted fire pumps, a rear suction inlet can generally out-perform a traditional front inlet in most instances. Of course, this assumes one is comparing same diameter inlet piping and same rated pump capacities. In most cases, the increased performance is due to the reduced number of bends and elbows needed for the rear inlet design compared to the traditional front inlet design. On many midship mount pump designs, only two elbows are needed on the rear inlet line in order to get it to the pump's intake manifold; this is much different from the front inlet piping that has to traverse over the front axle and thus has many bends and turns.