New Ming Empire mixed in America

Song He's order was carried out very thoroughly, and the four new warships formed a wild goose wing formation and began to speed up.

The captains of the British Expeditionary Fleet that were just ahead of them looked at the new warships charging straight towards them without changing their direction in the telescope, and they were a little confused.

"Are these Orientals crazy?" The captain originally thought that the Orientals would change direction, and then the two sides would compete for command capabilities at sea.

In the end, his own fleet successfully blocked the opponent, and then the naval battle began.

But now the opponent's operation made the previous steps omitted, and the game entered into a tense artillery battle at the beginning.

The disbelieving captain once again raised his telescope and looked at the direction of the smoke column on the distant sea.

"The direction has not changed yet! Could it be that there are more important people in those Eastern warships waiting for them to rescue?"

The two fleets have not yet met, and they can only be seen roughly through the telescope.

Therefore, both sides rely on the smoke pillars rising from the battleships to determine the position of the enemy battleships.

But now Song He's operations have made the captains leading the British expedition fleet suddenly feel a little less confident.

They had never fought such a smooth battle before, and their opponent acted like a rookie, making all their previous tactical preparations useless.

"I think it's normal. The Eastern navy has only been established for a long time. It is already very difficult to keep the fleet from getting scattered."

An adjutant on the battleship was a little unimpressed. He believed that the current appearance of the Xinming Empire's fleet should be the normal level of Easterners.

They were already some distance away from their own fleet, so it was not clear that a melee had started later.

They focused all their attention on the fleet in front of them.

When Song He continued to increase speed with his new warship and finally appeared within the opponent's visibility range, the captains who came to intercept were dumbfounded.

"Oh Maikar, what kind of battleship is that?"

A captain saw the appearance of the new battleship clearly in the telescope and couldn't help but exclaimed.

In fact, not only him, but everyone who saw the new battleship had this expression.

Nothing else, it's just because the new battleship is too big.

In this era when battleships are generally sixty or seventy meters long, a battleship with a length of more than a hundred meters and a displacement of more than 10,000 tons is simply a giant.

Under the setting sun, these captains could clearly see that the speed of Song He's fleet was far beyond their imagination.

Not only that, the pear-shaped collision angle in front of the opponent's warship also made these captains frightened.

Their iron-clad wood warships simply cannot stop this collision.

Of course, if it were another wooden warship, it might not dare to launch such a collision attack.

Now that these captains have seen Song He's desperate 'lose-lose' style of play, these captains also panicked for a while.

It is not that we have never encountered battleship collisions in battles before, but they were all launched with the idea of ​​perishing together.

Before the battle even started, Song He brought his fleet to do such a trick that they couldn't get used to it for a while.

But for these experienced captains, they quickly calmed down.

"Prepare for a bombardment. Let the gun crew members on the left come over to help. Try to fire a few more rounds of shells and directly sink the Oriental warship into the sea!"

On the flagship of the squadron responsible for the interception, the captain calmly issued the order.

Moreover, the battleship's boiler has also begun to fill with coal. If the artillery interception does not have the expected effect, then they will launch the battleship to start a pursuit battle.

But something these people never expected happened. Just as they were preparing to launch a salvo, Song He's fleet took the lead in launching an artillery bombardment.

"Directly in front of the target, maximum elevation angle, load... launch!"

In the turret of the new warship, the gunner began to direct the gun crew members to operate the artillery as he would during normal training.

Naval guns are not field guns, and it takes a lot of time just to load the separate shells.

Fortunately, there is an auxiliary loading device installed in the battleship. Otherwise, if you just rely on the pulley block to load, it would be really annoying to load quickly. Gu

Although it is a breech-loading cannon, the steps are also very troublesome. Just loading the ammunition needs to be divided into several steps.

For example, the propellant and warhead are sent from the ammunition compartment to the turret by a transmission device. Then the gun crew soldiers will first send the warhead into the gun bore using a ejector rod, and then the propellant will be sent into the gun bore in the same steps.

After that, the soldier in charge of the gun breech resets the gun breech, and then it can be fired.

Now the Xinming Empire uses a blocked threaded breech block. If it is a purely threaded breech block, the speed will be even slower.

To block the threaded breech block, you can push the breech block directly to its original position, and then turn the breech block hard to make the threads overlap.

The purely threaded breech block is much more troublesome. It takes a long time just to unscrew the breech block from the gun like a screw, and then you have to screw it back again when resetting it.

Moreover, the current artillery of the Xinming Empire is not the old-fashioned wheeled gun mount, nor is it the retractable gun mount of the later ironclad era.

Everyone knows that wheeled gun mounts are now the mainstream gun mounts on battleships.

Unlike the two large wheeled mounts of the Napoleon field gun, there are four or more small wheels under the naval gun mount. After firing, the recoil will push the naval gun and the gun carriage backwards.

If one or more ropes are not installed on this kind of gun mount, after the naval gun fires once, the naval gun will go somewhere.

The retractable mount of the naval gun is not the retractable mount of the field gun. The mount of the naval gun is divided into upper and lower parts.

The lower part is a slope with a low front and a high back. After the naval gun fires, the upper gun mount will move backwards under the push of the rear force. Because of the slope, the upper gun mount will have a slope when it retreats. process, so the recoil force is offset.

But this kind of gun mount is also very bulky and requires you to push the gun back to its original position and adjust the shooting angle after each firing, which is very troublesome. (I will try to make a video to show the Easter egg stamp)

So now the Xinming Empire adopts the later generation product of this kind of naval gun mount - the hydraulic recoil gun mount.

This kind of gun mount would not appear until the 1880s (after 1880). This kind of gun mount was used on the "Zhiyuan Ship" of the Beiyang Navy.

It is also composed of upper and lower parts. The lower gun mount is still inclined, but it has a hydraulic recoil mechanism.

After the gun is fired, the gun body and upper gun mount will move backward, but the hydraulic mechanisms arranged on both sides of the gun body will offset the recoil and reset the gun.

However, the Xinming Imperial Academy improved this structure and added a spring on the basis of the hydraulic mechanism, so that the gun body can be quickly reset without moving at any angle.

The current technology of the Xinming Empire cannot completely abandon the mechanism of dropping the gun mount, so the firing speed can only reach three rounds per two minutes.

Is this slow?

Not slow, and already very advanced.

Ordinary naval guns often take fifteen minutes or more to fire once, and the farther back they go, the slower the firing speed becomes.

Not only is the gunner physically exhausted, but more importantly, after the artillery fires, a large amount of white smoke will appear in the gun cabin.

This white smoke accumulates with the number of firings, and will eventually make the gunner unable to aim and reload.

During the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, most of the Beiyang Navy used the retractable artillery mentioned earlier, and the meeting took about ten minutes.

Even the primary hydraulic recoil artillery on the Zhiyuan Ship takes 2.5 minutes to fire.

Now the improved gun mount of the Xinming Empire can already enable the artillery to reach a speed of two rounds per minute.

In naval battles, speed is the key. Not only does the battleship need to be fast, but the artillery also needs to be fast when firing.

Therefore, as the two sides continued to get closer, the new warships taught the British expeditionary fleet a good lesson.

The main gun turrets located on both sides of the deck turned the guns to aim forward.

It fires while advancing rapidly, with a rate of fire of two rounds per minute. One turret has two main guns and two turrets, which means it can fire eight rounds per minute.

After the distance was closer, the two secondary guns on the bow also started firing. This ferocious firepower stunned the captains of these expedition fleets.

Not to mention, after their shells hit the opponent's ship, they would be bounced off by the sloping armor on the ship's hull.

Let alone shells, even solid bullets will not do much damage to these new warships.

But if one of the Xinming Empire's 406mm naval guns hits, it will be a disaster.

The flagship that was first set on fire was turned into a moving fire-torch on the spot.