Since the appearance of firearms on the battlefield, traditional heavy armor has become vulnerable, and cloth and cotton armor have appeared since the Yuan dynasty.

Although the appearance of cotton armor and cloth armor is similar, they are two completely different kinds of armor, cloth armor has a built-in armor, and cotton armor is different from cloth armor, which has no nail inside and is made of cotton pressing and mixing other materials inside.

The defense objects of the two are also different, cloth armor focuses on the protection of traditional knives, guns and arrows, while cotton armor focuses on the protection of firearms.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Guozhen recorded the "pure cotton armor" in the "Yongbu Sketch": "The cotton armor is seven catties of cotton, sewn with cloth such as a jacket, the arms are kicked with the feet, and the degree is not fat and swollen, and it is dried and harvested. ”

In the Ming Dynasty, firearms prevailed, and the production process of cotton armor was also continuously improved, not all of which were filled with cotton, and fabric, cowhide, paper and other materials would be added inside to improve the defensive power, and it actually became a composite armor.

The cotton armor of the Eight Banners Army was originally captured from the hands of the Ming army, and later improved to produce it, the picked cotton was wet and repeatedly patted into a very thin cotton sheet, and a number of such cotton sheets were embellished into a very thick and solid cotton cloth, and between the two layers of cotton cloth was iron armor, which was fixed with copper nails inside and outside, and finally formed the Eight Banners armor.

The defensive effect of cotton armor on firearms is very good, and the cloth iron armor has the ability to defend against the traditional bow and horse, not all the soldiers of the Eight Banners can afford to wear cotton armor, the cotton armor in the late Ming Dynasty was not popularized, most of the army is only equipped with cloth iron armor, and only the elite heavy infantry in the Eight Banners are equipped with iron armor and cotton armor.

The Zheng family can equip thousands of iron man troops at once, which can be described as wealthy!

"Smack! Syllable! Smack......"

The Iron Man Army also launched a counterattack, and they returned fire with muskets, and the firearms they used were no worse than the most advanced flint Lumi guns of the Jingwu Army, and they also used custom-packed paper shell medicines, which were very fast to reload.

Although the Jingwu army numbered 20,000, the terrain of the water pass was narrow, and it was not possible to arrange a musket array several miles long, so it could only attack with a musket array of several hundred people wide.

Seeing that the front row of the Jingwu Army continued to fall, Huang Degong shouted: "Cut the formation, the recruits retreat, and change to a first-class sergeant!" ”

Jingwu Army is the army that was expanded later, because the number of expansion is too large, the production of muskets is in short supply, in addition to the veterans of the Tianwu Army who got up early, the Jingwu Army uses the Suifa Lumi gun, and most of the recruits use the bird gun that is commonly used in the Ming army.

The bird gun is small in medicine, light in lead bullet, and far less powerful than the improved flint Lu Mi gun, which is not only poor in accuracy at a distance of eighty or ninety steps, but also lacks penetration, especially for this Zheng family iron army full of fine armor.

Huang Degong felt the pressure, and he ordered: "Transfer the shield soldiers to the front row and squat for protection!" ”

Huang Degong's Jingwu Army also copied the model of the Tianwu Army, basically the whole army was equipped with firearms, and the shield soldiers were almost useless.

However, at this time, the defense on the opposite side was too strong, and the two armies at a distance fired at each other, and the Jingwu army could not get any advantage, so Huang Degong had to mobilize shield soldiers to strengthen the defense.

The shield soldiers of the Jingwu Army use the rigid and flexible cards of the Qi Jiajun, similar to the production of cotton armor, and add a shield made of flexible leather, silk cotton, and cotton paper on the rigid shield, which can avoid the bird and the projectile forty or fifty steps away, and it has been tried and tested repeatedly.

With the addition of shield soldiers, the casualties of the Jingwu Army have been greatly reduced, but the two sides are still approaching, the Iron Man Army is equipped with a low proportion of firearms, and the melee ability is super strong, and only close quarters can they exert the greatest power.

And the Jingwu Army also needs to shoot at close range, Huang Degong knows very well, no matter how powerful the cotton armor is, as long as it is close to the distance, it will be pierced!

In the Zheng family's iron army, in addition to being equipped with cotton armor, some of them are equipped with European plate armor, which can be described as invulnerable in the face of the old bird guns of the Ming army.

"Smack! Syllable! Smack....."

After fine-tuning, the salvo of the Jingwu Army sounded again, and the Iron Man Army overturned dozens of soldiers in a short period of time.

In the face of the powerful penetrating power of the veteran of the Tianwu Army, coupled with the continuous shrinking distance between the two sides, even the European plate armor became powerless, either penetrated, or was seriously injured by the huge impact of the lead bullet.

The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were the heyday of the development of plate armor in Europe, but as early as the middle of the 16th century, the appearance of large arquebuses made the resistance of plate armor insufficient.

In the face of large-caliber lead bullets, well-made plate armor can indeed effectively resist the penetration of the front, but the huge impact force often causes the guard plate to sink inward and cause damage, and the vibration of lead bullet and plate armor will also bring serious damage to the human body, which makes the heavy plate armor more and more powerless in actual combat.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the popularization of new arquebuses and flintlock pistols, the light and great power made most plate armor unable to resist, and then the plate armor gradually entered a period of decline, and the whole body armor was gradually replaced by three-quarters armor or even cuirass, and the quality also declined.

Although Zhu Cihong heard that the protection of plate armor was high, he did not ask European craftsmen to build it and popularize it in the army, because with the increasing improvement of musket technology, those so-called invulnerable armor and armor have no place on the battlefield.

If the Zheng Family's Iron Army faced the Tianwu Army equipped with the most advanced Heding rifles, it would be a one-sided slaughter, not to mention that it could not wear cotton armor and plate armor forty steps away, even if it was a hundred steps away, the Tianwu Army could beat the Iron Army into a sieve!

The equipment of the Tianwu Army is the best in the whole of East Asia, not only everyone is equipped with flint Lumi guns and short swords, but the armor is more than the iron helmet with cotton helmet, and there is cotton armor outside the iron armor, it is a real heavy infantry, and some first-class armor soldiers are equipped with Heding rifles.

It is estimated that within three years, the Heding rifle can be fully equipped with the Tianwu Army, and within ten years, it can be equipped with 300,000 troops from the seven major armies.

I have to say that the field combat capability of the Iron Man Army is worthy of the Qing army, and if Zheng Zhilong had not secretly surrendered to the Qing Dynasty early in history and opened the Fenshui Pass and Xianxia Pass, the Qing Army would not have easily entered Fujian.

The Iron Man Army in history was even more comical in defeat, and followed Zheng Chenggong to Nanjing and Zhenjiang to recover a large area of lost territory, which made the Eight Banners Army frightened, but was defeated by the Qing cavalry when they unloaded their armor and bathed by the river.

As the Jingwu Army and the Iron Man Army continue to approach, the soldiers on both sides also continue to fall, in terms of defense, the Jingwu Army is not as good as the Iron Man Army, but in terms of close-range firepower output, the Jingwu Army completely suppresses the opponent!

This was the contest between the Spanish phalanx and the linear tactic, which was to reduce the depth of the whole army and arrange it in a horizontal row in a wedge-shaped formation.

This kind of formation arrangement can not only give greater play to the density of firepower, but also change the traditional cumbersome phalanx, which can be more flexible and rapid in the battle, deploy the formation and attack, and can also be transformed into a hollow formation in the face of the impact of the cavalry.

Line tactics were first created by King Gustav II of Sweden, who made Sweden a new military power in Europe with this military reform.......

Line tactics is a milestone in military history, marking the transition from ancient and medieval tactics to modern tactics, and laying the foundation for the later use of tactics in the Napoleonic era.

At this time, the line tactics have just been proposed for more than ten years, and they are not yet fully mature, and the tactical changes have not been completely completed.

It was not until several key battles of the Thirty Years' War in Europe, such as the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631, the Battle of Lützn in 1632, and the Battle of Rocroix in 1643, that all the armies that used line tactics were victorious, and then they were widely used by other European countries, thus completely replacing the Spanish phalanx tactics.