Nanfeng Port, Dongdingzhou, is located in Fengzhao County, the easternmost part of Dongdingzhou, and is the estuary of Baiquan River, a medium river in Dongdingzhou.

The Baiquan River is not a big river, but it is also the largest river in Dongdingzhou, and it is the only river that can be used for navigation.

What's more, Nanfeng Port and Ningyu Prefecture, which is dozens of kilometers away to the south, face each other across the sea, and sandwiched between the two is the Shayangwan Strait.

This strait, which is only a few tens of kilometers wide, is the only passage in and out of the bay of Shayang Bay.

Inside you can control the Shayangwan Strait, and outside you can directly enter the endless sea.

Such a geographical location also makes Nanfeng Port an important military port hundreds of years ago, and after hundreds of years of development, this place has developed into a very mature military port.

It was also the most important military port of the Daheng Navy in the southern region that year, and it became the most important forward base of the Daheng Navy during the Hengao War.

After Lin Ziran led the army east into Dongdingzhou, this port and the naval forces in Dongdingzhou fell into the control of the Southern Navy very happily.

Therefore, this place has also become one of the two most important ports of the Nanhai State Fleet, and the other is naturally Luohai Port.

At this time, in Nanfeng Harbor, Duan Hongxiao looked at the dozens of warships moored in the harbor, and he looked high-spirited.

Since receiving the appointment of the commander of the escort fleet, he immediately rushed to Nanfeng Port, thinking that the home port of the escort fleet was not set up in Luohai Port, but in Nanfeng Port.

After Duan Hongxiao arrived here by train, all the ships in the fleet under his command had not yet arrived, but they had almost arrived.

His chief of staff was briefing him on the situation: "There are a total of twenty-three warships drawn from various local fleets to join our escort fleet, all of which are the main ships of each detachment, and the smallest of them has a tonnage of more than 1,000 tons, and all of them are warships suitable for ocean-going operations!" ”

"Originally, there were twelve warships stationed in Nanfeng Port, and five more warships have arrived one after another, and among the other six warships, one is coming from Luohai Port, and the other five are carrying out escort missions!"

"According to the instructions of the headquarters, we have reorganized these 23 ships according to the performance of each ship, and organized them into the first squadron, the second squadron, and the third squadron."

"Among them, the warships under the jurisdiction of the third squadron will be older and weaker warships, and the follow-up will mainly be escort."

"The first squadron is our main fleet, and at present, the four ironclad ships with the largest tonnage are all assigned to the first squadron, and if the follow-up Pingbo can be commissioned on time, it will also be incorporated into the detachment and will undertake the task of strategic decisive battle."

"The second squadron is mainly based on high-speed warships and undertakes outpost reconnaissance tasks."

Organizing the escort fleet into three sub-fleets is still Duan Hongxiao's proposal, and he had already suggested to Lin Ziran and obtained approval before he took up his post.

This is because the ships in the escort fleet are all drawn from various local fleets, and although they are all ocean-going capital ships, they are large and small, old and new, and their speeds are fast and slow, and there is a great difference.

In order to be able to better command the operation, it is very necessary to group these warships.

After all, several cutting-edge warships in the fleet have reached a speed of 14 knots, but many of the warships built and put into service in the early days have a speed of only 11 or 2 knots.

At present, three capital ships have completed the comprehensive refitting of their rear-loading main guns, and all the previous smoothbore guns have been replaced with rear-loading rifled guns.

However, there are still some capital ships that still use smoothbore guns, and a few are equipped with front-loading rifled guns.

There is no way to do this, the oldest of these warships is more than twenty years old, the grandfather of the Duke of Meng's era, and the new ones have only been launched in the last two years, and the performance between them is very different.

And changing to a breech-loading rifled gun, this is also not an easy job!

First of all, the rear-loading guns built by the battleship are not those little guys in the army, in order to ensure the power, the guns carried on the battleship have a large caliber and a long body.

Otherwise, it will not be possible to penetrate the armor of existing ships at all.

You must know that the navies of the mainstream powers on the Blue Star in recent years, including the navies of the various feudal towns in the Daheng Empire, are already all steam ironclad ships, especially the newly built capital ships in the last ten years, which are generally laid with steel armor.

The caliber of this ship's guns is not large enough, and the barrel is not long enough to threaten the armor belt of these capital ships.

In fact, in recent years, the navies of various countries on the Blue Star have had a very embarrassing situation, that is, the power of artillery has become more and more difficult to keep up with the development of armor, resulting in the situation that it is difficult for naval guns to penetrate the armor of battleships.

The smoothbore guns that everyone used before were almost not mentioned, and the power of this thing was extremely poor, and a small number of navies, like the previous Nanhai State fleet, began to be equipped with front-loading rifled guns, but the power was still limited.

In order to tear through the armor of enemy warships, and the length of the gun barrel could not be greatly increased, the navies of various countries developed to equip themselves with large-caliber naval guns.

The main guns of the 10,000-ton main ironclad ships of various countries in these years are basically all large-caliber naval guns of more than 200 millimeters, and this is not a short-barreled mortar gun, but a ship-borne cannon, which is amazingly powerful when firing solid shells.

There are also naval warships of some countries equipped with front-loading rifled guns.

However, even so, it is not easy for these guns to penetrate the armor belt of enemy ships of the same level, and they often need to be fired at a distance of several hundred meters.

Of course, beyond a few hundred meters, with the accuracy of naval guns in this era and the non-existent fire control system, they will not be able to hit the target.

Beginning last year, the Nanhai Prefecture Fleet has been preparing to replace some of its capital ships with rear-loading guns, and the caliber of their guns has been preliminarily determined to be 200 mm, 170 mm, 150 mm, 120 mm, 100 mm, and 75 mm.

No matter how large the caliber is, this is beyond the current technical capabilities of the Nanzhou Machinery Bureau, unless the Navy does not want cannons, but only short-barreled mortars and the like.

Later, after many comparisons, the more important thing was to reduce R&D expenses and speed up R&D, so the artillery used by the Navy was basically copied from the army's artillery.

Research and development on the basis of army artillery is mainly to extend the barrel and thicken the barrel, anyway, the naval gun does not need to care about the weight of the naval gun, let alone the maneuverability of the artillery.

After a simple imitation improvement, the navy soon got a series of naval guns, ranging from 75 mm to 150 mm caliber.

Of course, these are emergency products, don't expect specific performance or anything, and it can only be said that it can be used if it is dead.

As for whether it is good or not, we need to talk about it after the Navy uses it.

This product is available, but the Navy has a more important problem, that is, production capacity!

These naval guns, because the barrel is longer, this is more difficult to process, the overall production is difficult, the output is small, and more importantly, it is necessary to compete with the army for production resources.

But now in the South China Navy, the army is the core, and the navy is just the little brother.

So until now, the navy has only received a total of more than 100 rear-loading naval guns.

Is that much?

There are a lot of them, but you must know that there are more than 20 capital ships in the escort fleet alone, and there are dozens of coastal and inland river warships in the sub-fleets of various places.

Just the combat ships, there are more than a hundred ships in the South China Sea State fleet!

If you calculate it carefully, you can't get a share of it on average.

Not to mention, the share of more than twenty guns still belongs to the matching guns on the Pingbo, which is not in service.

That is, now, among the active warships in the entire Nanhai Prefecture fleet, only more than 70 rear-loading naval guns have been issued.

In addition to some of these naval guns, which were assigned to inland gunboats and accompanied the army's Eastern Expedition to the Northern War, more than 50 of them were assigned to ocean-going warships.

And the warships, armed with these breech-loading guns, are currently escorting the fleet.

Now, Duan Hongxiao is thinking about using these battleships equipped with rear-loading naval guns to teach the fleets of those northern feudal towns a lesson!