In Ansu City, Lin Ziran held a naval development meeting, and Duan Hongxiao, director of the Navy Military Command Department, and Huang Xinggang, commander of the First Fleet, and other naval generals gathered together.

Lin Ziran sat at the top, and the rectangular table below was the generals of the navy.

This meeting has been going on for more than two hours, starting at about one o'clock at noon, and it is still going on after three o'clock, and the admirals below are discussing various details.

As for the general direction, it was already set at the beginning of the meeting.

No, to be more precise, in fact, it was already determined before the meeting began, that is, the future navy of the Great Heng Empire must be a maritime armed force that can effectively safeguard the overseas interests of the empire all the time!

To put it bluntly, the navy must be an offensive navy, not some coastal defensive navy!

There is no need to even discuss this, because in the history of the millennium, the Daheng people have not engaged in any defense in the overall strategy, and it has always been the Daheng people who have taken the initiative to initiate external expansion.

Whether it is the army or the navy, they tend to go offensive rather than defensive.

Of course, this is also because Daheng has sufficient national strength to support it!

Although the industrial capacity of the contemporary Daheng has fallen behind, the technical capacity of the civilian industry is estimated to be even second-rate, but it is better than the scale, and the Daheng people play official capitalism and trade protection policies, and make their own money, and the poor quality of civilian products is not a big deal.

As for the defense industry, it is better, barely able to squeeze into the first echelon, even if it is first-class, but it is also first-class, no matter what, it is also a country that can build 10,000-ton ironclad ships and rear-loading guns.

In addition, Daheng has a population of more than 200 million and more than 7.5 million square kilometers of land, including more than 2.5 million square kilometers of arable land, and the resources needed for various industries, whether it is iron ore, coal or even oil.

Such a Daheng, coupled with the advanced concepts brought by Lin Ziran, as long as you concentrate on development for a few years after reunification, it won't be long before Daheng people can make the world tremble again!

Lin Ziran firmly believes in this!

Even other people are full of confidence when they don't know Lin Ziran, the traverser factor.

And even more so on the naval side!

After the basic nature of the navy was determined at the meeting, the first construction plan proposed by the navy was not a large-tonnage capital ship, but a shallow-water warship.

The navy believes that the firepower and protection of the current inland river and coastal warships are too poor to meet the needs of modern warfare, otherwise, there would not be a need for the Luohai cruiser, the only advanced dome cruiser in the navy, to go to Zhenbei City to provide fire support.

You must know that the Luohai is a cruiser, and its main task is to conduct naval battles in the depths of the sea, not to provide fire support deep into the inland waters.

Now running to the north of the town to provide fire support, and still risking running aground, is completely overkill.

In addition to this influence, in the previous Mihe Battle and the Jingshi Campaign, when the First Artillery Fleet was drawn and formed all the way from the Nanhai Prefecture and Dongdingzhou areas, and then went north along the coastline, a large number of gunboats in it were extremely difficult to maneuver even in the coastal areas because of their extremely poor suitability.

To this end, the navy needs to develop a new type of coastal warship, which has a shallow draft, so that it can go deep into inland rivers, lakes, and coastal waters to provide fire support when necessary.

At the same time, it is necessary to have a certain ability to sail at sea, and it is not required that the seaworthiness is good, but at least it must be able to sail in the ocean, so what, in the future, it must be able to run to the coast of the Orissa Empire and aim the naval guns at the port of Orissa!

The firepower must be strong, the defense must be strong, after all, the positioning of this ship is an offshore vessel, and it needs to attack against the fire of the enemy's offshore defense ships and shore defense guns!

As for the design of the ship, if you want firepower and protection, then the maneuverability has to make a trade-off, so the speed can be reduced, and it is not required to be more than fifteen knots, but about ten knots.

It is worth noting that when the admirals of the Great Heng Imperial Navy proposed to design such a shallow-water warship, their purpose was not to talk about coastal defense!

Instead, I want to drive it straight to someone else's doorstep!

The difference between the two concepts is huge!

When other countries engage in offshore warships, their purpose is to defend their coastal waters, while Daheng people engage in coastal warships in order to launch attacks in the coastal waters of other people's homes.

Although it is said that the Daheng capital has not yet been completely unified, and the newly baked Lin Dynasty of the Daheng Empire currently controls six and a half states, it does not prevent the admirals of the Daheng Empire from planning foreign wars!

This is because everyone can see that although the northern states are still stubbornly resisting, reunification is inevitable, and this is the general trend of history, and the northern states cannot resist this general trend of history.

Now that we are about to be unified, what are we going to do next?

According to the thousand-year-old tradition of Daheng, it is naturally ready to launch a war for external expansion!

If the empire wants to expand externally, it will either hit the northwest region of the central continent, or fight the alliance of the six northern countries, but to be honest, the alliance of the six northern countries is not easy to fight, the winter in the broken place is too cold, and the people in the broken place are also hard bones.

Many times in history, the people of Daheng have entered the hinterland of the Six Nations Alliance, but in the end they were forced to retreat on their own initiative, because of the severe cold of the local area and the indomitable armed resistance of the locals, which made the people of Daheng feel that the gains outweighed the losses.

The Sixth Dynasty was extremely powerful at its peak, but there was nothing too good about the Six Nations Alliance.

In addition to the northwest direction, then only the south is left, the Kingdom of Denor and the Kingdom of Kasi can be fought, and further south is the Olisa Empire, and the war in this direction has very high requirements for the navy, especially if there is another Hengao war, the navy must completely control the sea power.

This is also the reason why in this strategic meeting, the Navy will seriously take out this type of ship that seems to be a coastal defense warship to discuss.

The navy did not think of using such ships to carry out the coastal defense strategy, but used it to carry out the coastal offensive strategy!

Duan Hongxiao said at the meeting: If we can have more than a dozen such coastal warships of several thousand tons to kill the coastal waters of the Orissa Empire under the cover of the main ocean-going fleet, we will be able to completely blockade their ports and cut off their maritime connections with the outside world by virtue of the characteristics of shallow draft, thick armor, and strong firepower, and even forcibly enter the inland rivers in the middle of the Orissa Empire to support the army operations.

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