Li Xuan knows very well that plate armor, especially heavy full-body and half-body armor, has not much lifespan in the history of warfare, and the reason why it is still strongly promoting large-scale equipment of plate armor is very simple, the Ming army does not have heavy muskets now!

Since the Ming army does not have plate armor now, it is natural to take advantage of this opportunity to use plate armor to harvest a wave!

However, in this era, the modern armies of Europe have begun to equip heavy muskets on a large scale to fight against thicker and thicker plate armor, the most typical of which is the Spanish heavy muskets.

The appearance of heavy muskets will make plate armor, especially full-body armor and half-body armor, completely withdraw from the stage of war, because to resist this kind of heavy musket, plate armor needs to be very thick, and after the thickness comes up, the weight will inevitably come up.

So much so that in the end, the infantry simply did not equip the plate armor and went directly to the battle in cloth clothes, and only the cavalry would continue to equip the cuirasse that had been thickened to the limit!

This is also the reason why Li Xuan wants the Ministry of Industry to prepare for the technical reserve and even production of heavy muskets, that is, the development of heavy muskets is inevitable.

Even if the full-body armor has withdrawn from the stage of war, the ultra-thick cuirass will still be active in the stage of war for a long time, and to deal with the cuirass, you can't use these existing small-caliber muskets.

If you use a small-caliber smoothbore gun and other cavalrymen rush over in cuirasses, your small-caliber musket will have to be blinded!

Although the nine-pound artillery and even plate armor have not begun large-scale production at present, the guards stationed in Zhaoqing and with a relatively special political status are close to the water, and the first batch of small-scale trial production of nine-pound artillery and plate armor were obtained in the name of testing.

Among them, there were three nine-pound guns that had been test-fired in front of Li Xuan, plus three nine-pound guns produced on a small scale in recent times, so that the Guards Artillery Regiment had a nine-pound artillery team.

And the plate armor also got more than 100 sets, including full-body armor, half-body armor and cuirass!

The full-body armor was used to equip the sword and shield men, the half-body armor was used to equip the spearmen, and the cuirass was used to equip the cavalry, and they also tried to equip the musketeers with cuirasses!

But because the plate armor made in the Tang Dynasty, including the cuirass, is relatively thick, it basically follows the development path of contemporary European plate armor: in order to resist arquebuses, it is made thicker and thicker!

Even if it's a cuirass, that's more than a dozen kilograms!

When musketeers wear these cuirass, their mobility is greatly affected!

In the end, after only trying for a while, the Guards took the lead in giving up the attempt to equip the musketeers with cuirasses, and the army on one side had not yet tried, but after seeing the test results of the Guards, they also gave up directly, but the army put forward another possibility.

That is, since the existing cuirass is too heavy to affect the battle, can it be possible to directly abandon the back and leave only the front? What about a frontal cuirass?

Such an idea was presented to Li Xuan, and Li Xuan was a little speechless at first glance, these people even got out the body armor of the future generations!

The frontal cuirass envisioned by the army is not actually a smooth plate armor, but a thick cloth bag, and then a steel plate is inserted into it directly as bulletproof, and the weight is all reduced, but it is still useless after reducing the weight.

In the live-fire test, the existing 14mm musket can penetrate at a medium distance, even if it cannot penetrate, but the huge impact force of the bullet will still make this steel plate dent and cause huge trauma to the human body!

Therefore, after trying to equip it, the musketeers of the Tang Army are still quite dissatisfied with this kind of bulletproof steel plate, Nima, although the real combat time of line combat may be only a few minutes, but when the formation is adjusted in formation, it will last for dozens of minutes or even hours, and you have to run around, wearing this thing will be tiring to death.

And this thing is lightened because of the thickness of the steel plate, and the bulletproof effect is not good, wearing this, they might as well wear a heavy cuirass, although that thing is heavy, but it can still have a bulletproof effect!

In the end, Li Xuan personally ordered that this kind of bulletproof steel plate, which the army called a frontal cuirass, could continue to be studied, but it was not equipped!

In the face of the idea that these generals are bent on equipping the musketeers with plate armor, Li Xuan is quite painful, this year is the era of muskets, in Li Xuan's opinion, plate armor can be used in recent years, and in the future, except for cavalry equipped with cuirass, all other arms will not be equipped with plate armor, because it is useless to wear it.

As the first unit to be equipped with nine-pound artillery and plate armor, the Guards are related to their political status, and they also undertake certain equipment test tasks, but this is not a real combat test!

The troops equipped with nine-pound artillery and plate armor for actual combat tests are the first army!

On the eighth day of the second lunar month, outside Shaoyang, more than 20,000 troops of the First Army successfully approached Shaoyang after many days of marching and continuous peripheral operations, and completely surrounded the Ming army in the city.

At this time, two nine-pound guns and one hundred sets of plate armor transported from the rear also arrived outside Shaoyang City.

Most of the armor that arrived was half-body armor, but in addition to full-body armor, there weren't many cuirasses!

After seeing these new equipment, Hao Bonian decided on the spot to equip all these plate armor to the heavy armor infantry under the First Army, especially the heavy armor sword and shield soldiers who were responsible for the battle in the city, whether it was full body armor or half armor or cuirass, anyway, these plate armor were much better than the current equipment of various iron armor and cotton iron armor.

And these more than 100 heavy infantry equipped with plate armor will be the first batch of soldiers to use plate armor in large-scale actual combat in East Asia!

And the whole old six is one of them!

As a senior heavy armor sword and shield soldier who served in the first division of the first infantry division, he was born as a bandit in his early years, with strong body and superb sword skills.

When he received a set of full-body plate armor, he immediately couldn't wait for his comrades to help him put it on, and the first feeling of wearing it was safe!

Nima, the whole body, including the hands and feet, is wrapped in steel plates, and it is difficult to feel insecure!

The second feeling is that it is heavy!

As a fierce man who often wears double armor when fighting, a set of cotton and iron armor inside, and a set of chain mail outside, he feels that the whole body armor on his body is heavy, and others feel even heavier.

With a waist knife and a shield, this equipment even a fierce person like Quan Lao Liu can't last too long in the process of fighting.

Because the first batch of plate armor produced was too focused on defensive performance, it was very heavy, and only these strong men who used to be heavy infantry could be equipped, and the whole body plate armor needed to be selected from the heavy infantry before it could be selected.

After Hao Bonian found out about this situation, he said to his subordinates: "Although this plate armor has good defense, it is still too heavy, and I suggest to the Ordnance Department that the thickness of the plate armor be appropriately reduced, especially the thickness of the non-lethal parts!" ”

Even if it is a plate armor with good defense, if the soldiers can't wear it, or a large number of soldiers can't wear it, it's just a plaything.

Plate armor that can't be equipped on a large scale is of little value.

This group of heavy infantry equipped with full-body armor and half-body armor will become the vanguard of the attack on Shaoyang City!

According to the previous management, to attack such a fortified city, the Tang Army transferred heavy infantry and grenadiers from various units to form two temporary assault battalions.

But unlike before, these assault battalions were joined by nearly a hundred heavy infantry equipped with plate armor!

There have been so many battles, and now the routine of the Tang Army attacking the fortified city is also quite perfect, it is still shelling, digging tunnels and blasting!

The only difference is that the two nine-pound cannons brought up by the new ones are amazingly powerful, and the heavy cannonballs hit the city wall, and the power is amazing!

What disappointed Hao Bonian at that time was that the nine-pound artillery was still not powerful enough to collapse those thick city walls!

There is no way, even if it is a nine-kilogram artillery, its own weight and power are still in the ranks of field artillery, and if you want to break through these walls with a thickness of seven or eight meters, you have to use more than eighteen catties or even twenty or thirty catties of artillery!

Nine pounds of artillery can't break through the city wall, so naturally it depends on blasting, and after the blasting, the assault battalion began to charge under the cover of muskets, bows and arrows, and artillery!

At this time, if the other party had a large number of artillery as defensive firepower, Hao Bonian would definitely not do this, but Shaoyang City is not Hengyang City, there are not many medium and large-caliber artillery on the head of this city, and his own artillery fire can completely suppress the opponent's firepower.

Hao Bonian dared to send out the assault battalion!

As one of the more than twenty heavily armored sword and shield soldiers with full body plate armor, although he could not take the lead because of the heavy armor, he trotted forward with a steady pace, and then climbed the city wall.

This has just been on the city wall, and the Ming sergeant hiding behind the battlements seems to have been prepared, and a spear is directly stabbed over, which can startle the whole old six, but he soon found that he didn't have a, and immediately couldn't help shouting: "Kill!" ”

Relying on the whole body armor, he wrapped himself into an iron can, and the whole old six even the shield was too lazy to lift, and directly brandished the long knife and strode forward, and then hard-pit the enemy's several knives, and directly raised the knife and fell, and one knife was to split the nearest Ming saber and shield hand in half.

After him, two more heavy infantry wearing half-body armor also followed, these three people, with Quan Lao Liu as the frontal core, two people on the left and one on the right as the auxiliary, killed more than a dozen Ming troops on the opposite side without the slightest resistance.

Blood, soon all over the city!