"Major General, we're going to win!"

It was David who spoke. Jones, the "China expert" in the Dutch Navy, the commander of the battleship Sealand.

His words were not nonsense, but after receiving reports from reconnaissance ships and Johor Castle, he confirmed the strength of the Ming fleet that was carrying out a landing mission in the Strait of Johor.

This fleet is not the main fleet of the Nanyang Fleet, but a landing task fleet - the current Ming Navy is getting bigger and bigger, and the establishment is becoming more and more complex. At the next level of the Generalissimo's Office Navy Division is the Frontal Fleet, which is divided into three major fleets: the North, the South, and the East.

Among them, the Beiyang Fleet is responsible for guarding the "gateway of the country" between the Yangtze River Estuary (including the Yangtze River Estuary) and the Liaodong Peninsula.

The Nanyang Fleet is responsible for a large area south of the mouth of the Yangtze River to the Nanyang Islands, and is the main force responsible for maritime hegemony, and its strength is very strong.

The nature of the Oriental Fleet is the same as that of the Nanyang Fleet, which is also a fleet that controls maritime supremacy, mainly responsible for sea power east of Japan (including Japan) to the New World, and is also strong.

Underneath the three fleets are the two daily troop formations of the Maritime Defense Division (naval base) and the fleet detachment. The fleet detachments are only responsible for administration and training, and are not operational command units in wartime.

In a wartime state or quasi-wartime state, the Admirals of the three fleets will form a mission fleet, that is, a fleet temporarily formed to carry out a specific mission. If this particular mission is a decisive battle, then the name of the mission fleet is usually "the main fleet of a certain ocean". If this particular task is a landing, then the task fleet is a "certain ocean landing fleet".

If there are multiple mission fleets performing the same mission, they will be distinguished by numerical numbers.

So what is now appearing in the Strait of Malacca is the Nanyang Landing Fleet, that is, the fleet that is under the jurisdiction of the Nanyang Fleet and performs landing missions.

Under this kind of mission fleet, there will no longer be a detachment with a specific mission name as a number, but a detachment will be named with a number.

That is, "the first unit of the Nanyang Landing Fleet" and the like......

In Dave. Before Jones left the Ming Navy, he served as the deputy chief of staff in the Navy Division, and was directly involved in the setting up of the three major fleets of the Ming Navy, and was very familiar with the establishment of the Ming Navy.

In addition, he was also very familiar with several standard aspects of the Ming navy - although the Ming navy was brought out by the Dutch, because their foundation was too poor, there was always a lack of enough good officers and sailors, so they could not adapt to complex and chaotic tasks.

Therefore, the Ming army and navy have always paid attention to standardized operations, that is, fighting according to books!

After studying the naval combat examples of the Ming Dynasty and the European side, the Navy Department summed up the five major combat modes of "decisive battle mode", "escort mode", "landing mode", "garrison mode" and "counterattack mode", and formulated several corresponding formations and battle plans for each mode...... Moreover, these plans were compiled into a book and sent directly to every naval captain, and a copy was also placed in the captain's room of each ship!

If you forget it due to excessive tension during the fight...... You can also learn and use it now!

This kind of command is only known in the world's navies......

And this book by David. Jones also had a copy on hand—he had already co-authored it! Can you hide it from him?

So how the Ming Navy fought the landing war, he knew it very clearly.

"Now they should be deployed according to the landing pattern in the Battle Instructions, and in addition to the landing detachment, there will only be at most two detachments responsible for combat." David. Jones told Trop, "The formation that our reconnaissance ship found in the waters west of Temasek Road should be one of those combat units." To the east of Temasek, there should be a formation of similar size.

Our reconnaissance vessel reported that it had spotted one Yingtianfu-class, and there will be another Yingtianfu-class to the east of Temasek Island. Both formations will have the Ying Tianfu class as the lead ship and flagship, plus a few modified 'Feixiang-class' ships to form a battle line formation for maneuvering.

As for the combat ships in the landing formations of the Ming Navy, they should be the main force of hard-sail bombardment artillery warships at the state and county levels. ”

Trop crossed his arms and pondered, "What if one of their combat detachments found three council-class?" Will it run away? ”

"No, it won't." David. Jones shook his head, "The Ming Navy claims to be destroyed when it sees the enemy, and there is very little content in the "Battle Instructions" to avoid battle and retreat...... Of course, this is not because of how brave they are, but because their capital ships are relatively slow, and it is difficult for them to escape the pursuit of the enemy's superior forces. ”

Now the Ming Dynasty has been able to independently design and build soft-sail battleships, but their design level is still a little worse than that of Britain and the Netherlands, and the bombardment battleships designed and built have the characteristics of "small and slow". The reason is that the soft sail technology has not been fully understood, so the design is relatively conservative, resulting in the speed of the ship can not go up, so they dare not build the tonnage of the ship, because it will be slower to build bigger.

Trop laughed, "That's good...... We can eat one of their detachments first, then go and knock out the second one, and finally pack up their landing detachment! I believe that after this battle, the Chinese should know who is the real hegemon on the ocean! ”

David. Jones really knows the Ming Navy very well!

In his and Troppe's analysis, he actually guessed the deployment of Shi Lang and Liu Guoxuan, the two chief and deputy admirals of the Nanyang landing fleet!

At this time, Shi Lang and Liu Guoxuan were each leading a combat detachment to patrol the sea on the east and west sides of Temasek Island.

The composition of the two detachments is exactly the same, the flagship is one Ying Tianfu-class, then two Feixiang-class, then four Junwei-class, and finally four Qianhusuo-class. Such a formation consisted of 11 combat ships, in addition to several galleys for reconnaissance and escort missions. The total of the two formations is 22 warships.

The Flyer class has undergone two rebuilds, the first time with a gyroscope gun on the deck, the second time with a complete overhaul, with all the guns removed, and then a major overhaul of the two-story guns. The lower gun deck was closed, leaving only the upper gun deck to be rebuilt into a gun compartment, that is, the straight gun deck was transformed into a compartment, and two 15-pound cannons that could fire flowering shells were placed in each compartment. A total of 12 artillery compartments were repaired, a total of 24 15-pound cannons. The heavy whirling bombardment guns that were originally installed on the upper deck were completely eliminated in this overhaul - because the people of the Daming Naval Shipbuilding Bureau still felt that all the bombardment guns should be put in the reinforced gun bays to be reassured......

The military guard level and the Qianhu level are a reduced version of the Ying Tianfu level.

Among them, the military guard level is named after the military guard, with a load of 500 tons, three masts, a flat deck, a total of 9 gun compartments on the first floor, and can be equipped with 18 15-kilogram cannons.

The Qianhu level is named after the Qianhu Institute, with a load of 300 tons, two masts, a flat deck, and a total of 5 gun compartments on the first floor, which can be equipped with 10 15-kilogram cannons.

In addition to these four types of warships, there is also a kind of state and county-level hard-sail bombardment gunboat around Temasek Island, which is a bird-type bombardment gunboat, with a load of 500 tons, a total of 7 gun bays on the first floor, and can be equipped with 14 15-pound cannons.

However, such states and counties generally do not participate in fleet decisive battles, but are used to escort ships or support landings. Because the main task of the Nanyang landing fleet is landing, it is equipped with many prefectures and counties, and the number is as many as 24. Together with the 22 ships of the two combat detachments, there are a total of 46 battleships with strong combat effectiveness!

In terms of numbers, the strength is much stronger than that of Trop's fleet.

Although the East India Company had assembled a hundred armed merchant ships for Trop, most of them were too thin to be equipped with bombardment, and Batavia did not have that many bombardments.

So in the end, Trop only selected 18 of them for modification, plus the 14 new gunboats he brought from Europe, for a total of 32 warships.