"Gentlemen, we have been discussing for 4 months, and we have also conducted a lot of arguments and discussions on the design of our capital ship for the 1905~1906 fiscal year, and the original vague shadow has now become a clear pattern, and now we are finally able to make her really real!" Fisher stood in the conference room excited.

"Today, our special commission will become a full-fledged design committee, and the first official task I give you is to design a battleship with a speed of 21 knots and an armored cruiser with a speed of 25 knots, both of which must be armed with uniform large-caliber naval guns!"

Fisher had been waiting for this day for too long, and the bureaucracy within the Royal Navy was protracted and inefficient, which made Fisher unbearable, and for two years, two whole years, he had been waving the flag within the Navy two years ago, hoping that the Royal Navy would build a new battleship that could not be beaten.

In 1902, the Royal Navy designer Diddleman also believed that a new type of battleship should be built that could be unmatched by foreign navies in terms of displacement and firepower, but because Dideman did not have a clear understanding of such a battleship at this time, such a call was not taken seriously by anyone.

A year later, however, the Italians published "The Ideal Battleship of the British Navy", which allowed Fisher to finally show his vague ideal battleship in the form of a clear picture.

The Italians painted a wonderful picture of this new type of battleship that no one with a brain could refuse: "The new battleship will be equipped with 12-inch naval guns without the secondary turrets, and it will be able to quickly approach the enemy with the speed of an armored cruiser, and then hit at least one large-caliber shell in the opponent's waterline armor before the enemy's only four naval guns of the same caliber can give us a lucky blow, which will be enough to kill."

The heavy armor of the whole body can withstand the blows of the enemy's medium-caliber naval guns, and can concentrate fire on one enemy ship, destroy it and quickly transfer fire to attack another. Then unscathed to strike at the third ship. ”

Such a scene was a perfect recreation of what Fisher longed to see, and the Royal Navy was not without its own supporters at a time.

In the same year, the Royal Navy's shipbuilding superintendent Watts and his assistant Narbes agreed with the Italians' design and proposed to build a battleship with 12-inch guns to replace the previous mixed-caliber battleships.

More importantly, the advantages of all-heavy artillery are not limited to the field of design, but also to the naval internal gunpowder tests.

Jochen's method of continuous aim and shooting, which was plagiarized by the Royal Navy as a naval cadet at Keele, was eventually invented by Colonel Percy Scott of the Royal Navy, and it still worked well and was popularized within the Royal Navy.

However, this aiming method did not apply to the 12-inch naval guns commonly used in the Royal Navy. Because this naval gun was too heavy, it could only be aimed at an adjusted angle using hydraulic equipment (the German Navy at that time mainly used 260 mm naval guns with much lighter weight, and it was slightly easier to solve this problem technically). ）

Therefore, people of insight within the Royal Navy began to study the question of how the 12-inch naval gun could improve the accuracy of hitting.

Harding, an artillery officer of the Royal Marine Corps, proposed in the 1901 issue of the magazine "United Forces" that the process of naval gun salvo - landing point confirmation - artillery correction - second salvo fire should be handed over to a person or department not affiliated with any one artillery to determine the determination of the firing elements by the centralized artillery command system and issue the order to fire in a unified manner.

This was the first time that the concept of fire control appeared within the British Royal Navy, and in the same year that Watts proposed the construction of a unified all-heavy gun, Harding published a series of articles on fire control in the journal Naval Gunnery.

The Royal Navy immediately appointed two commissions to test the concepts in Naval Gunnery on the battleships Victory and Solemnity, which was the first official test of fire control by the Royal Navy, and the results were handed over to Harding himself, who had been transferred to the Naval Ordnance Bureau at this time, to evaluate.

The conclusions drawn were heartening to Fisher, since the design of his all-heavy gun battleship was strongly supported by the results of the assessment.

The 12-inch naval gun, due to the difficulty of sustained aiming, could only fire at the maximum amplitude of the roll. Therefore, it was necessary to increase the accuracy of the artillery by firing a salvo of guò guns, and the number of 4 guns was obviously difficult to satisfy.

The test also concluded that the 6-inch naval gun was far inferior to the 12-inch naval gun in terms of fire control applications. Because the 6-inch naval gun was too fast, a large number of water columns splashed in the target area would make it difficult to identify the distance between the landing area and the target, and at the same time, it would be difficult to determine which shot caused the water column, which brought great trouble to the command of the fire control officer.

Although the 12-inch naval gun had a slower rate of fire, the landing point was clearly visible, and Harding clearly wrote in the report: "The 12-inch naval gun is easier to hit and shoot than the 6-inch naval gun, although the 6-inch naval gun can form a dense fire within 4,000 yards." However, the power of the shell was only one-fifth that of the 12-inch gun, and the lower trajectory of the 12-inch gun also reduced the flight time of the shell. Makes artillery corrections more rapid. ”

Such a report was obviously a shot in the arm for Fisher, who was full of confidence that with the ideas of the Naval Shipbuilding Director and the report of the Naval Ordnance Bureau, his opinion would be taken seriously, but in 1903 there was still no movement from the top of the Admiralty.

Having lost patience with the Admiralty, Fisher began to decide to ditch the Admiralty and take matters into his own. This was how the Naval Select Committee was formed, and Fisher persuaded the Earl of Sellburn to form an informal committee of seven experienced naval officers and a group of technical experts to help Fisher paint a picture of the new warship in his mind.

And Fisher, the progress of the special commission, did not even submit any official report to the Admiralty, and Fisher had already made up his mind. As he said to Rear Admiral Sir Robert Absnot: "The Admiralty is full of 'old ladies', and they will buy their noses into the pile of papers, thinking about how wide the ribbon can be, and turning a blind eye to reality." You think I'm going to write everything I know in a report like a fool? When I'm in charge, I'm going to have a drastic change in the Admiralty, and I'll kill whoever dares to stand in the way! ”

Right now. Fisher has finally become the First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, and he can kick away anyone who stands in the way of his ideals.

As a result of the previous four months of discussions, the design of the new warship was already very clear, and the so-called reorganization into a formal design committee, and the issuance of design orders was just a formality, and Fisher was sure that the committee would come up with a design sketch within two months. The detailed design drawings will also be completed within 6 months.

And what makes Fisher even happier is that it seems that even God is helping him, and the Royal Navy has made a breakthrough in the field of naval gun aiming, and the Vickers BVIII turret equipped with a new high-speed high and low machine and a steering machine allows the 12-inch naval gun to continue aiming, thereby further improving the shooting accuracy, which is simply tailor-made for its own warship.

Fisher believes that the emergence of these two new warships will completely open up the gap between the Royal Navy and other countries in naval technology!

Unbeknownst to Fisher, however, a dispute was raging across the Atlantic, at the Admiralty of another emerging power.

"It doesn't make any sense at all!" Washington, a shipbuilding expert in the US Navy? Irwin? Chambers fired at the design of the 16,000-ton battleship designed by the Naval Construction and Maintenance Bureau: "Four 12-inch first-class guns and eight 10-inch second-class guns. The design of such a battleship is worthless! 1 12-inch naval gun can top 2 10-inch naval guns!

And these secondary main gun turrets need to be placed on the side of the ship, which not only requires a wider hull to accommodate the huge diameter turret seat, but also affects the tensile strength of the hull! This thing is nothing compared to the design proposed by the General Council of the Admiralty last year! ”

Chambers was an advocate of the U.S. Navy's unified all-heavy gunboat design, and in June 1903 he submitted a design proposal to the Naval Warfare College, which concluded in a summer meeting that a new battleship equipped with 12 12-inch guns (Note 1) would have the same combined combat strength as three old battleships.

Therefore, in October 1903, the General Board of the U.S. Navy proposed a research project and design requirements for an all-heavy naval gun battleship, but like the United Kingdom, the General Commission's opinion was ignored by the Secretary of the Navy, the Naval Construction Board, and the Naval Construction and Maintenance Bureau.

And at this time, the Connecticut class was completed. The Bureau of Naval Construction and Maintenance, which was working on the design of the Mississippi class, came up with the battleship design that was heavily criticized by Chambers based on the conclusion that the 8-inch second-class main gun was no longer enough to cause enough damage to most newly built battleships at the Naval Combat College meeting.

"At a distance of 3000 yards, even a 10-inch naval gun is not guaranteed to penetrate the battleship's main armor belt! And this distance increased to more than 8000 yards. 10-inch naval guns are even less likely to cause any damage to the battleship! How long are you going to hold on to these 10-inch things?! ”

Chambers's conclusion was based on the judgment of the U.S. Naval Operations Committee on the damage effect of naval guns on the increase in the combat distance of warships, and under this judgment, the demand for 12-inch naval guns was very high within the U.S. Navy, and in the face of the rigidity of the Naval Construction and Maintenance Bureau, Chambers was eager to find all the 12-inch naval gun parties to drown these guys with saliva.

"And don't forget, the congressionally approved tonnage cap is 16,000 tons! At such tonnage. It is simply impossible to equip the broadside with 8 10-inch secondary guns! (To be continued......)

PS: Note 1: The Americans' original design plan was still a diamond-shaped arrangement of 6 main turrets, that is, the arrangement of the Nassau class and the Helgolan class. Considering that the Japanese Hanoi class is also arranged in this way, it seems that although this arrangement is inefficient, there is nothing too worth complaining about at that time, and the British have been grasping the layout of the Nassau class after the war and complaining is really ill-intentioned.