When Yue Tuo finished explaining the new defense plan, a group of generals retreated from the hall of the general army in Beizhen. After watching his subordinates leave, Zilharang turned around and wanted to talk to Yue Tuo, and by the way, he asked about the situation in Shenyang. But as soon as he turned around, he was startled, Yue Tuo, who had just been in good spirits to explain military affairs, was pale at the moment, and kept rubbing his stomach with one hand.

Zilharang immediately stepped forward and asked nervously, "Yuetobel, what's wrong with you?" Is there something uncomfortable, do I want to call a doctor for you to take a look..."

Yue Tuo, who was sitting on the chair, stretched out his hand and grabbed Jilharang, who wanted to turn back and call people, and took a deep breath before saying: "Don't call, it's often like this these days, the King of Khan asked the imperial doctor to show me, and it's not a big deal." The imperial doctor prescribed me a prescription, and I went back to let people fry a pair, and I was fine after eating it. Don't spread this little thing, lest the morale of the soldiers below fluctuate, and this battle will be even more difficult to fight. ”

It was only a moment of thought that he understood that what Yue Tuo said was right. In fact, since the Battle of Yizhou, the Ming soldiers who fled when they saw the Manchurians in the field have undergone some changes, and they now dare to stop and look at the number and equipment of the Manchurians, and observe the movements of the other party before slowly turning around and running.

In the past, seeing the soldiers of the Ming army was like a hound seeing a hare, regardless of the Manchurians who rushed forward, after experiencing countless conflicts with the Ming army, now they gradually know how to look at the number of Ming soldiers first, and then decide whether to provoke a conflict.

Although Shenyang and Beijing reached a peace agreement a few years ago, clashes between small groups of troops in and around Yiwulu Mountain have never ceased. The generals of Bukjin and Uiju are trying to see each other's military deployments more clearly, and block the reconnaissance of their side by the other side's scouts.

This also makes it possible for places such as Jinzhou and Jinzhou to remain at a low intensity while the situation is calm, but there has always been a low-intensity armed conflict between Yiju and Bukjin. Shenyang and Beijing have all but turned a blind eye to this, and while each side has often protested each other's provocative actions, neither has tried to restrain their militaries from conflict or escalate it.

Both Shenyang and Beijing seem to use such skirmishes as a window into the combat capabilities of the opposing army, and use the results of each conflict to assess the morale, combat skills and technical equipment of the opposing army, so that their own troops can conduct targeted training.

It's just that as time goes on, the conflict slowly begins to become evenly matched. Even Baturu, the most belligerent of the Manchus, mostly chose to follow the whereabouts of the other side when he encountered Ming troops with little difference in numbers, rather than directly going forward to invite battle.

This change on the front line in Beizhen is also one of the reasons why Huang Taiji took the risk of accepting Fan Yongdou's suggestion to use financial means to quickly accumulate money in order to upgrade the equipment of the army.

Although Nurhachi created a brand-new armed group system of the Eight Banners, the fundamental method of fighting the Eight Banners still originated from the Ming army's operational concepts that he learned from the operations under Li Chengliang.

Elite soldiers charge into battle, ordinary soldiers follow closely behind, break through the enemy army a little, and after causing the enemy's entire line to be defeated, it is constantly chasing and killing the rout, making it difficult to regroup. The elite of the Eight Banners naturally refers to those veterans who are bold and careful and skilled in martial arts. But in addition to the courage and martial arts of these veterans, the most important thing is that the equipment of these veterans is much better than that of ordinary soldiers, and even the weapons and equipment of the Ming generals are inferior to them.

In the era of hand-to-hand combat, sophisticated armor and weapons meant that these veterans had a lot more chances to survive on the battlefield than others. After all, in a melee, most soldiers can cut at the enemy 1-3 times at most, and if they can't kill the opponent, then they will be hacked to death by the opponent.

Although the armor weapons of the Eight Banners came from the capture of the Ming army at first, after the Houjin captured Shenyang, they looked down on the shoddy goods created by the Ming military officer's workshop and began to build their own weapons and armor. In this situation, the Ming army, which was inferior to the Eight Banners in terms of organization, training, equipment, strategy and tactics, naturally became fearful of the enemy.

After Chongzhen ascended the throne, he reorganized the army, set up the General Staff and Logistics Department, and carried out a comprehensive transformation of the official workshop, and the appearance of the Ming army finally had a great change. Especially after the Ming Dynasty started the industrialization process, the various weapons created by the Ming Ordnance Supervision finally have a certain quality assurance.

On the contrary, for Shenyang, after losing the source of fine iron from Shanxi because of the Zhangjiakou Collaboration Case, it had to import inferior iron from the Sihai Trading Company and North Korea. It was originally a handicraft workshop-style Shenyang blacksmith shop, and the quality of the weapons and armor produced had dropped to a higher level.

When there is not much difference in the equipment level of the soldiers on both sides, morale, training, organization, and logistics supply become the core of the contest between the two armies. Training, organization and logistical supply all depend on the level of social productivity of a country.

Since the time of Nurhachi, the social productivity of the Jianzhou Jurchens has been extremely low. It's just that Nurhachi relied on the monopoly of ginseng, mink and other Liaodong specialties to accumulate a lot of wealth and equip his subordinates with sophisticated armor and weapons. As for training and organization, although the Jianzhou Jurchens had begun to settle down, they did not give up fishing and hunting.

Niu Lu, the basic combat unit of the Eight Banners, meant a hunting squad from the beginning. In other words, because of its backward social productive forces, the Jianzhou Jurchens maintained more collective life than the rural areas of the Ming Dynasty. This habit of collective life cultivated since childhood made the Jianzhou Jurchens more suitable for the organizational life of the army, and they were also more likely to obey the discipline of the army.

The Ming Dynasty promoted rural transformation, and after the implementation of the brigade-commune system in the north, it was also changing the living habits of the northern peasants. The education system of primary and secondary schools, the industrialized factories and mines, are gradually integrating the people of the Ming Dynasty into a kind of collective life.

Compared with the primitive collectivism of the Jianzhou Jurchens, this collective life derived from industrial civilization is obviously more purposeful and organized. With the adoption of the compulsory military service law that has been implemented one after another over the past 10 years, the field army has basically eliminated the unqualified soldiers provided by the old military households and guards, and replaced them with a large number of well-proportioned, honest and timid peasants in the north.

These hard-working and disciplined soldiers, coupled with the officers trained by the Army Military Academy, are rapidly transforming the stereotype of the Ming people about the army. The 11th Field Army stationed in Yizhou has a group of high-ranking generals who have participated in overseas military operations, such as Lu Xiangsheng, and their familiarity with the war is not weaker than that of Manchu generals such as Yue Tuo and Zierharang.

From another point of view, the war for the main passes of Yiwu Lu Mountain can actually be regarded as a confrontation between the Ming army that had begun to have an industrial consciousness and the strongest force in the Middle Ages.

In the early days of this war, the Ming army easily gained the upper hand of the Qing army with new equipment such as mortar artillery. However, with Yue Tuo's adjustment of defensive tactics, the advantages achieved by the Ming army in the early stage were suddenly weakened.

However, this change on the battlefield was soon noticed by the lower-ranking officers of the Ming army, who quickly wrote down the situation and reported it to Yan Yingyuan.

Yan Yingyuan immediately convened his staff officers to discuss this, and he said to them: "From the current point of view, mortars and muskets have indeed played a great role in attacking fixed forts. Even in the ambush operation against the Qing army, the mortar cannon can also play an unexpected role.

However, the mortar still has some flaws, such as when the fortress is covered with loess, the lethality of the mortar will be sharply attenuated. In addition, the range of the mortar is too close, so that the opponent can also use small artillery to prevent our troops from setting the mortar in the ideal position, thus greatly weakening the attack power of the mortar cannon.

In addition, now the Qing army sent 20 to 30 small troops deep into the dense forest areas of the mountains, crossed the mountains from some inaccessible places, and launched attacks on the rear forts and military stations of our army.

These small units of the Qing army are supposed to be from Orion backgrounds, and they are extremely familiar with life in the mountains and forests, according to the survivors who survived their encounters. Dressed in light armor, these soldiers were extremely agile and able to walk on steep cliffs.

When they encountered a small force of our army, as long as their number did not exceed three times, they would take the initiative to attack, and most of them began to shoot with long-range bows and arrows, and only after our army lost the ability to resist did they fight hand-to-hand combat. These men are extremely good at shooting and can easily hit targets at a distance of 6 to 70 meters.

The rifles we are using now are difficult to hit targets beyond 45 meters, so it is basically difficult to gain the upper hand in such a counter-fire without sufficient firepower. This was a great blow to the morale of the soldiers, and some soldiers even began to lose confidence in whether the rifle could kill the enemy...

Now I want to know, is there any way you can contain these tactics of the Qing army? ”

Regarding the first problem raised by Yan Yingyuan, the staff officers immediately proposed a solution, that is, to dismantle the 3-jin guns and 6-jin guns and transport them to the mountains, first use these small field guns to control the artillery in the Qing army's forts, and then use mortars to shoot at them.

With regard to the latter issue, apart from revising the position of the troops, increasing the number of patrol troops, and enhancing the means of communication, it was difficult for the staff officers to come up with more effective tactics for the time being for such a small-scale conflict operation.

Until a trainee staff officer from the Nanjing Army Military Academy timidly suggested to Yan Yingyuan: "... Actually, we can try to deal with them with deer hunting guns. ”

Although the young staff officer's voice was about to be drowned out in the discussion of everyone, Yan Yingyuan still heard it with the tip of his ears. He then raised his hand to silence everyone first, and then asked the trainee staff officer, "What deer hunting gun?"

The young staff officer quickly explained to Yan Yingyuan the origin of the deer hunting gun. Since Taiwan was recovered by the Ming Dynasty, Taiwan's abundant deer herd has become the easiest wealth for mainland immigrants.

The whole body of the deer is full of treasures, especially the whole deer skin is extremely valuable, and it is the most desired armor material for the Japanese aristocracy. But it is also extremely difficult to hunt a whole deerskin.

What's more, the mainland immigrants who moved to Taiwan were not all hunters, and they hunted deer with muskets in addition to digging traps. If you want to hunt a herd of deer with a musket, you have to run very close to the herd.

But the deer are small creatures and flee at the slightest hint of the wind, making it difficult for hunters to approach them. Therefore, many people began to use their brains on muskets, trying to increase the accuracy and range of muskets.

Because the muskets of the Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau could not compete with the arms supervisors in the north, they tried to sell their muskets to these Taiwanese deer hunters. In order to increase their accuracy, they began to study how bullets flew after leaving the muzzle, and even consulted Galileo and other members of the Academy of Sciences.

In 1520, Gott, a blacksmith in Nuremberg, Germany, had already invented the linear rifled gun, also known as *. Italy invented a spiral-shaped rifled gun, which can make the projectile rotate and fly stably in the air, improving the shooting accuracy and range. However, the high cost of making the double line and the inconvenience of loading ammunition from the muzzle of the gun made many soldiers did not like to use this firearm.

After understanding the role of rifling, an engineer from the Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau finally developed a method of carving spiral rifling in the barrel of a gun, thus developing a deer hunting gun engraved with two spiral rifling and a range of up to 150 meters.

The deer hunting gun was an instant hit with hunters, and although it was a little more difficult to reload, it was much more accurate.

After listening to the young staff officer's explanation, Yan Yingyuan only asked, "Where is this kind of gun?" ”

"Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau has an office in Beijing, they should have it there, right?" The young staff officer said uncertainly.

Yan Yingyuan raised his eyebrows and said, "Okay, now I'll give you a task to go to Beijing to get a batch of deer hunting guns." If it really works, I would recommend that the General Staff add this firearm to the procurement list next year ...

(. = )