The central manor, which is also on Xuanwu Lake in the core of the new royal city, rumbles of cannon fire soon after. The average water depth is not very deep, only about one zhang deep on the Xuanwu Lake, and the deeper southwest area is only about five feet deep, and the water depth reaches a depth of about two zhang after a lot of manual excavation work in a specific position.

In these positions, there are three new types of sea ships with a displacement of about five or six hundred tons, which is equivalent to about two thousand materials, and these sea ships were only trial-produced after the main expedition of the volunteer army led by Xiao Xuan captured a large number of craftsmen.

Thousands of years of agricultural civilization have made the east with the same number of forests gradually thin, although it has not reached the middle and late Manchu Dynasty or the Republic of China era of bald mountains, but also made the transportation of some timber extremely difficult. With the same craftsmanship and technology, it would have cost almost two or three times the European standard to build and install enough ballast for a sailing ship like the one with its heavy keel and ribs.

On the surface of the water, some small boats that were not too large carried 3,000-pound guns of not too small specifications and launched firepower. Perhaps the recoil effect on a small boat with a small size is too great, and after each fire, the gun emplacement and even the stability of the ship must be adjusted for a long time before it is possible to continue firing.

Some practice during the construction of the navy has shown that the environment at sea cannot be fully simulated on the lake, even for archery training. This is because the firing at sea has completely different characteristics from the firing on rivers and lakes, and the experience required is also different. However, if it is only used for weapons and tactical testing, it is not too much of a problem to require the corresponding hit rate with certain conditions. In the real sea, it is almost about three minutes before there are two shots, and the impact of different specifications on the hit rate has become very obvious.

It took a flotilla of forty-eight small boats with a displacement of 100 tons to fire about 9,600 shells in the fire of about 3,000 pounds of heavy artillery, and it took about a thousand shells to hit the sturdy-looking ships with holes, although they might not sink so easily in the case of human damage, but the hit can roughly make the opponent's ships lose their combat effectiveness due to excessive attrition.

However, if you compare another set of data, it is difficult to reassure that when bombarding a Fukun ship of the same size, due to the lack of an effective keel system, only a similar number of hits of 40% can cause serious damage enough to lead to the loss of combat effectiveness.

This does not represent the whole situation in actual combat, according to some people in the Zheng family. Although Jing'an did not have many regular large sea ships in the West, even when dealing with those armed merchant ships, the fire hit rate in the same situation was often greatly reduced due to the fierce firepower of the opposing sea ships, and they had to fire at a longer distance in similar situations. These factors, combined with the fact that the ability of the far sea to exploit the direction of the wind is completely different, makes it difficult to achieve a real victory even with ten times the strength and tonnage. A few years ago, in a battle with the Dutch, including Liu Xiang's main force, in Liuluo Bay, they were able to effectively approach the opponent's ships and use blasting tactics, and to a large extent, they achieved some results with the help of the characteristics of the Western sea ships in the coastal waters relatively close to the coast, and the advantages of Western sea ships could not be fully exploited.

Recalling the thrilling battle in the Pas-de-Calais at that time, the success of the semi-suicidal rocket ship blasting tactics was largely related to the fact that the wind and waves on the sea at that time were not very obvious. If in the open ocean under normal sea conditions, the speed advantage of the enemy's sea ships can be fully utilized, and even Xiao Xuan cannot guarantee whether similar tactics will be effective.

However, before the large-scale test, Xiao Xuan had some expectation of this situation to a certain extent, so the trial production of rifled guns was also carried out for more than a year.

After obtaining a lot of key talents and even high-quality minerals from Europe, many problems and obstacles have finally been broken through, especially in the manufacture of some spiral rifling and straight rifling processing tools. After all, in the early Renaissance era, some of the more difficult guns were also prepared. It's just that when Xiao Xuan planned to enlarge the rifled weapon to the specifications of field artillery, he still encountered a lot of problems. First of all, if the specification and strength requirements of the boring machine are beyond the scope of direct operation by experienced workers, and only use hydraulic forging hammers or some other methods to process, the yield will be reduced to an unacceptable level.

The final solution is to use iron materials that are not so strong and relatively easy to process as the inner lining, process the caliber of about 1 inch 5, the weight specification is 40 kilograms, and the length of the barrel reaches 50 times the diameter of the inner cen barrel, and then wrap the outer layer of the body tube through a certain toughness of steel skin, and reinforce, and finally make the weight of the body barrel reach about 120 kilograms. This kind of artillery fires about two catties of projectiles until the speed of black powder is almost at the limit, and finally reaches the power of the decent, with dozens of times the muzzle energy of the full-power projectile, it can break the final power of the oak ribs of this era. In addition to the fact that some first- and second-level reinforced style warships do not have enough threat capabilities, the vast majority of third-class sail warships have the ability to launch fire threats at relatively close distances.

Of course, the manufacturing cost will inevitably be more than 10 times higher than that of other similar firearms, and if we add the more expensive rifled projectiles, the cost can almost be compared with some naval guns of about 4,000 catties.

At this time, Xiao Xuan is also very clear that the cost of firearms is still drawn, even if the cost is so high, in a year or so, the core craftsmen of more than 10,000 scales have also trial-produced nearly 100 new rifled guns that can be operated flexibly by two people and reduce the waves as much as possible, so in about three to five years, with the continuous increase in proficiency and even the growth of a new batch of talents, you can have thousands of front-loading rifled guns Armament, not only in naval battle cover may be able to play a major role, It will also allow the use of force to be concentrated in the hands of more reliable people in a way that is not too costly and risky, and some internal security risks can also be greatly alleviated. Perhaps the decisive stage of the foreign invasion of the West will be in three or five years.

(End of chapter)