Chapter Eighty-Nine: Advances in Artillery-Making Technology
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However, Ferdinand didn't have the Karen guns at hand. In 1495, Sardinia produced a total of 2,000 18-pound British Kofilin cannons, which was a very high number in the West at that time. But in reality, Ferdinand was very unhappy with this figure.
Quantitatively, it did not meet Ferdinand's needs.
In terms of quality, due to the newness, whether it was Ferdinand's craftsmen recruited from Iberia, or later craftsmen from England, Flanders, Germany and other places, the carbon content control of medium and low carbon steel was not very good.
Technically, due to the difficulty of determining the U-shaped tubes and technical parameters required by the Rodman Cannon Casting Method, despite Ferdinand's greatest help and the fact that the European brick-makers (who were indeed the top experts at the end of the 15th century, but were out-and-out bricks compared to the 19th-century technology) had been working frantically day and night, they could only be put into use at the end of the year.
So far, Ferdinand has only used guns cast by the iron mold casting method, and the natural service life and quality are lacking. But it's still much better than the French. During the Italian War, Aragon's new artillery did not come in handy, as the Aragonese army was mainly engaged in soy sauce and guerrilla warfare, so some shortcomings were not reflected.
However, Ferdinand is naturally well aware of his own defects, so he is now eagerly looking forward to a technological breakthrough, but the good news has come, some reliable U-shaped tubes have been made, and the test of technical parameters has been fortunately solved a lot, and starting next year, it will be possible to mass-produce artillery produced by the two major artillery-making techniques of iron mold casting and inner membrane water cooling technology.
Moreover, gunsmiths, who were familiar with the new technology, were able to forge ten guns a day in teams of ten. Over the course of a year, excluding the time off for holidays, you can cast such a terrifying figure as 3,000 guns. Of course, considering that there are still some deficiencies in technology, and at the same time, Ferdinand is now short of coal and iron, the total amount will definitely be discounted. However, with an annual output of 10,000 artillery pieces, it should not be a problem.
Then, you can get your hands on some other guns. Most of the previous cannons were all 18-pounder British-made Cofflin cannons, pursuing quantity and killing opponents with the sea of "Hongyi cannons". Now there are more of them, and the variety can be more diverse.
The Karen naval cannon is a well-known (relatively) lightweight, powerful naval gun. This cannon was probably invented by British General Melville in 1779, which changed the naval armament of most countries, especially the British Navy. Because this cannon was originally made by the Scottish Cullen Iron Company, it is called the Cullen Cannon.
This is a large-caliber gun with a very short barrel, similar to a howitzer, but it is used to fire solid shells at close range with a small charge. However, it had a short range, so the salvo of this gun was ineffective when firing at long distances, but it could cause very serious damage to the wooden part of the warship when firing at close range: the shells of the Cullen gun, due to their small charge and low flight speed, could cause large bullet holes, and much more seriously damage the wooden part of the ship, causing many particularly dangerous cracks. In Ferdinand's time, the vast majority of ship hulls were made of wood! So this weapon has a big effect.
At the same time, because this gun is relatively light, it is relatively easy to deploy several such guns on the aft, middle and aft decks and foredeck of a warship. According to later statistics, Ferdinand learned that in 1781 the British Navy had 429 warships equipped with six to ten Cullen guns in addition to ordinary guns. The weight of the Cullen cannon is only 30% of that of the "Hongyi Cannon", and the caliber can be even larger.
However, the British did not count the Cullen guns as the main artillery weapons, at least in theory, but as an auxiliary weapon, because during the war with France and the United States, the British did not count the Cullen guns in the total number of warship guns, for example, a British cruiser marked the number of guns as 36, this number does not include the six Cullen guns it carries, or more, so in fact it has 42 or more guns that can be used in battle.
During the French Revolution, in naval battles with the French Navy, British warships had an advantage in the weight of the shells fired during the fullboard salvo due to the use of Cullen guns, which allowed the British Navy to win many victories in close combat.
However, from the perspective of the times, the Cullen gun was still a weapon to strengthen the combat effectiveness of those smaller warships in the early 18th century, and the leading role of the long gun could not be replaced, and its accuracy was even higher in calm water.
Of course, there are few calm days in the stormy Atlantic, and in the Battle of Lake Erie, on the calm waters of the inner lake, the U.S. Navy used long guns to strike British warships more accurately than Cullen guns beyond the range of the Cullen guns, and achieved good results.
Later, as the size of warships at all levels increased, the Cullen guns began to be discontinued and replaced by other types of guns.
However, the glory of the Cullen cannon was not over, as an improvement of the Cullen cannon, in 1820, the French general Péxant had an invention of great significance for the armament of the navy. He designed a large-caliber gun with a narrow chamber at the end of the cannon, called it "canons obusiers", and began to use this "cannon with explosive shells" to fire hollow shells at small angles of fire, and its lethality was superior to that of the new design and the technology of the explosive projectiles.
Although there had already been a flat fire in Germany with explosive shells with 24 or 12-pounder cannons, and Napoleon was well aware of the destructive effects of explosive shells when they hit the wooden side of a warship, he equipped most of the gunboats intended to attack Britain in Toulon with howitzers, and established a rule that warships should be shot with shells that exploded after they had been hit. But until the beginning of the 20s of the 19th century, only the howitzers of the shore defense batteries had fired at warships with hollow shells.
At this time, the advent of the Pexan's cannon that fired explosive shells, the "Pexan cannon", allowed warships to launch hollow explosive shells at the lowest elongation trajectory for ship-to-ship naval warfare, and the hit rate of the Pexan cannon was not lower than that of the old guns that fired solid shells. Therefore, the Pexan cannon has always been an important weapon for large warships in the early 19th century.
For Ferdinand's time, all the advantages of the Cullen and even the Pexan were more obvious, and the "limitations" of the Cullen - the shorter range and suitability for small warships were not a problem at this time, because the large warships of today were not comparable to the British cruisers of the American Revolutionary War. Of course, Ferdinand could not quickly pursue a large caliber short range, and now he is still leaping from low to high step by step, first producing a 12-pounder Cullen naval gun in 1496, anyway, the application of inner membrane controllable cooling technology has greatly improved the quality, strength and service life of the artillery, Ferdinand's medium-caliber artillery is even more powerful than the enemy's slightly larger caliber artillery.
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