The second floor of the Prince's Palace is very lively, because March 1 is the day of public bidding for the construction of various types of warships of the German Federal Navy. Ship berthing manufacturing enterprises from all over the country have come to the bidding, and the orders for shore defense ships that the giants usually look down on, such as kayaks, speedboats, patrol boats, etc., have become sought-after loans, and mosquitoes are small but also meat.

There were a lot of bidding enterprises, and the military collected them one by one for temporary storage.

Dietrich von Schoken, as a newly transferred army general to the navy, participated in the whole process, he did not speak much, and few colleagues around him spoke to him, a big reason is that the new recruits were transferred, and everyone was not familiar with each other, on the other hand, some people looked down on those who climbed by family prestige. Many people think that he climbed to his current position by virtue of his connections, but completely ignore his many meritorious deeds and heroic wounds in the Great War.

"Hello, sir." Just when Sauken felt marginalized, a colonel approached him and hurriedly greeted him.

"Major, anyone?" The person who came was Siriakos, who asked, pointing to the abrupt empty seat next to Sauken.

"No one else, sir, please be seated." Sauken immediately stood up and gave a military salute.

"Okay Major, don't call me sir, here, the colonel is just a 'ticket'." Siriakos laughed at himself in front of an unfamiliar subordinate, and then swept his eyes over the first two rows. The lowest rank there was a rear admiral, and there were a number of well-known senior admirals such as Admiral Reinha Scher, Field Marshal Franz von Hipper, and Marshal Tirpitz and Henin.

The envy of Siriacos is the youngest of them, Gonse Lütjans, who is Eric's chief of naval finance and is in charge of tens of billions of naval funds.

Also thanks to Eric's appreciation and promotion, Siricos' promotion to colonel is also a recent thing, and Eric has the intention of making him the captain of the first aircraft carrier. There are pros and cons to such an exceptional promotion, and the advantages are naturally needless to say, the disadvantage is that he and Sauken received the same cold reception, but Sauken was transferred to the presidential nomination, and Siriakos was promoted by exception.

The two had the same experience and the same feelings about the development of the navy, so they chatted.

Unconsciously, the bidding meeting in the morning has ended, and according to the meeting requirements of the owners and bidders, the list of winning bidders has been announced in accordance with the "target" drawn up by the experts of the Ministry of National Defense. Since Germany's coastline is now on par with Italy's, the north, from the Netherlands in the west, to Estonia in the east, and to the south, because of the annexation of Austria, has gained a large part of the route to the Adriatic Sea.

According to the needs of the territorial waters of the German Confederation, the number of coastal defense ships today is more than four times higher than that of Germany before World War I, and this is only to basically maintain the Navy's needs for coastal defense.

After the bidding for these so-called "mosquito meat" projects was completed, the real big arms purchase orders began. Before bidding for such ships, the Navy first explains the performance indicators of such ships to the bidders, with a view to improving and improving them during the construction process.

The officer who gave the lecture was Marshal Haining.

The 12 large destroyers, codenamed "Z-21", are different from the previous habit of using TBDs, allowing the Navy to be more clear about the functions that their models replace. The Federal Navy used "Z" to name this type of ship, and the previous TBD should be correctly called a torpedo boat sabotage ship, which is literally clear at a glance.

TBD: By German standards, the initial combat mission of this type of destroyer was to drive, deter, and destroy the enemy's approaching capital ships, or to attack the enemy's approaching torpedo boats from a long range, while also carrying torpedoes and torpedo enemy ships.

Unexpectedly, the ship that was supposed to be a torpedo destroyer turned out to be a good hand at dropping torpedoes. Destroyers of this class are much larger than torpedo boats, loaded with a greater number of torpedoes and of a larger caliber. At the same time, this type of warship is smaller than large ships, fast, has a small bomb area, and is flexible and maneuverable, making it the best alternative to torpedo boats.

The Z-21 scheme redefined the first program for this type of ship, and the 12 destroyers also had different classes; The four standard combat destroyers (i.e., the prototype with artillery as the main attack weapon) belong to the attack type, which strikes mainly at sea and can also strike at the shore. Four escort destroyers, which can escort fishing and escort, can strike at sea and from shore. The four torpedo destroyers, which are mainly attacking torpedo boats, can also attack other large warships at sea. The names of the three are different, and there is a clear distinction in combat skills, and the prototype ship of the destroyer is higher than the latter two types of battleships in terms of single-ship artillery strike power.

The prototype ship had five 127-mm twin naval guns, arranged along the ship's central axis, with three front guns and two rear guns. Turret 1 is on the foredeck, and turret 2 is immediately behind; The No. 3 turret is actually called the middle main gun and is located on the second floor in front of the conning tower, the No. 4 turret is knapsack next to the second aft deck, and the No. 5 turret is on the aft deck.

With a length of 110 meters and a width of 12 meters, the overall design of the Z-21 allowed the Z-21 to abandon the idea of carrying torpedoes while ensuring the intensity of firepower, but the twin turrets occupied a large number of positions and strengthened the anti-aircraft rate of fire fire due to the use of the countersunk system. Whether this design can achieve the maximum value of striking the enemy still needs to be further tested after launching sea trials, and it is impossible to see the problem with a piece of data after all.

The prototype ship has no torpedoes, lacks the ability to kill large ships with one hit, and when attacking large ships, it can only strike at the enemy's equipment and personnel in the warehouse, or run and support from a long distance, and his goal is to implement the function of "expelling". The 127-mm twin naval gun is 38 times the diameter, supplied by Krupp, and has a range of up to 15 km. Due to problems with the reloading system, the high-level dual-purpose design was abandoned when obtaining a higher rate of fire and only flat fire (shelling of surface targets).

Due to the requirements of the rate of fire, manpower and semi-automatic reloading were no longer desirable, and instead of an automatic reloading system used in the LSF field gun, electric drive, with a rate of fire of up to 60 rounds per minute, it became his forte to combat small surface ships and ships of the same class.

In order to make this kind of gunboat more lethal, the turret is also electrically driven, with a speed of 30 degrees per second, even if the torpedo boat approaches the side of the ship at high speed, the turret can keep up, and the torpedo speedboat can never get close to this situation, because the torpedo boat is the nemesis of large surface ships, so it must be eliminated in advance when the torpedo is close at a long distance to ensure the safety of large ships. Of course, the design was only to make the artillery fire more flexible, and at such a fast speed, to compensate for the unfavorable situation when seizing the position. As for whether it is necessary to meet such a requirement, it needs to be tested in real combat or during live-fire training. The naval version of this gun was designated as the SK-21 127C/38 and was equipped with armor-piercing shells to deal with light cruisers, grenades against small ships, destruction of large ship surface structures and killing deck personnel.

Such a high rate of fire certainly requires a sufficient bomb load to support it. In order to ensure more space for bombing, the hull of the Z-21 is a hybrid skeleton structure, with a double-layer bottom, welded construction, 30 longitudinal skeletons from high to low, ensuring 15 per side, evenly arranged along the hull from bow to stern. In addition, 15 transverse skeletons are placed below the hull deck as supports.

The arrangement of the skeleton determines that the Z-21 has a watertight zoning structure with excellent performance, 10 watertight rooms and 8 oil-tight rooms, and each compartment is also equipped with a tightly seamed watertight door, so that when the ship is injured in battle, it can use the watertight door to give up the battle-damaged warehouse after emergency isolation, so as to ensure the survivability of the ship and the safety of the crew. Compared with ships in other countries, this layout will improve the damage management capacity a lot.

The extra compartment was expected to hold 2,500 127-mm naval gun shells, which was also due to the length of the countersunk shell, which was one-third shorter than the bottle shell.

The thickness of the hull armor is positioned at least 25 mm, which is only armor for dealing with sea conditions.

In order to work with aircraft carriers, this gunboat needs to be faster to meet the support requirements, the most remembered speed index is set at more than 36 knots, the endurance can reach up to 6,000 nautical miles, can meet the requirements of the William Naval Base or Kiel Naval Base after the departure of the Mediterranean Lampedusa military base, without the need for resupply, can continue to fight for 6 hours without stopping.

As an indispensable power system on the ship, the solution provided by the Navy is that the steam turbine is the main engine and the diesel generator emergency plan complement each other, the former can ensure that the power needs of the whole ship are met in wartime, and the latter can be used in an emergency when the former is incapacitated, insisting on fighting or withdrawing from the battlefield.

The prototype ship that overemphasized the performance of the main gun made the navy have to abandon the high-level dual-purpose secondary gun used in order to strengthen the fire projection, and instead use the Flak-18 anti-aircraft gun provided by Rheinmetall, with an inner diameter of 37 mm, an effective fire height of 4,200 meters, fully automatic ammunition feeding, and can effectively hit low-altitude and high-speed targets, and the whole ship is equipped with a total of 10 such anti-aircraft guns, 4 on each side and one at the front and rear, which are placed between the main guns, and cannot provide effective air defense support to friendly forces except for self-defense weapons at close range.

The standard number of crew members is 298, and the full number of posts is 320. The post includes various departments, except for a rotating team, the rest of the crew can still open all the equipment of the whole ship in combat, which shows that automated weapons save a lot of human resources.

Such a high standard of requirements, naturally, will not be too low in tonnage, and the Admiralty finally decided to have a displacement of more than 3,000 tons, in order to be suitable for the rational assembly of strike equipment.

At this time, this was already the tonnage of a light cruiser.

The Z-21 completely subverted the previous shipbuilding standards in Germany and even the world, and the process requirements were much higher than in the past.

Dietrich von Schoken and Siriacos listened attentively to Vice Admiral Lütjans's narration, and finally had some substantive understanding of Eric's military strategy, especially Sauken, who never thought that the equipment of the navy was not as simple as he imagined, compared with the army, the technical nature of the navy can completely measure the overall strength of a country's science and technology.