Chapter 180: The First Battle with a New Weapon
With a "bang", the wood was easily cut off by Li Su's Mo knife. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info is a refreshing feeling.
Cheng Chumo and the others also had a good time, they checked the blade, and it was indeed not damaged at all.
In the early years of the Tang Dynasty, the Tang army was not equipped with a large number of Mo knives, mainly because of the lack of steel and backward processing technology.
Li Su has the help of Taobao system, and Taobao has come to the cubic boron nitride (CBN) grinding wheel series to cut and polish the artifact. These grinding wheels have no electricity, but the craftsmen have installed a handle on them, which is also convenient to use. The processing speed has been greatly improved.
Li Yu searched Baidu and found a very powerful weapon in the era of cold weapons - the English longbow.
Longbows are generally about 5 feet (1.5 m) long, roughly eyebrow-length, and some are 1.8-2 m long, which is longer than the 4-foot bow common in Europe. The back of the bow is bent from a whole strip of wood, and the best bows are made of yew wood, which is hard and elastic. Hard materials such as elm, ash, and oak are also available alternatives, but they are always less performant. During the Hundred Years' War between England and France in the 14th-15th centuries, the longbow was the main battle weapon of English archers.
The longbow shoots arrows up to about 300 meters (a very long distance in ancient weapons), that is, it can achieve the effect of a "barrage", when the own soldiers charge ahead, the rear longbowmen can still release high parabolic arrows to attack the enemy's upper part.
The weakness of the horses comes from the attack from above, and most of them have no armor, so once they are injured, they will become difficult to control. And even at a limit distance of three hundred meters, conical arrows can penetrate ordinary chain mail.
The longbow fired clusters of arrows with a maximum range of up to 400 yards (360 meters), the standard bow and arrow in the Don army had a maximum range of 250 meters, and the usual effective range was 150 meters.
The arrows of the longbow can penetrate leather, padded mail and fabric, or penetrate chain mail at distances of 240-280 yards (about 220-260 meters). At a distance of 200 yards, plate or fish scale armor can withstand its penetration; And a frontal hit within 100 yards can't even resist plate armor; At a range of 50 meters, the longbow and arrow can be said to be indestructible.
The longbow is better than the crossbow on the battlefield, mainly because of its fast rate of fire. In terms of firepower density, the combat effectiveness of one longbowman is at least equal to that of three crossbowmen. A qualified archer can shoot 12 arrows in a minute, and if it is a random burst of arrows, the rate of fire can be increased to 15, and some perverts can even shoot 20 arrows. By 1866, the breech-loading Dreisers of the Austro-Prussian War were only half as fast as that.
With such a rate of fire, if 1,000 people shoot collectively, tens of thousands of arrows can be fired in one minute, which is amazingly powerful.
Longbows also have a feature - they are simple to make and inexpensive.
Li Su made improvements to the longbow, mainly in the production of arrowheads, using three-edged arrow tips, which have stronger armor-piercing power. In addition, two size standards of 1.6 meters and 2.0 meters have been determined.
Another invention of Li Yu was the sapper shovel.
These two new technologies have also set up a new production plant.
After reporting to Li Shimin for approval, 1,000 officers and soldiers were dispatched by the Yinshan Prefecture to conduct a drill on new weapons. It is scheduled to be reviewed by Li Shimin in Chang'an on October 20 this year.
In order to exercise the abilities of Du He, Cheng Chumo, Wei Chi Baoqi, and Yang Kang, Li Su made them accept this reading task.
Du He and Cheng Chumo were in charge of practicing the Mo Dao Formation.
Yu Chi Baoqi and Yang Kang were in charge of rehearsing the longbow formation.
There is also that Zhao Dashan, who is in charge of the sapper drill.
Li Su's youthful temperament reminded him of the military parade in later generations and wanted to have fun.
With Li Ji's cooperation, the troops under review were quickly in place, and half of Li Ji's energy was focused on this.
Li Ji stayed in Yunzhou for half a month, and returned to the Yinshan Metropolitan Protectorate with a batch of Mo knives and longbows. Soon, the power of new weapons such as the longbow was tested.
The deputy envoy of the Western Turks, because he instigated some Xue Yantuo people to defect to the Western Turks, has now been promoted and has become the general of Xining (northeast of Jiayuguan), bordering the western marching road of the Yinshan Protectorate of the Tang Dynasty.
In order to undermine the Tang Dynasty's control of the Xue Yantuo tribal area, he often sent people across the border to make trouble.
Li Su is now the ambassador of the Steppe Affairs, and he has given orders to resolutely fight back against the challenge of the Western Turks at any time.
On this day, Gao Min, the head of the Xinglin Lake Guard, received a report that a group of Western Turkic troops was making trouble on the border, and they had crossed the border to rob several herdsmen, and there was a clash with the Tang army patrol.
Gao Min immediately gathered 600 Tang troops and went to the accident site.
Before I arrived at the accident site, I saw more than a dozen corpses lying in front of the herdsmen's yurts on the road, which was very miserable. The officers and men of the Tang Army were all angry, and they were in a hurry to find the Western Turks and fiercely clean them up.
Soon they were near the border and found those Western Turks.
The Western Turks were very arrogant, and they were on this side of the Tang border, proudly waiting for the Tang army to appear. They are bold because there are more than 2,200 of them.
When the Western Turks saw the arrival of the Tang army, they immediately lined up and prepared to fight. The Don army also began to line up, and the two sides began to confront each other.
The Western Turks, relying on their large numbers, shouted and provoked from a stone's throw away.
After a standoff of about 30 minutes, Gao Min, the commander of the Imperial Palace, ordered the Tang army to prepare for shooting.
At this time, the Western Turks laughed even more happily, they thought that the Tang army was sick, and they opened their bows and arrows from a place of arrows, which was clearly to scare people. Unfortunately, their notion of a stone's throw is wrong.
The first round of shooting of the Don Army began. 100 long-range archers armed with 2-meter long bows, from 300 meters away, the first row of arrows flew in, and no less than 30 Western Turks fell.
The Western Turks couldn't imagine that the arrows of the Tang army could shoot so far, and they panicked. Before they could react, the second row of arrows arrived, and a dozen more soldiers were shot.
Most of the Western Turks wore leather armor, and the triangular arrows fired from the longbow were like papier-mâché.
Seeing that the other side was small, he ordered all of them to charge and fight hand-to-hand with the Tang army. The Western Turks then charged.
The Tang soldiers also had 300 1.6-meter longbows, which they fired non-stop at at a flat rate.
The soldiers, who wielded 2-meter bows, used projectiles and continued to strike at the Western Turkic army behind.
The Western Turks were very depressed, they did not understand, and the Tang army did not seem to need to take arrows and draw their bows again, and the arrows kept coming.
It turns out that this kind of archery is a three-stage shot.
Three-stage firing was an arquebus tactic that emerged in the 16th century, which compensated for the slow firing speed of muskets when they could not fire continuously. In both the Ming Dynasty and Japan, there were records of three-stage strikes. This method of firing was a fast, sustained and effective method of firing when the burst firearm was not invented.
According to the "History of the Ming Dynasty", Mu Ying, a general who pacified the south (Yunnan) in the early Ming Dynasty, first used firearms to deal with rebels, elephants and other beasts, and felt that the gunpowder loading speed was too slow and improved a tactical shooting method. Specifically, a group of three people fired at the front of the group, then retreated to the rear of the line to concentrate on reloading, and the second soldier stepped forward to fire. Three people alternate reloading and firing, tripling the efficiency of arquebuses that would otherwise take a minute or more to shoot at a time! Approximate European semi-maneuver tactics.
In order not to leave a gap for shooting, Li Su introduced this tactic to the shooting technique of the longbow.
From the beginning of the launch, it took about 20 seconds for the cavalry of the Western Turks to rush to the Tang army, and it was these more than 20 seconds that hundreds of casualties had already been inflicted on the Western Turks.
The Western Turks were extremely fierce, relying on a large number of people, and still pounced on them despite such heavy casualties.