"Set sail on all ships! Approach while the enemy's sails are still on and engage in melee combat! ”

The Jiangdong Navy must have been the elite division on the water at that time, although it was beaten by more than a dozen rounds of stone-throwing attacks by the Ganning fleet at this time, it was full of ghosts and wolves, but the formation was not very chaotic. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info and with the issuance of Dong Xi's military order, the main sails of these more than 100 warships were immediately sailed to the top, and they approached the Ganning fleet at the fastest speed possible with the advantage of the tailwind.

To tell the truth, the Jiangdong Naval Division, as the top naval division in the world at that time, won the Battle of Chibi before, and they were all arrogant and arrogant, and once upon a time they were pressed and beaten like this and couldn't fight back? So now that Dong Xi's military orders are given, they are all as energetic as clockwork, and they can't wait for their ships to rush under the other party's ship immediately, and then throw the hook and board the other party's ship, and fight face to face with the other party.

Due to the lack of long-range attack methods at that time, and the power was relatively limited, the tactics of water warfare at that time were mainly to suppress with bows and arrows in the medium range, and then engage in close-range hand-to-hand combat on the deck after the broadside. Now that Dong's fleet had received such a blow at a distance of about 200 paces, it was indeed an effective tactic that could exploit the strengths and avoid the weaknesses while the opponent's sails had not yet been raised.

In Dong Xi's view, he now has more than 100 ships and more than 5,000 soldiers; The opponent has sixty ships, and from the perspective of the size of the ships, the total number of people carried should be far inferior to the other side, so if the opponent is approaching the other side and making the opponent's long-range attack ability unable to play, then in the hand-to-hand combat of the fighting personnel, the party can regain the advantage and the initiative.

The idea was not wrong, but Dong Raid made a mistake because he didn't know that the tactical methods of Gan Ning's ships were beyond the scope of water warfare at that time. Now, two hundred steps is not a long distance...... Two hundred steps, about one hundred and forty meters, if it is on land, an ordinary person can run faster, about twenty to thirty seconds can be completed, but for the ships on the water at that time, this was not the case at all.

Sun Wu's ship had to set sail and raise anchor, and even if the people in each post were in place, it would take about two minutes to complete the distance of these two hundred steps. Relatively speaking, this is already very fast, if they encounter other sailors, Sun Wu's navy can directly approach the other party, but what they are now encountering is the old fritter fleet led by Gan Ning, who has been floating on the sea for many years.

On the command platform, Gan Ning saw Wu Jun's sailman starting sail with a telescope, and immediately ordered the ship that had been lined up to start turning around, changing the whole ship to meet the enemy on the right rear sideboard, but the sail still did not rise. Since the power of ships at that time was wind and oar, under the premise that the sails were not raised, the ship had to rely on the cooperation of the wooden oar and rudder on one side to turn around, and the speed of turning around would be slower for large ships.

The other most important point is that although Gan Ning's sixty large and small warships have sails, they do not have wooden oars! Therefore, Dong Xi saw from a distance that Gan Ning's fleet began to turn around slowly, but when the sails were still not raised, he didn't pay much attention to it. Because according to the way of sailing at that time, the speed of Gan Ning's large ships was relatively slow, and according to the current distance, if Gan Ning's fleet had turned around and raised its sails, the more than 100 ships under Lu Meng's command would have already joined Gan Ning's ships.

It's a pity that Dong Xi didn't know that Gan Ning's sixty ships were steam engine and propeller type dual-powered ships, and many times they didn't need to raise their sails at all. And Gan Ning was originally a water thief, and he had been rampant in the northern seas for many years before, and his experience in naval combat was far greater than that of Dong Xi. So at this moment, Gan Ning only had to sweep his eyes, he had already calculated the starting distance of the propeller, and immediately ordered the steam engine power of the whole ship to start at full strength, so when Dong Xi's ship was still twenty steps away from Gan Ning's ship, and Wu Jun was ready to board the ship, he was shocked to find that the other party's ship was moving forward rapidly without raising its sails and rowing without wooden oars, and soon pulled the distance between the two sides to about seventy steps.

At this time, the Ganning fleet did not face the Wu army with the stern of the ship directly behind, but met it with a relatively large firing surface on the rear side. At that time, the effective range of bows and crossbows was generally 50 to 60 steps, and the so-called "100 steps through Yang" referred to the special bows made by generals with strong arm strength, which were not used by ordinary archers. Now the distance between the two sides is seventy paces, and although the arrows of the Wu army can barely reach the ships of the Ganning fleet, they obviously have no lethality at all.

However, on Ganning's side, because it was the rear side to meet the attack, only the third and fourth parts of the second half of those trebuchets could still effectively carry out the catapult attack after turning dozens of degrees, and the first half could not be hit. As a result, the pressure on the Wu warships in the face of the sparse stone-throwing attacks has been greatly reduced, so some of them no longer have any scruples and continue to move forward to prepare to approach the Ganning fleet. After all, he couldn't even return his hands just now, and most of the Wu Jun were pressed with a belly of fire.

However, Dong Raid is not a fuel-efficient lamp after all, and at this time he has already sensed that something is wrong, and Gan Ning's fleet cannot be as simple as a stone-throwing attack. Moreover, under the premise of not setting sail, Gan Ning's speed is basically the same as his own, and he is facing his own side with the right rear side of the ship, which is obviously a prelude to keeping a distance and carrying out medium and long-range attacks. Now that he came to his senses, Dong Xi immediately ordered the troops to lower their sails, and asked the oarsmen to row backwards, preparing not to pursue Gan Ning anymore, and the fleet would retreat some distance first.

It's just that although the military order was issued, when the attack was downwind and the return was against the wind, it was not so easy for these 100 or so ships to turn around and sail back. At this moment, the steam engine power of the whole ship of the Ganning fleet had been fully started and had entered the maximum speed, and the order issued by Ganning was that the whole ship would move forward in a long snake formation to make a right roundabout, and the fleet directly went around the rear of Dong Raid, cutting off the retreat road of Dong Raid.

Perhaps some people often see such a scene, that is, on the battlefield of the cold weapon era, when facing the opponent's infantry group, a certain side will send a strong cavalry unit to forcibly penetrate from the opponent's flank, so as to achieve a tactical purpose of forcibly cutting out a small piece of the opponent's troops in a short period of time, and then the superior forces that can be assembled by the side in this short period of time will eat this small piece of the separated troops.

Gan Ning had been rampant in the north for a few years before, occasionally going to the land to fight the autumn wind, so he had encountered several opponents who used this tactic, but most of these opponents were small Wuhu nomadic tribes who wanted to take advantage of the chaos to pick up some cheap in the area where Cao Yuan was fighting. The cavalry capabilities of these small tribes were okay, but the overall coordination of group operations was too poor, so this tactic was not carried out very successfully.

It's just that although it hasn't been very successful, a little bit of success will still happen. After watching it a few times, Gan Ning participated in research and consideration in his spare time, and slowly successfully transformed this tactic into an interspersed tactic for the naval fleet. Of course, the main thing is that Ganning's steam engine ships are fast and powerful, and they are strong enough. Perhaps it is better to describe it this way, that is, the ships of the Ganning fleet are like heavy cavalry, which can be wantonly attacked and interspersed in the old ship group.

Looking at Gan Ning's fleet when carrying out this order, it always maintained a state of facing the Dong raiding ship formation with the right or left side of the ship, and the trebuchet also unceremoniously threw round after round of stone bullets, which directly caused the left and right flanks of the Dong raiding ship formation to be confused. Not only the stone bullets, but also the firing windows on the middle and lower floors of each ship had been opened, and from the firing windows were one after another thick feathered arrows. These feathered arrows were shot by large crossbows specially equipped on warships.

Didn't Zhuge Liang complete his repeater in the late Three Kingdoms? A crossbow and ten arrows are fired in a row, and you don't have to shoot one arrow to change an arrow, but in general, it is also a single crossbow, and the effective range and lethality are relatively limited, which is not very suitable for real water confrontation.

In modern films, there used to be a lever-type repeater. That kind of repeater does exist in reality, it is not something made up out of thin air, and it is said that it is likely to be a repeater developed by Zhuge Liang. The crossbow bow that was reproduced and reproduced according to the prototype of the historical object is now in a museum.

And Lu Ren and Shirley have the information on hand, and they also have excellent craftsmen with a lot of experience, so they have made further improvements to this kind of repeater according to their own actual situation, and then it has become the semi-automatic machine crossbow used by the Ganning fleet and the city guard.

The first is to increase the size of the crossbow by increasing the bow arm to about one meter, increasing the range and attack power of the arrow by increasing the length of the bow arm and bowstring, and adding pulleys to the chord position at the end of the arm to reduce the physical exertion when shooting the hand string.

Then there was the modification of the structure of the arrow box. The structure of the arrow magazine of the original crossbow was to buckle the short arrows several inches long into the magazine one by one, which was a bit like manually loading the magazine of a modern gun, and the loading speed of the arrows was relatively slow. If this method of loading arrows is for a group of crossbowmen to shoot in groups and multi-stage in normal military array operations, it will naturally have little impact on the density and duration of the arrow array.

However, on ships, especially ships like Ganning, which are about to sail long distances at every turn, it is simply impossible and not allowed to carry an excessive number of personnel on board the ships to carry out multi-stage grouped shooting. If you think about it, the total stowage of the ship is only so much, if there are too many people, where will the cargo be placed? In addition, the food, drink and accommodation of the personnel also occupy a lot of space.

In addition, the space on the ship is limited, and the crossbow is not allowed to be placed too much, if the original crossbow is continued to use the way of putting arrows into the box one by one, then in dealing with the water warfare method of hand-to-hand combat at that time, the continuous shooting of the arrows will definitely appear a large gap, which is relatively small in the single ship personnel, and the Yizhou sailors with poor hand-to-hand combat ability will become the fatal point of defeat...... (To be continued.) )