Perhaps the method of cheating military funds had an effect, and soon after, the Qing court really allocated an additional 4 million taels of silver to Beiyang to purchase ships, although the amount could not be compared with the desperate Japanese government, but it still made the Beiyang Navy Division deeply surprised.

However, how to use the 4 million taels of silver has sparked a fierce debate at the top of the Beiyang Naval Division.

According to Admiral Lin Taizeng's idea, since the silver is limited, it is not necessary to force the purchase of too good warships, but to buy one or two cheap second-hand goods, and then use the remaining silver to complete the warship modification plan that was delayed due to lack of funds, which is the most cost-effective.

Judging from the performance parameters of the newly purchased ships of the Japanese Navy, the rebuilt Japanese Combined Fleet will have a formation speed of no less than 16 knots, and if the four new defense patrol ships with faster speed are extracted from the separate formation, it can reach more than 22 knots. In the face of such a high-speed fleet that comes and goes like the wind, the tactics we used in the Battle of Dadonggou have become meaningless, even if the Zhijing 2nd ship is ventilated under strong pressure, it is difficult to catch up with the four new high-speed defense cruisers of the Japanese army, even if they have been seriously damaged, while the rest of the Japanese ships are either insignificant weak ships and have no value in pursuit, or they are armored cruisers that are difficult to sink and may not have a chance to pursue. Therefore, if we just use this money to tinker, even if we can win again in the next decisive battle of the main force, it will be difficult to sink the Japanese capital ship, and then the Japanese will go back to repair it, and then they will be able to come out again to make trouble, and with our limited funds, we cannot afford to fight a war of attrition in any way, and if we can't hit it hard in one battle like last time, we will definitely lose in the end."

Although Liu Buyun has always been bold, the practical difficulties are there, so he does not dare to easily accept Deng Shichang's proposal, "Zhengqing means to buy two high-speed defense patrols with a maximum speed of 22 knots, at least more than 20 knots?" But now that the arms embargo of the European powers has not been lifted, where can we buy such a new type of warship? What's more, we were able to achieve miraculous results by dividing our forces during the Dadonggou period, because the Japanese Navy mainly used black powder blasting shells and smoke launches, and at the same time, there were no ironclad giant ships that could compete with the Dingzhen Second Ship, and our hard power had an absolute advantage, and even if we divided a part of our forces, we didn't have to worry about not being able to withstand the main battlefield; But in the next decisive battle, the Japanese may have completely replaced the new ammunition, even if it is still inferior to us, the gap will not be too big, and their advantage in the number of rapid-fire guns and the total tonnage of warships is greater than that of Dadonggou, plus they also have a new armored cruiser 'Captain Pratt' that is more powerful than the second ship of Dingzhen, if we still repeat the old tricks, it is likely that the main battlefield will be defeated by the enemy because of insufficient strength, and if the main battlefield is lost, what is the meaning of the so-called surprise soldiers? Zhengqing, as you just said, our warships are much slower than the Japanese, and once we are defeated, we will be completely annihilated! So you must win head-on battles! ”

"It is better to have such a warship, which has strong firepower and defense, can be incorporated into the main fleet to participate in a frontal decisive battle, and has a speed that is not much slower than the new defense patrol, and can catch up with the injured and escaped Japanese ships, so that the problem will be solved. By the way, such a warship should still be used to break diplomatic relations and protect shipping routes, because the warships that have beaten her cannot catch up with her, and the warships that can catch up with her are not her opponents at all", Admiral Lin Tai once sighed with a wry smile, but he did not know that he had inadvertently proposed the concept of "battle cruisers".

And Lin Tai never expected that just three days later, a perfect warship would really be born in the world

After listening to Zhou Chunyu's introduction, Liu Buyun's eyes widened in disbelief, if it weren't for the venture capital company's products that had initially established credibility, he would definitely suspect that the other party was making up to tease him

Although it is not the first time to use the optimization function, it is basically a single type of weapon before, the process is simple, and the improvement is relatively small, and the composite weapon of the warship is different, it took Li Hui more than 30 hours before and after, and its performance compared with the prototype The improvement is far beyond Li Hui's initial estimate, even if the current progress of the system technology tree related technology is still before 1890 AD (the historical invention time is generally before 1900)

In the final analysis, this is because the end of the nineteenth century was the fastest period of replacement in the history of warship development, and a large number of new technologies and new designs sprung up, so that many warships were already backward when they were still on the slipway, and even classic models such as the Garibaldi-class armored cruiser did not make full use of many technological achievements that had actually matured at that time, so there was a lot of room for improvement

The Garibaldi-class armored cruisers were historically known for their firepower and tonnage utilization, but when Li Hui compared her armament to the best available models, he found that almost everything needed to be replaced.

First of all, the main gun, the lead ship of the Garibaldi-class armored cruiser uses a single-mounted Armstrong 10-inch main gun, with one front and one in the front, but this naval gun is actually not a rapid-fire gun in the real sense, the theoretical maximum rate of fire is only 1.5 rounds / min, and because there is no perfect armored turret, it is easy to be interfered with by enemy gunfire in actual combat, and the continuous rate of fire is at most 1 round per minute.

Among the naval gun models available for the selection of the system, most of the top performance models are French products, which fully demonstrates the deep heritage of the French in artillery design.

The most powerful of these was the French Type 1898 274mm rapid-fire gun. The bullet weighs 262 kilograms but can still reach a terrifying rate of fire of 3 rounds per minute, and the gun is light in weight, long range, high accuracy, and perfect in all aspects, fully demonstrating the unique artillery design ability of the French.

Originally, there was a shorter life of the body tube in France, but because of the system optimization, it can be easily solved by using materials and processes from other countries. So at first glance, it was clear that this naval gun was the first choice for the main guns of new ships.

But the problem is that the caliber of 274mm is really not embarrassing, it is too small as the main gun of a battleship, and it can only be installed with 1 at most as the main gun of a cruiser and does not reflect the advantage, coupled with the current weak domestic infrastructure, even the two major bases of the Beiyang Navy can only berth warships with a draft of more than 6 meters at most, not to mention other ports, such harsh objective conditions limit Li Hui's optimization of the size limit of warships, resulting in 274mm rapid-fire guns are useless at all