Those warship designers regarded Li Hui as a genius in warship design, so they didn't think to hide this common sense at all, but they didn't know that Li Hui was just a rookie who had just stepped into the threshold, and he could design such an excellent work with the help of the system......

This discovery immediately led Li Hui to overturn the original design of the Sage-class battle cruiser, because if the ship could be designed to be relatively slender and not affect the speed, the superiority of the diamond-shaped layout would be enough to overwhelm the defects and shortcomings. Pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info

Li Hui knows very well that the reason why the Chinese Navy's strength has miraculously leapt to the top of the world is largely due to the fact that Li Hui seized the gap in the process of upgrading the navy's science and technology, boldly abandoned auxiliary ships, and used almost all of its resources on capital ships. However, this imbalance of naval artillery firepower increased dramatically after the advent of rapid-fire guns, and torpedoes were trapped in power or only had that bit of range, and this imbalance would not last long, and once the torpedo technology broke through the bottleneck, it would be impossible for the Chinese Navy to continue to maintain such a large main fleet, because from then on at least half of the resources would have to be allocated to the construction of auxiliary ships......

In addition, with the widespread application of new technologies such as case-hardened armor, the relative advantage of this battle cruiser is unlikely to be as huge as the previous Haitian class, and the three countries of Britain, the United States and Germany have all begun to engage in an arms race at sea, and the bubble of the Chinese Navy's invincibility will burst in a few years.

Without overwhelming strength, it is impossible to continue to take the line of frontal and hard shouldering, and using the advantage of speed to avoid real attacks and cut off the enemy's sea lines of communication will become a more effective means for the Chinese Navy to deal with a possible strong enemy in the future. However, the operation of breaking diplomatic relations is generally a small formation, or even a single ship action, and the advantages of the diamond-shaped main gun layout are too obvious, which has been fully proved in the naval battles of those two years.

Originally, "under the premise that the ship type is relatively slender", the restrictions on the main guns used in the diamond-shaped layout will greatly weaken its practicability (if there are no other restrictions, when the tonnage is similar and the length-width ratio is large, the main gun firepower of the warship with the diamond-shaped layout [taking into account the caliber, diameter and quantity] is definitely not as good as the layout of the whole central axis, and the gap is very large, at most it can only reach six or seven percent). Even if it is used for breaking the crossing, it is difficult to compete with the layout of the central axis.

However, due to the limitations of system technology, the maximum caliber of the rapid-fire gun currently available to Li Hui is less than 280mm, and the tonnage of the hull can reach up to close to the standard row of 14,500 tons. After all, the cost of the tonnage of warships accounts for only a fraction of the total cost of building ships, and the capital ship with the same 10,000-ton full central axis layout with 8 275mm main guns is less than 10% cheaper than the 14,000-ton diamond-shaped layout capital ship, so the latter is naturally more cost-effective......

The armor is not thick? That's right, the thickness of the main armor of the Sage class battle cruiser is still only 155mm, because this is enough, and any more is just a waste of tonnage.

According to the consumption that Momen has so far mastered, Britain and the United States have not yet developed ******* explosives (ps: to complain, I found that Germany is more patriotic about chemical companies and has done a good job in technical secrecy, while other companies have all disregarded national interests, and even strategically important products such as Krupp armor have actually sold technology patents to Britain in order to make money, otherwise Jutland may really be able to win...... ), which is still using an excessively sensitive picric acid explosive. Before the invention of the cap-piercing shell, if this charge was used, even a 305mm caliber cannon could not penetrate the Krupp armor with a thickness of only 150mm, not to mention that the armor material used in the Sage class battle patrol was no longer the original Krupp surface carburized hardened armor, but an improved version with better performance!

Since the naval technology with a system age of 1900 has not yet been studied, Li Hui does not have a better armor material than Krupp armor. In fact, even if there was a choice, Li Hui would not have chosen it, because the more advanced armor in history was developed for the cap-piercing shells that had not yet appeared at this time, and the non-cap-piercing shells used by the navies of various countries today were not effective (compared to case-hardened armor).

However, the completion of the research of "advanced metallurgy" and "cemented carbide" in industrial science and technology gave Li Hui a bold idea, that is, to use these newly mastered material processes to try out a new type of armor with greater surface hardness than Krupp armor in reality, because this new type of armor is still a case-hardened armor, and it immediately appeared in the optional armor models when Li Hui optimized the warship......

Due to the addition of many important alloying elements that have not yet been applied in alloy steel at this time and more advanced surface hardening processes, the surface hardness of this capital ship armor named "Tianzi No. 1" by Li Hui is terrifying, and the protection ability has naturally increased significantly. Judging from the results of the solid bullet test, the "Tianzi-1" armor can be almost equivalent to 120% of the thickness of the Krupp armor, even if the enemy's armor-piercing shells are changed to blunt elevator aluminum explosives, no more than 305mm caliber, 40 times the diameter of the naval guns are still helpless against it, even if it is fired to a close range of direct artillery fire.

And what even Li Hui didn't expect was that the surface hardness of the "Tianzi No. 1" armor was too high, which led to the nemesis of the case-hardened armor that appeared later - the hard cap armor-piercing bullet was almost completely ineffective (because the hardness of the hard quilt cap was not enough), which had a greater impact......

With such a strong armor protection, the Sage-class battlecruiser can almost completely ignore the threat of naval guns, and only underwater weapons such as torpedoes and mines can sink them, and considering that the bottleneck of torpedo technology should be earlier than the hard cap armor-piercing bullet that requires a breakthrough in material science, Li Hui still attaches great importance to anti-torpedo, but he did not increase the lightning protection next door, but chose a more active way - strengthen the secondary artillery fire to make the enemy's lightning strike ships have no chance to shoot torpedoes at all!

After the caliber is reduced to 105mm, it can use a whole load of shells, and the rate of fire of naval guns has increased greatly, and the ultimate rate of fire can reach 25 rounds per minute, which is faster than that of pull-to-leash rifles, and the number has increased to 16, and its firepower density can be imagined. As for the question of the power of artillery shells, for such a small target as a torpedo boat, even a 105mm caliber blasting shell is enough...... (To be continued.) )