"Lord Wang, what are you doing again?" Wang Dayuan helplessly watched as another of his men was dragged into the dock and began to be transformed.

"Loading the cannon, what kind of power is the artillery, haven't you seen it?" Zhao Weiji looked at Wang Dayuan's ignorance with contempt.

In fact, when Zhao Weiji made the Mauser gun, the birth of artillery would not be too far away, in the process of human history, in fact, artillery was the first to be popularized than muskets, because the power of artillery is too amazing.

However, because of the Mauser gun at the bottom, in fact, when the artillery was brought out by Zhao Weiji, the people in Xinhua City were not so surprised, even if the artillery made a huge pit on the plain a few miles away.

But at that time, everyone regarded artillery as a weapon to attack and defend the city, but no one thought that when the first batch of artillery was cast, Zhao Weiji loaded them on the ship.

"Lord Wang, what are you doing with artillery on the ship?" Since only Zhao Weiji's ships could pass through the route of the Central Plains of Xinhua City, there had been no pirates for a long time, so Wang Dayuan really didn't understand what the purpose of installing cannons on the ship was.

Instead of loading cannons, it is better to save some space to carry some people or goods between the Central Plains and Xinhua City.

"Artillery loaded? Be a pirate. Regarding Wang Dayuan's question, Zhao Weiji replied with some excitement,

Be a pirate? Wang Dayuan's heart at this moment seemed to be rushed by tens of thousands of "divine beasts". What does this prince want to do? Put in the good soil emperor does not want to go to be a pirate?

And judging by his posture, he is ready to do a lot of work, and the ships equipped with this kind of artillery should not be able to defeat any ship in Wang Dayuan's impression of many years of sailing, even if it is the strongest warship that the Great Song Dynasty has now.

At this time, Wang Dayuan saw another novelty. Several more wagons came from the city, on which they pulled several cannon-like things. But the barrels of such cannons are strange, they are shorter than the barrels seen before, and they are not flat, the muzzle of this cannon is aimed at the sky.

"Lord Wang, what is that?"

Zhao Weiji looked in the direction that Wang Dayuan was pointing and saw something strange to Wang Dayuan, so he explained: "That thing, it's called a mortar." ”

"Mortars? What's that? ”

"That's another kind of artillery, I'll show you later." After that, Zhao Weiji shouted to the group of people pulling mortars: "Pull it to the dock, and then hand it over to Lao Zhan, he knows how to install it." ”

After saying this, Zhao Weiji motioned to Wang Dayuan to lead the horse, and then the two of them got on the horse and ran towards a place south of Xinhua City.

When he got there, Wang Dayuan saw all kinds of artillery placed on an open land, and there was a huge factory next to the land.

And then in the distance in front of those guns, there were large and small craters, and there were ruins. From the scene in front of him, Wang Dayuan could guess that this was the artillery range that Zhao Weiji used to test one artillery piece after another.

After entering the artillery field, Zhao Weiji asked people to find a mortar to come over, and then reloaded, after the reloading, he said to Wang Dayuan: "Huanzhang, have you seen that mound?" There are two carts on that mound, can you hit that cart with a cannon? ”

Wang Dayuan looked in the direction that Zhao Weiji was pointing to, and really saw a very high mound there, the height of the mound was six or seven battles high, and there was really a car parked there on the top of the mound, although the car was very simple.

After Wang Dayuan made an observation, he found someone to test fire it with an ordinary artillery, but the shell hit the halfway point of the mound.

Wang Dayuan, who was not convinced, asked the cannon to raise the muzzle to the highest point and fired again, but the shell was still a big difference on the top of the mountain.

Immediately after that, Wang Dayuan, who saw the point of the doorway, asked the cannon to move back and conducted another test firing, this time the landing point moved up a little, but it still failed to hit.

So Wang Dayuan then moved back and conducted several test firings, and each time the impact point was improved to a certain extent, but it was still a little worse.

However, this also gave Wang Dayuan confidence, so he ordered people to move back, but later Wang Dayuan was surprised to find that the bullet point not only failed to improve again, but began to decline continuously, and finally became only able to hit the foot of the mountain.

After seeing that he could only hit the foot of the mountain in the end, Wang Dayuan could only shake his head in disappointment, and then said to Zhao Weiji: "Lord Wang, I can't do it." ”

For this result, Zhao Weiji was actually not surprised, because the ordinary artillery produced in Xinhua City didn't want to hit so high at all. The elevation angle of the artillery in Xinhua City is only 30 degrees.

At this time, Zhao Weiji found the gunner who had just come from, and then asked him to use a mortar to shoot at the top of the mound.

Wang Dayuan watched the whole shooting process from the sidelines, and he only saw that the gunner aimed at the broken car with a strange gesture, and then began to adjust the muzzle of the mortar.

The muzzle of this mortar is very high from the ground, and the whole muzzle is basically facing the blue sky, and I can see that the gunner lowered the muzzle slightly towards the ground, but the muzzle is still basically perpendicular to the ground.

Then he was seen pulling the running rope, and then a cannonball flew out, and then the car was blown up.

As a result, Wang Dayuan didn't understand why the larger artillery didn't blow up the car, while the slightly smaller mortar did.

Zhao Weiji naturally knew that Wang Dayuan's head was full of doubts at this moment, so he decided to give Wang Dayuan a geometry lesson. So he found a stick and drew two drawings on the ground.

The two pictures are roughly the same, with an ordinary artillery and a mound of earth, and a mortar and a mound of earth.

However, the difference was that there were three guns in the artillery pair, and three different arcs were fired from the running holes of the three guns, which fell into three different places halfway up the hill of the mound.

There was only one mortar on the mortar's side, and an arc was born from the muzzle, but the other end of the arc fell to the top of the mountain.

After drawing these two pictures, Zhao Weiji called Wang Dayuan over and asked, "What do these three pictures mean, do you understand it?" ”

Wang Dayuan looked at it carefully, then shook his head and said, "I don't understand." ”

Although Wang Dayuan didn't understand, Zhao Weiji didn't have any chagrin, as if he already knew that there would be such a result, and then he said: "Do you know what is called parabola?" ”

Wang Dayuan shook his head again.

This reaction was still expected by Zhao Weiji, so he picked up a stone on the ground and threw it out, and then asked Wang Dayuan: "What is the trajectory of the stone?" ”

"The trajectory of the stone after it is thrown seems to be an arc."

Hearing this answer, Zhao Weiji nodded with satisfaction, and then continued: "As long as anything is thrown out in a horizontal direction, it will fall to the ground, but the process of falling to the ground will form an arc, and this arc is the trajectory you saw just now, and this trajectory is called a parabola. ”

"Oh, it's called a parabola, so is it possible that the shells fired by artillery also have parabolas?"

Regarding Wang Dayuan's ability to draw inferences immediately, Zhao Weiji nodded more satisfied: "Yes." So Huanzhang went to look at the two pictures just now, can he understand anything now? ”

After understanding the parabola, Wang Dayuan went to look at the two pictures carefully, and then he found that the arcs born from the muzzle of the cannon seemed to be parabolas.

"Lord Wang, are these lines parabolas?"

"yes, and then what?"

"What does the prince mean is that the reason why the artillery can't hit the top of the mound is because this parabola can't reach? Why is that? ”

So Zhao Weiji began to explain to Wang Dayuan about the parabola, as well as the elevation angle of the muzzle, and the relationship between the driving force and the parabola, etc., in short, it was a bit like giving people a middle school geometry lesson.

After Zhao Weiji explained all this, Wang Dayuan finally knew what this mortar does, this mortar can just solve the problem of insufficient elevation angle of artillery, and the mortar can hit where the artillery can't hit.

And not only that, Zhao Weiji also ordered someone to demonstrate the ability of the mortar to hit the target over the wall, and Wang Dayuan saw that the mortar could easily destroy the target behind the wall without destroying the wall.

After reading this, Wang Dayuan finally knew what mortars were for, but a new question arose, since mortars are so useful, what else do you need artillery.

For this question, Zhao Weiji did not answer Wang Dayuan directly, but asked someone to take out the shells of two different artillery pieces for Wang Dayuan to weigh it, and then Wang Dayuan understood why the two kinds of runs existed.

Because mortar's shells are much lighter than artillery's, in this era when the weight of the shell determines the power, the power of the mortar is too different from the artillery.

"If the mortar shell is too heavy, it can't be fired at all, so the artillery has to exist."

"Well, my lord, but you still haven't told me all this, why did you put all these cannons on the ship? Are you really going to be a pirate? ”

"Of course, I'm going to be a pirate, and a big pirate, and the most pirate should be a man's dream. These cannons are the weapons I looted, I'm going to rob them, I read the name of the ship, and when the ship is remodeled, it will be renamed the Black Pearl. I've also figured out the pseudonym I used to be a pirate, so I'll call me Captain Jack in the future. ”

After listening to Zhao Weiji's incomprehensible words, Wang Dayuan really didn't know what to say.