While the navy and army of the Republic of Seris were attacking cities and plundering land on the East Dutch Islands, on the island of Sumatra, the Dutch colonial governor of Lampung Port. Chelson is also in a hurry.

Since a month ago, Dutch shipping between the entire colony of the Indonesian archipelago in the South Seas had been cut off by the sea power of the Serisians, and some ships were sunk not long after they left the port......

The war between China and the Netherlands on the Nanyang Islands not only made Seris's naval surface ships shine, but also turned the world's attention to an underwater combat weapon that they did not attach importance to for the first time -- submarines!

The submarine weapon can be traced back to the American Revolutionary War in the late 18th century, when the rebel armies in North America invented these first underwater ships in order to counter the British Navy's Invincible Armada. According to its inventor at the time, David Murray. David Bushnell's design shows that the entire American-made submarine can dive to about 30 minutes below 6 meters below the surface after filling a specific cabin with water. At that time, the power of the submarine was still very primitive, and after ruling out the possibility of steam power, the American Bushnell finally installed two hand-cranked propeller facilities on the submarine, and under the full operation of an adult man, this early submarine was able to achieve a sailing speed of about 3 knots underwater.

By the mid-to-late 19th century, some people in Western Europe began to try to install steam boilers into submarines to create non-human chemically powered submarines. But at that time, such attempts were mostly the private actions of individual inventors, and the naval circles of various countries during this period did not accept this non-mainstream naval combat weapon, in their opinion. Submarines, such ships that can sail underwater, are undoubtedly evil. In fact. Even on the eve of the First World War, where submarines were greatly developed. The submarine weapon is still considered a "non-gentlemanly" sneak attack weapon, and submarine seamen are punished with capital punishment for piracy after they are captured by the enemy.

Even in such an environment in which world public opinion is generally unfavorable, the submarine weapon has not stopped its own development...... Driven by the rapid development of modern science and technology, by 1878 A.D., the American John . Holland had already invented a modern steel submarine equipped with fish weapons and powered by a gasoline internal combustion engine.

Interestingly, John. Holland, an Irish-American, initially developed submarines for exactly the same purpose as the Cerris Navy in Asia, both to deal with the British Navy, which dominated the world's oceans. With the support of the "Fenian Society", formed by a number of local Irish revolutionaries in exile in the United States. John. In 1881, the Holland-II submarine was successfully equipped with an underwater balance rudder design for the first time, which made the subsequent submarines more stable in underwater navigation and operation. By the end of the 80s of the 19th century, Holland's submarines had aroused the interest of the navies of many countries around the world, and the United States, Germany, Seris, Sweden and other countries had successively purchased a number of submarines produced by Holland for their own research and development and operations.

By 1890, the shipyard of the French built a large submarine with a displacement of 490 tons. Zid", and later in the country's naval exercises, the sneak attack "sank" the French battleship "Saint-Brieus", with a full load displacement of more than 9,000 tons, after the news came out, the world was suddenly sensational! Since then. Countries around the world seem to recognize the true value of submarines, and have begun to invest heavily in their own submarine-related research and development projects. Britain, the United States, and France later built many of their own naval submarines, and among them, the submarine development of the Far Eastern Seris was particularly rapid.

Compared to other countries in the world, the Republic of Seris is also the first naval country to be equipped with submarines on a real scale. Now, after nearly a decade of development, the submarine force of the Seris Navy immediately shocked countries around the world as soon as it appeared.

Strictly speaking, in addition to the Drop-type Tang-class submarines that were successfully developed by Chen Zeyu under the "guidance" of Chen Zeyu in the later period, the early bow-type Sui-class submarines were actually not much more advanced than the submarines of other countries' navies. In this Dutch-Indian War against the Dutch colonial authorities, it was this seemingly not advanced Sui-class combat submarine dispatched by the Seris Navy that still alarmed the rest of the world's naval powers, one of the biggest reasons is that the Seris submarine is equipped with a new type of thermodynamic long-range weapon that has been successfully developed and put into actual combat for the first time, the steam gas torpedo!

Before the appearance of Seris's thermodynamic torpedo, the maximum range of the White bald torpedo equipped by the navies of European countries was generally around 1500 to 2000 feet, which was converted into a metric system of about five or six hundred meters, not only the range was extremely limited, but the launch speed of the white-headed torpedo that relied on compressed air to propel the navigation was also pitiful, only less than 20 knots, and it was not impossible to go faster, but it would inevitably accelerate the consumption of the compressed air stock inside the projectile itself. As a result, the range of naval battles, which was not considered "redundant" in the first place, was reduced. Prior to this, when the naval fleets of various countries wanted to use torpedoes to attack enemy ships, most of them had their own light ships (lightning strike ships, which gradually developed into modern destroyers) in the fleet to risk sailing within the range of the enemy's capital ships' rapid-fire naval guns in order to carry out torpedo attacks that were not very effective.

For this reason, torpedoes, although their own power is far greater than that of small and medium-caliber guns of various warships, has not been able to become the main combat weapon of the navies of various countries for a long time. Later, some of the world's major naval powers even gave up on assembling torpedo tubes on their capital ships, and gradually used the torpedoes of the past as a simple means of sneak attack in night battles...... But the new gas torpedoes equipped by the Seris Navy completely subverted the situation!

Compared with the old white-headed torpedoes in the West, the gas fish of Seris not only has a much greater range than the other side, but its maximum range is as high as 2940 meters, which basically reaches the direct range of the main guns of most naval ships of this era, and other than that. The speed of the new gas fish has also increased. Its underwater travel speed of 35 knots (about 65 km/h) is enough to pose a non-negligible threat to the lead ships in the naval sequence of various countries today.

After the advent of this Type 95 gas torpedo. It immediately became the main battle equipment of light and heavy surface ships and submarines of all fleets in the Seris Navy, and soon replaced the old Type 90 imitation White torpedo. The Type 95 gas torpedo was first equipped with domestic Taiwan-class cruisers and Sui-class submarines, and after 1897, all levels of combat ships produced by the Seris domestic shipyard, including the Jiaozhi-class light cruiser and the Lelang-class destroyer, have taken this new type of torpedo as one of the indispensable standard combat configurations.

Among them, as an extreme product of the navy's emphasis on torpedo combat attacks, the Lelang-class destroyers of the Seris Navy are even more exaggerated equipped with four quadruple installations, a total of 16 455mm water torpedo tubes. Its lightning strike ability can definitely only be described as "metamorphosis".

With the exception of one torpedo launcher on each side of the ship, the remaining two are installed on the first central axis of the hull, making the Lelang-class capable of firing a staggering 12 torpedo volleys on the single side. This is unprecedented in the history of world naval warfare, purely a huge sea torpedo warehouse, when the new torpedoes on these ships bloom together, even the largest domestic Ryukyu-class main battleship must temporarily retreat to avoid its edge, it can be said that the appearance of this type of Type 95 gas torpedo is really a reliable means of combat for domestic light ships to threaten the capital ships in the enemy fleet.

With the exception of the lightweight Lelang-class destroyers, which mainly used torpedoes as a means of attack, the rest of the Ceris Navy's warships did not waste the striking power of the new thermodynamic torpedoes. Except that the two-stage submarine was equipped with a slightly larger caliber 510mm95 modification of the torpedo. The number of torpedo weapons equipped with the remaining types of surface combat ships also varies. Among them, the early Taiwan-class cruisers of the Seris Navy inherited the torpedo armament of the past. It is mainly equipped with 5 underwater torpedo tubes, and is equipped with 15 new 455mm gas torpedoes; The subsequent "Lijiang", "Tainan", "Kaohsiung" and other Cochin-class cruisers were equipped with two triple 455mm water torpedo launchers, a total of 6 tubes; After that, the remaining large-tonnage capital ships, such as the Ryukyu-class and Luzon-class ironclad battleships, were successively equipped with two or three water torpedo auxiliaries. In particular, it is worth mentioning that all the ships of the Seris Navy are also equipped with new torpedo reloading equipment and spare torpedoes, so that all combat ships can carry out effective secondary torpedo attacks in a very short time.

It can be said that in the previous naval battle of Batavia between China and the Netherlands, most of the naval ships on the Dutch side were torpedoed and sunk by the Seris navy. In the months that followed, the Dutch colonial fleet scattered throughout the Southern Ocean was unexpectedly defeated in the face of the all-round tight blockade operations of the Seris Navy, and among them, as the most high-profile Battle of Bangka Island, the Ceris submarine force also lived up to expectations and caused heavy losses to the Dutch civilian transport fleet.

The Dutch, once the unbeatable coachmen of the sea, were more frightened by their opponent's submarines than the giant steel warships of the Seris Navy. In more than four months of hostilities, although Seris's surface ships also achieved some results against the Dutch, compared to these relatively limited losses, their submarines made all the Dutch in Sumatra feel more bitter hatred.

Since the declaration of war a few months earlier, the Dutch have lost more than 900,000 tons of seaborne power along the routes of their entire Southeast Asian colonies, most of which were due to the submarines of the Oriental navy. Especially in the waters of Bangjia Island, which is close to the main island of Sumatra, which is the place from the Strait of Malacca to the Dutch Indian Islands, Seris's submarine operations in the area are even more "crazy", almost to the point of being airtight.

Watching these merchant fleets, which had been built up over generations and centuries of hard work in their own countries, sink to the bottom of the sea one after another, all the Dutch who survived on the island of Sumatra involuntarily began to bleed in their hearts.

Martin, the Dutch colonial governor of Sumatra, is now completely desperate for the war in Indonesia, not only has the shipping between his colonies in the Southern Ocean been cut off, but even Bangka and Bogor, which are close to him, have completely lost their news. Some time ago, some of the fleets were even sunk by Seris's submarines under the noses of their own harbors, and for the current Governor Martin, everything was left to fate.

After thinking about it, Martin, the governor of the Dutch colony, finally sent another telegram asking for help from the mainland.

Almost at the same time, in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, a Dutch government official reluctantly delivered a letter of request for mediation written by his country's prime minister to the British consulate...... (To be continued......)

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