401 Advances in the military industry
Accumulate steadily.
Li Guang has been preparing for several years, recruiting many technical elites, and investing a large amount of money, and finally saw results. In the second half of '42, Haitang's military science and technology made great progress, and some projects even made breakthroughs.
The six key scientific research projects of Haitang Kingdom, known as the Six Knives, have all made varying degrees of progress.
Among them, the rocket engine project turned out to be the first to succeed.
At the beginning, Li Guang proposed adding auxiliary thrust to fighter jets, but he thought that rockets would be difficult in the 21 st century, and it would take quite a long time to produce results. However, the fact is that it is not very demanding that a rocket engine alone requires no control, only a short afterburner, and is even allowed as a disposable.
Since the schematic diagram was provided by Li Guang, Li Guang originally thought that the material was the biggest difficulty, after all, the combustion chamber and nozzle of the rocket engine had to withstand high temperature and high pressure. Even a refractory material was proposed - silicon carbide. However, silicon carbide, a common material in later industries, has been probed in many ways, and there is no enterprise production at this time. It was definitely too late to develop, so scientists solved this problem in an extremely simple way, using local materials.
Datang Island is rich in graphite reserves, and the French had complete mining facilities before Haitang occupied Datang Island.
After several tests, the technician applied the combustion chamber and combustion nozzle with a mixture of graphite and other refractory materials, and the purpose was easily achieved.
And for the storage, delivery, control of liquid oxygen and kerosene, technicians borrowed some of the technologies of Japanese oxygen torpedoes. Just for safety, the purity of oxygen is a lot lower.
By the end of November, the rocket engine was installed on fighter jets. After experimentation, the results are excellent.
Li Guang's original requirements were a total weight of 100 kilograms, a thrust of 100 kilograms, and a burning effect of about four minutes.
But during development, the parameters changed. In order to protect this set of devices, and especially to protect the fuel, the designers added armor protection. Therefore, the final weight of this device is 120 kilograms, and the thrust is still 100 kilograms, but it can only provide about two minutes of thrust.
But during real combat exercises, the pilots found out. Two minutes of additional thrust was sufficient, and in the experiment, the maximum level flight speed of the F4F Wildcat fighter easily exceeded 680 kilometers.
In '42, the pilots of the Navy's resistance army also advanced by leaps and bounds in tactics. In the Battle of Midway, the Naval Resistance Army captured the Japanese aircraft carrier Kaga. The captured Japanese Zero fighter showed the performance of the Japanese Zero fighter.
During a confrontation exercise with the Zero. The pilots of the Naval Resistance Force also discovered some problems one after another. One of the largest. It is also the most astonishing discovery, which completely overturns the impression of Li Guang as a traverser. The Japanese Zero fighter is not much more advanced than the US military's F4F Wildcat, and it can even be said that it is a fighter of the same grade, with its own strengths.
Although the outstanding performance of the Japanese Zero fighter lies in its good low-altitude performance, high climb rate and large range. But in addition to these few features. In other respects, it is not more advanced than the F4F Wildcat fighter of the US military. In many aspects, especially the high-speed maneuverability, the US military's F4F Wildcat fighter has an advantage.
In fact, as early as when the pilots of the Naval Resistance Army flew the P40 fighter and the Japanese plane, they found that the P40 fighter was not too far inferior to the Japanese Zero fighter. As long as the tactics are on the right side, there is even a considerable advantage.
So how to explain: in the first year of the war, the US fighter planes were pressed and beaten by the Japanese army?
Li Guang believes that it can only be explained by the incompetence of the US military. Most of the online articles of later generations have a concept that in the early days of the Pacific War, the performance of US fighters was not as good as that of the Japanese army. Li Guang now suspects that it is all an advertorial of the US military defending its incompetence.
Just like in the Pacific Theater in '42, the US military summed up the battle with a cliché: Tactically we have lost, but strategically we have made progress.
After mastering the performance of the Japanese Zero fighters in depth, the pilots of the Naval Resistance Army had more means to control the enemy.
For example, after the Zero fighter reached a level flight speed of 370 kilometers, it hardly dared to maneuver.
The car does drifting, and the ground is heavy and not easy to overturn. Almost the same reason, due to the excessive pursuit of speed and horizontal maneuverability, the maneuverability of the Japanese Zero fighter decreased sharply when maneuvering at high speed. If you are not careful, you will lose your plane.
At a speed of 370 kilometers, there is almost no difficulty in maneuvering for the Wildcat fighter, and there will be no rollover. That is to say, in the air battle of the fighters, the most dangerous stage of the original tactics of the Naval Resistance Army, the detachment, had a solution.
After further discovering the performance of the Japanese Zero fighters, the Naval Resistance Army believed that the Wildcat fighters equipped with rocket engines were no longer a matter of being able to escape in front of the Japanese Zero fighters, but could completely occupy an advantage.
It is expected that by the end of the year, all the Wildcat carrier-based aircraft of the Maritime Resistance Force will be equipped with this rocket engine.
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For the first time, the sonar research group, the battery research group and the communication group jointly developed a product. This product is not a copycat, but it was developed by technicians spontaneously - a radio sonar buoy. Li Guang had heard of this kind of thing in the 21st century, but he had completely forgotten it. This thing is the result of the proposal put forward by the submarine force of the Naval Resistance Force and the painstaking research of the technicians.
The reason is very simple, a 100-watt fixed-channel radio station with an external underwater microphone and an external transmitting antenna are installed in the pontoon. Throw it on the surface of the sea, and you can listen to the propeller sound of a submarine or warship at any time on the shore or on a ship.
In terms of technical content, it is nothing more than the integration of a radio station. But for Li Guang, he was very happy. The fact that the officers and technicians of the Naval Resistance Army took this step indicated that the military scientific research of the Haitang Kingdom began to no longer rely on Li Guang's foresight, but began to innovate independently.
With this thing, the submarine force does not need to deploy a large number of submarines in order to reconnoiter and warn enemy ships. A single submarine can complete the tasks of the previous submarines, and all of a sudden it will improve the submarine combat effectiveness of the Maritime Resistance Force, which is already small.
And for the Mozambique Strait between Datang Island and Africa, the reconnaissance efficiency is even higher. With dozens of buoys, you can basically monitor all ships and submarines.
A submarine is equipped with several sonar buoys, which can block the Sunda Strait for tens of kilometers.
The most recent period. Wireless sonar has already begun to make a difference.
In the Indian Ocean area on the southern side of the Sunda Strait, a submarine of the Maritime Resistance Force sank seven Japanese merchant ships in less than a month, blocking the Indian Ocean passage of Japanese merchant ships. Outside the Sunda Strait, the Japanese occupation of Christmas Island, as a bridgehead for Japan to go out of the Indian Ocean, could not be resupplied and life was very difficult. As for the guano on Christmas Island, it is even more impossible to deliver. The submarine of the Maritime Resistance Force has achieved such brilliant results, far exceeding the average monthly sinking volume of submarines in the past year. The role of radio sonar buoys began to manifest itself.
This kind of sonar buoy was invented in England as early as 41 years, but due to the limitations of battery and audiophone performance, the resolution is low. The radio transmission distance was so short that neither the United States nor the United Kingdom paid attention to it. The performance of this sonar buoy developed by Haitang technicians is much better than that of the original British product. The effective transmission distance of the radio can reach more than 50 kilometers, and the listening device can definitely catch the propeller sound of a warship or submarine within 10 kilometers.
However, this device, under the existing conditions. It is easy to be captured by enemy forces, and the battery can only last for six to ten days. In order to avoid being captured by the enemy. Such sonar buoys are equipped with self-destruct devices inside.
A sonar buoy made by the Maritime Resistance Force. Another problem is that the size is somewhat large, the weight of the whole system reaches more than a ton, and the submarine voyage can generally only be tied to four on the deck. However, under the existing technical conditions, this is already the result of the efforts of technical personnel. With such equipment, a submarine or ship can complete the blockade and reconnaissance of the sea surface with a width of 100 kilometers.
The cost of sonar buoys is not low. But for the combat effectiveness of submarines, it is more than doubled. It is foreseeable that in the coming 1943, the results of the submarine of the Maritime Resistance Army will be even more brilliant.
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In addition, the six core military technologies of the Haitang Kingdom have also made certain breakthroughs. The breakthrough that most satisfying Li Guang was radar technology.
Haitang does not have the ability to create high-power radars. But low-power radars have begun to equip troops in just a few months. Throughout the forty-two years. The only fighters that the Maritime Resistance Force was able to buy from the United States were TBD torpedo planes, which were not very good and were modified by technicians and equipped with radar pods and anti-aircraft radars.
However, due to technical reasons, the system integration capacity is insufficient. A TBD torpedo aircraft can only be equipped with one sea-to-sea radar or an air-to-air search radar.
A high-frequency radar with a peak power of only one kilowatt has a search radius of fifteen to twenty kilometers for sea search. The search radius of the anti-aircraft search radar is slightly larger, which can reach about 25 to 30 kilometers.
In terms of some performance, the radar of the Naval Resistance Force is only at the level of the British airborne radar in the 40s (in fact, it is also an imitation of the British. )。 However, due to the increased frequency of the magnetron, the wavelength is also short, and the search accuracy is greatly improved. However, due to the difficulty of purchasing PPI displays, the Maritime Resistance Force can only use oscilloscopes, which are somewhat cumbersome to operate and require skilled operators to use.
However, the biggest feature of these two radars is that they are very close to modern AWACS aircraft. Whether it is the shape of the electronic pod of the anti-sea radar or the anti-aircraft radar casing placed above the aircraft, it is very much like a modern AWACS aircraft. In particular, the anti-aircraft radar is as if the plane is wearing a straw hat. There is no doubt that this shape design is from Li Guang's hand.
Of course, in terms of function, the difference is still very far, and because it has just been put into trial production, the performance is still very unstable.
In addition, these two radars have a great disadvantage, the weight is really excessive, and the weight of a single aircraft reaches more than 350 kilograms.
For reconnaissance aircraft, range is extremely critical. The TBD torpedo plane's range was originally only 1,150 kilometers, and in order to expand the search radius of this reconnaissance plane, technicians removed quite a lot of the plane's original spare parts. Several built-in or external fuel tanks were specially made for this aircraft.
In the end, this TBD torpedo machine was able to refuel more than 500 liters more than the original design, and the total range reached 1,600 kilometers, which could barely guarantee a reconnaissance radius of 500 kilometers. However, in this way, this torpedo machine can only be used as a reconnaissance aircraft, and it is simply impossible to attach torpedoes and bombs.
Of course, there were no fewer drawbacks to using this torpedo machine as a reconnaissance aircraft, since it was a two-seat torpedo machine, the tasks of the radar operator were too onerous (observation, communications, machine gunner). If it is a new American three-seat TBF torpedo machine, it will be more suitable. However, for the Naval Resistance Force, this can only be imagined, and for a while the Americans will not be willing to sell new torpedo machines.
For several other scientific researches, Li Guang is also very concerned. For example, in Plan A, it took two or three years to complete the beneficiation process and start refining uranium. And the next step is to separate uranium-235 is the difficulty, and technicians are experimenting day and night.
However, rocket engines, sonar buoys, and airborne radars are all indispensable equipment in the next military plan, so Li Guang is very urgent. During his time in Datang Island, Li Guangran the three project departments had the most times, constantly participated in the discussions, and put forward many improvement plans. As a modern university graduate of mechatronics, Li Guang is still able to put forward many useful insights in these scientific researches.
During his time on Datang Island, Li Guang spent far less energy on military and government affairs than on scientific research. With the participation of Li Guang, all the technical personnel burst out with great enthusiasm for work, and all the personnel are working day and night, finding problems at any time and improving them at any time.
War is the one that best promotes scientific and technological progress. Before the Navy's second move, all F4F fighters were equipped with rocket engines, and twenty-four torpedo planes were equipped with anti-air or sea-to-sea search radars. (To be continued......)