On the morning of the 30th, the main fleets of China and Britain met in the South China Sea, about 150 nautical miles northeast of the Riau Islands.

In the first two hours after dawn, the cruiser fleets of the two countries discovered each other, and then engaged in a fierce exchange of fire, with the cruiser fleets of both sides firing a large number of shells at each other with rapid-fire guns of the six-inch and five-inch classes as the main guns, and the cruiser fleets of both sides suffered varying degrees of damage in the battle.

At 7:30, a British second-class protective cruiser was sunk, not only becoming this naval battle, but also the first warship to be sunk in this Sino-British war.

However, in this cruiser engagement, the Imperial Navy did not always maintain good luck, and soon the cruiser Shao Wu of the 9th Cruiser Detachment was hit by fire from several British cruisers, and even a first-class protection cruiser.

It didn't take long for the unfortunate Shao Wu to be directly penetrated through the power compartment of the ship by a 234 mm shell from the British Edgar-class first-class protection cruiser, causing the ship to lose power and finally being used as a target, and in a short five minutes, the Shao Wu was hit by at least 30 rounds of more than 5-inch shells.

The dense shells almost washed the entire Shaowu aside, and the buildings above the deck were all shattered and pitted, in addition to the shrapnel inside, the corpses and wounded of the gunners were also lying on the deck, blood flowed sideways, and the slippery and greasy blood stains made people unstable on the deck.

Whether it is a contemporary cruiser or a cruiser a few decades later, the protection capability is quite weak, especially the protection of the gunner is almost equal to zero, the artillery positions are all open-air guns, but there is no turret armor, and the hull has no vertical armor, most of them only have one dome armor to protect the hull from sinking.

Therefore, the battle between the cruisers, this sinking or not sinking will not be said for the time being, but the casualties of personnel are very heavy!

Shao Wu, who had lost power and had no gunner, floated on the sea like a dead fish, and on the conning tower, a middle-aged officer wearing a colonel's epaulette staggered and struggled to get up, he didn't care about his head and was a little dizzy, but quickly glanced at the situation in the conning tower, and found that the others were also struggling to stagger to stand up.

The conning tower was hit just now, although it did not penetrate the armor of the conning tower, but it also caused great trauma to the personnel in the conning tower, and the shrapnel that flew in caused a huge shock to kill and injure the people inside.

The colonel looked at the tattered conning tower, took a deep breath, put back on his bloodstained military cap, and then took off his gloves, which had turned from white to red because of the bloodstains.

Immediately, he walked out of the conning tower, and as soon as he got out of the conning tower, he saw a gunner running in front of him in a panic, and he wanted to shout and ask him why he didn't go to the gun position to fight, but at this time his eyes also swept over the gun emplacement of a 150 mm single-mounted main gun on the side of the side.

Which 150 mm main gun shield is still good, but the gunners behind the gun shield have all fallen to the ground, two people are groaning and shouting because of pain, while more people are silent, some people are not even complete, missing hands and legs are considered normal, what is even more impossible to look at is that some people are all flesh and blood, and their internal organs are scattered all over the ground.

In the clash of naval guns, those five-inch and six-inch naval guns may be a matter of adding a few craters to a huge battleship, but for the gunners who have no turret protection and have to fight on the deck guns, a random five-inch high-explosive shell is fatal to the gunner.

Even if he was not killed on the spot by the explosion of the shell, on this day in 1896, both China and Britain used picric acid shells!

I don't want to talk about the explosive power of this picric cannonball, but the side effects such as causing a fire and producing toxic gases are quite powerful.

All countries in the world, including the Imperial Navy, have successively applied picric acid on a large scale in the eighties, and the top three navies in the contemporary world, namely Britain, France, and the Empire, have successively chosen picric acid as the charge of artillery shells in the eighties.

However, the Empire is different from several other countries, because the Imperial Navy also has shells with *** charge at the same time.

After entering the nineties, the empire's chemical technology has reached a certain breakthrough, and the first shells that used to only exist in the laboratory can finally be mass-produced, and the navy has found that the shells with the best charge, especially the armor-piercing projectiles, can play a more efficient armor-piercing effect when targeting the enemy's armor defense.

Because the shell with the first charge can be detonated in a **** way after the armor-piercing shell penetrates the armor of the enemy ship, which in turn causes internal damage to the hull.

If it's picric, it will explode on the first impact!

For the navy, among these two types of explosives, *** is obviously more suitable for large-caliber shells, which penetrate the enemy's armor and explode deep into the enemy's ship, while picric acid is more suitable for small and medium-caliber artillery.

In addition, there is the problem of stability, picric acid is not stable enough, and after the Imperial Navy adopted this explosive for eighty years, there will be an explosion accident basically every once in a while.

The Tianwu ironclad ship was sunk on the spot in an artillery shell explosion accident in 1884 and decommissioned!

On the internal side of the empire, the army used *** as the main charge earlier, and the navy was reluctant to use the power of picric acid explosives, but there was a desire for more stable performance, and a very important reason was that the navy had a large inventory of picric acid shells.

So at present, the navy is using the first shells and picric acid shells together, some warships do not have *** shells, and some battleships are all *** shells, and the two shells within the navy are mixed, which refers to the whole, not that each warship alone is mixed with these two shells.

Unlike the Imperial Navy, which was a mixture of two kinds of shells, the British side was all bitter acid, and the shells that were fired caused by the Shao Wu fire.

The colonel staggered forward, and on the way he could no longer see many soldiers still standing and fighting, and there were no gunners fighting on the six main guns and several secondary guns on the Shao Wu.

He tried to gather the remaining soldiers to continue the battle, but before he could find other gunners, another British six-inch cannon hit the Shao Wu, and the shell exploded less than five meters away from the colonel's length.

Under the violent explosion, the captain of the colonel was directly lifted up, and then slammed into the steel plate behind him, and then looked closely, but the whole person was already motionless.

About two thousand meters northwest of the Shao Wu, Rear Admiral Meng Junshan, commander of the Ninth Cruiser Detachment, looked at the Shao Wu in flames, and sighed deeply, he knew that although the Shao Wu had not yet sunk, the Shao Wu was finished, and this kind of end was not as simple as the loss of combat effectiveness due to relatively large personnel damage.

But under this kind of fire, Shao Wu will eventually be burned to only a skeleton, and then sink into the icy sea.

Sure enough, it didn't take long for a large number of sailors to jump into the sea on the burning Shaowu, and it was obvious that someone had already given the order to abandon the ship, and the remaining sailors jumped into the sea to find a chance to live.

While the Shao Wu was enveloped in flames, a large fleet was coming at high speed with a faint white smoke a few nautical miles behind the Ninth Cruiser Detachment.

The first is a huge shape, full load displacement of more than 16,000 tons, one of the most advanced battleships of our time: the Houyi-class battleship Diyu, the bow of the ship hangs the dragon badge of its capital ship status, and the two twin 300 mm and 40 times the caliber main guns in the bow point into the distance like Optimus Pillar.

The 300-millimeter cannon, which had already shed its armor, seemed to be about to let out a terrible roar at any moment!

In the boiler room inside the hull, a large number of boiler soldiers with their upper bodies exposed and their strong muscles were swinging the shovels in their hands to send shovels of coal into the boiler, and the hot gas coming out of the boiler smoked the entire boiler room like a steamer.

Under the hard work of a large number of boiler soldiers in the boiler room, the huge Emperor Yu cut through the wind and waves, and has already run out of the speed of sixteen knots, although this speed is not the maximum speed of the Emperor Yu, but it is also a very considerable speed, on weekdays, the Emperor Yu will generally only cruise at a speed of ten or twelve knots, and occasionally run fourteen knots or fifteen knots.

As for the sixteenth stanza, unless there are special circumstances, it is generally rarely used, and modern battleships will not be high in speed when they are fine.

Because this will seriously damage the service life of the steam engine!

But now that it has entered the combat state, these warships naturally don't care about the service life of the steam engine, and the current speed of the main fleet to sixteen knots is actually nothing, and what is even more fatal is that those cruisers, those ordinary protective cruisers, the basic speed has been increased to more than twenty knots, even if it is an old cruiser that has been in service for many years, most of them have increased to a speed of eighteen knots.

As for the fast cruisers that have been commissioned in recent years, they have all soared to a speed of more than 23 knots, and the few fast cruisers with a larger power configuration can even reach a speed of more than 25 knots.

This kind of speed is a complete drag race for these modern warships, and maintaining maximum speed is quite a challenge for both the ship's power system itself and those boiler crews.

Even if the boiler soldiers have good physical strength, but in terms of the reliability of the current steam engine, it is estimated that it will not be able to sustain the maximum speed of several hours.

On the Emperor, Rear Admiral Huang Dongxing, commander of the Third Battleship Detachment, was on the control tower, holding a telescope and looking at the fleets of the enemy and us several nautical miles away.

At this time, the relative distance between the two fleets was already very close, and one of the main fleets of the Imperial Navy, that is, the third battleship detachment, was less than six nautical miles away from the main fleet of Britain in front.

At this time, the course of the two sides was about 90 degrees close to each other, and it was clear that both fleets wanted to seize the T-shape.

At this distance, it will not take long for the two sides to enter the range of each other's main guns, and then the duel between the main fleets of the two sides will begin.

After the main fleets of the two sides began to face off, the battle between the cruisers that had been very lively before was not worth mentioning, to put it mildly, the role of the cruiser is only in the outpost battle, reconnaissance operations play a certain role in the battle, but after entering the real main fleet line engagement, ordinary cruisers, especially the protective cruisers with serious lack of protection and firepower, are not qualified to go to the battle line, and even less qualified to affect the victory or defeat.

At most, a few torpedoes were fired, but the current level of torpedo technology is still very primitive and backward, and it is far from being able to exert a huge impact like later generations, and even affect the victory or defeat of naval battles.

The next time is already the stage for the capital ships of both sides!

And the outcome of the decisive battle between the capital ships of the two sides will directly affect the outcome of this naval battle, and even the outcome of this Sino-British war.

At 8:40 a.m., Lin Tongshu, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet of the Imperial Navy, ordered the flagship Houyi to raise the private general flag and go to the front line on behalf of the commander-in-chief of the fleet.

And sent flags and radio signals to each ship: "The rise and fall of the empire, the glory and disgrace of the saints, in this battle, I hope all the kings will work together and fight bravely!" ”

Just when Lin Tongshu was about to hang it, the British on the opposite side also hung the Z-shaped flag and issued a flag message: England hopes that every man will do his best!

At 8:50 a.m., as the vanguard of the main fleet of the Imperial Navy, the Emperor was already less than five thousand meters away from one of the battleships in the main fleet of the British on the south side!

At this time, the fire controller on the Emperor had already decided to take the lead in using four main guns to fire at the British fleet with the large range brought by the long barrels of his main guns, as well as the benchmarking rangefinder attached to it!

As the order was issued, the two huge main gun turrets on the Emperor began to move slowly, and the artillerymen inside the turret were struggling to load the medicine bags and shells lifted from the ammunition depot into the guns according to the instructions of the officers.

Then the two huge twin turrets moved slowly a little, and then the four huge barrels were also slowly raised.

After the preparation was completed, I saw a gunnery officer in the turret waving his hand with excitement on his face, and the next moment there was a vibration from the entire turret.

At the same moment, if you look at the two turrets from the outside, you can see that the muzzle of one of the main guns instantly frees up a huge fire, followed by a loud rumbling sound into the ears.

Before the eyes and ears could get used to it, I saw several other main guns firing one after another, and although this kind of fire was not a salvo, the interval was still very small.

After the shelling, the artillerymen in the turret were already busy again, they had to clean the chamber, then reload, and aim, and it would take at least a minute or two before they could refire.

But when these four shells were fired, more people were watching where they landed!

On the main mast of the Emperor, there should only be a lookout, but at this time, an officer wearing a major's average climbed up, and I saw him personally use a telescope to observe the shell landing point, and then inform the relevant shell landing point data below through the microphone, so as to rest the subsequent trajectory.

And in the main fleet of the British, Colonel Adrien on the battleship of the second class of Prestige looked at the shell landing point more than seventy or eighty meters away from the battleship, and couldn't help but sigh: "This level of gunnoncy is really a waste of this huge battleship!" ”

Although it was only the first round of shelling, but the distance was so remote, Colonel Adrien couldn't help but despise it, if the Chinese were all of this level, even if their fleet was a little behind in the number of cutting-edge capital ships, but this battle also had great hope of victory!

"The main guns before and after the herald are ordered to return fire!" When Colonel Adrien spoke, he was already with a hint of a desire for battle, an expectation of victory! (To be continued.) )