The breeze is green, the grass is green, and in an instant, the time has come to the spring of 1927. After more than ten years of peaceful development, the damage caused by the European war has been completely erased, and the vast European fields are lined with factories and trains roaring across the railroad tracks. And even the land of France, which was most severely traumatized by the war, has gradually regained its former vitality under the smoothing of time. Shattered villages and cities were rebuilt, deep trenches were filled with earth, and France's economy bottomed out and recovered to pre-war levels last year.

Under the control of the Qing Dynasty, Germany's fine and sophisticated state aircraft has been steadily advancing in the ideal direction: all 27 treaty heavy patrols have been completed, and Germany's vast overseas interests have been supported in the continuous cruising of the world's shipping lanes. More than 50 new-type destroyers were also built in the more than 10 years after the signing of the treaty, and they have undoubtedly made a qualitative leap in tactical use compared with their predecessors who could only strike at lightning in the near sea. With the rapid development of electric welding technology in the post-war years, the warships of the German Navy from 1920 onwards have made a qualitative leap in performance compared with the first batch of ships: compared with traditional riveting, the new welding process can save thousands of tiny rivets, thus greatly reducing the weight of the structure while maintaining the strength of the hull.

Historically, after the defeat of the war, Germany made extensive use of welding on their light cruiser Emden, which they built in 1921, and began to spread it to all warship construction, starting with the K-class cruisers. In this plane. Germany's ship welding process is obviously even more perfect.

In 1915, the first heavy cruiser Hanover class built by Germany was already the absolute leader of the country, and in 1920 they started construction of the 16th heavy cruiser Berlin. It has achieved unprecedented tons of combat effectiveness in this field. The ships of this class maintained the standard displacement of 11,200 tons and 12 203 mm main guns of their predecessors, but the secondary firepower of 10 128 mm secondary guns and 8 40 mm anti-aircraft guns was increased to 14 128 mm secondary guns and 40 40 mm anti-aircraft guns in one fell swoop, which almost reached the anti-aircraft fire of the battleship level in the late World War II period.

In the face of the appearance of the German battleship full of small-caliber guns, the navies of the United States and Britain looked at their imaginary enemy with a puzzled look: The current aviation force is still stuck in the stage of open cockpits and wooden skin, and the maximum speed of fighters is only more than 200 knots. And as for bombers, which pose a threat to warships. It is still struggling in the speed range below 100 knots; A warship can be equipped with a dozen anti-aircraft guns at will, and these barbarians who are trying to do so in the sky can be swept into the sea to feed the fish! The British media, which had been thinking about making big news all day long, did not give up this opportunity to belittle the German ship, and newspapers from all sides ridiculed the German heavy cruiser as "Tirpitz's cactus." It is of no use other than to flaunt its might in front of the indigenous Africans.

Qingying also laughed at these arguments. This time, the German ships were equipped with a large amount of anti-aircraft firepower, but it was not due to his direct design requirements, but was actually due to the experience summed up by the navy during the exercise. Due to the succession of the development of German technology. and Qingying's devotion to the aviation industry. The Luftwaffe achieved far higher heights in fighter performance than ever before: in several naval exercises deliberately led by Qing Ying, the main force of German surface ships suffered severe damage under the sweep of a large number of land-based aircraft groups, and some warships were even sunk. In the face of increasingly serious air threats, the German designers themselves began to make improvements: the original twin 128-mm guns changed the turret structure to make them capable of firing at a maximum elevation angle of 85 degrees, while the small-caliber anti-aircraft guns were placed on the deck and superstructure in order to create a dense rain of anti-aircraft bullets when enemy aircraft attacked. Even on destroyers, their anti-aircraft firepower is gradually increasing. In the following exercises, the surface fleet's anti-aircraft capabilities were significantly enhanced.

The spear and shield have always been a coexistence. At the same time as planning to solve the problem of anti-air. The German Navy is also beginning to think about how to use this offensive force to its own advantage: once the combat position is far from land, the only thing that can give it air combat power is the flat-topped aircraft carrier! This led to the creation of the second class aircraft carrier of the German Navy. In order to make its own navy have stronger combat effectiveness as much as possible, Qingying, a large plug-in, participated in the design of the aircraft carrier without doing his job, and put forward three revolutionary guiding strategies in a row.

For one, the new aircraft carrier must lay a sufficiently solid piece of armor on the flight deck above the hangar. Compared with ordinary aircraft carriers such as Essex and Xianghe, armored aircraft carriers with armored flight decks such as Dafeng and Guanghui obviously have incomparable continuous combat advantages in sea and air battles: the naked flight deck only needs the most ordinary 250kg bomb, which can blow up a large crater of hundreds of square meters on its surface, which can no longer be used, and the aircraft carrier that cannot take off and land aircraft is obviously a waste in battle! Historically, the two crane sisters of Radiance and Xiangrui in the Mediterranean Sea and the Coral Sea have proved the great advantage of armored aircraft carriers in carrying bombs: after the armored deck of Radiance was blown up, only a small shallow pit would appear, and it could be reused immediately after filling it with quick-drying cement, while the Shuangshu of the Fifth Air War could only return to China for repair, and their absence in the Battle of Midway also directly caused the Combined Fleet to suffer an unprecedented setback!

Contrary to the first impression of many, armored aircraft carriers do not actually add much armor weight to ordinary aircraft carriers. Because even if an ordinary aircraft carrier does not lay armor on the flight deck, its own horizontal protection is indispensable; Otherwise, if the opponent launches a delayed fuse bomb, the power compartment will be scrapped, and the ammunition depot will be exploded, and it will directly become an artillery battle on the sea. The armored carrier simply raised the horizontal defense that should have been laid up to the flight deck, and added a ring of light armor around the hangar to prevent the ship from appearing like a skylight like Shane's body in the face of bombs falling at a large angle. As for the issue of aircraft capacity, as long as the hangar area is sufficient, the armored aircraft carrier can carry a large number of fighters; The hangar of the Taiho is even larger than that of Essex, and if the Japanese carrier-based aircraft can fold its wings like the United States, its carrying capacity will never be less than the latter!

Of course, armored aircraft carriers also have their drawbacks. The main horizontal protection raised to the flight deck greatly increased the ship's center of gravity, which, together with the hangar armor, caused its GM to plummet. In the event of a torpedo attack from underwater, it will inevitably fall into a far greater danger of capsizing than a conventional aircraft carrier of the same tonnage. Faced with this problem, Qingying's solution was to widen the hull and set up a lightning protection protrusion underwater, so as to make up for the lack of GM value in the equivalent distance. Although this will bring a considerable amount of sailing resistance, for Qingying, who holds the three major fluid opening and hanging artifacts of the bulbous bow, large square tail, and tail plate, and has an extremely strong power subsystem, this can be easily done at no cost.

The second is that the Qing Dynasty plagiarized the invention of the British in history, and added an additional beveled deck to the wide through deck. Although the beveled deck was an invention made by the British on aircraft carriers only in the jet era, this did not in any way detract from the great effect that this innovation had in the propeller era. With a beveled deck, an aircraft that fails to hook a barrage during landing can be immediately pulled up from another runway and go-around without crashing into the barrage net or colliding catastrophically with the aircraft parked in front of it. In addition, aircraft carriers with beveled decks can also carry out aircraft take-off and landing operations at the same time, and the attendance efficiency has been qualitatively improved compared with aircraft carriers with a single deck. Since this beveled deck is not very long, the price to pay in terms of weight is quite acceptable.

Finally, Qingying planned a double-decker hangar with a large enough total area for this class of aircraft carriers, and the height of the single deck was also guaranteed to be no less than 4.8 meters. Since the German scientific and technological power in this plane is already far ahead of the same period in history, even Qingying himself, the initiator, cannot judge what kind of course German aviation technology will develop in the future. Once Germany has unexpected powerful aircraft in the future, and the hangar height of the aircraft carrier is not enough, it will be the most painful thing: the British Tejas class aircraft carrier in World War II could not accommodate jets on board because the hangar height was only 4.27 meters, and finally had to withdraw from the stage of the ocean.

At the end of 1926, two heavy aircraft carriers built according to these concepts were launched, and Qingying named them "Zeppelin" and "Ekner" respectively, in honor of these two engineering pioneers who made great contributions to Germany's aviation industry. Due to the ship's 100 mm armored flight deck with a length of 180 meters and a width of 20 meters, and the total thickness of the underwater multi-layer mine armor has reached 80 mm, the final standard displacement of the Zeppelin class with a design speed of 33 knots is as high as 31,000 tons. Of course, the tonnage claimed by the German Navy is 27,000 tons under the treaty. With a total flight deck length of more than 270 meters, this class of ships adopts a closed hangar that is more suitable for Atlantic operations, and has an incomparable advantage over aircraft carriers of all countries in the same period.

In order not to arouse the suspicion of the opponent, Qingying also equipped 4 twin-mounted 254mm main guns in front and behind the superstructure of this aircraft carrier. However, these turrets are just empty shelves on the deck, not only do they not have any gun shaft servo mechanism, but even the inside of the turret is empty, and they have no combat effectiveness at all. Qingying's intentions were quite clear, these guns were made for the navies of the great powers; Once the fighting broke out, the guns were cleanly dismantled in a very short time. (To be continued......)

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