In Dalian, the No. 3 dry dock of the Beiyang Heavy Industry Shipyard, the aircraft carrier "Yunpeng," which had been damaged in the Battle of the Bay of Bengal, was lying quietly in the dense scaffolding, and the flight deck was a little empty, and two generals in snow-white uniforms were strolling side by side with their hands behind their backs.

"I see, I said, how could they let me go...... The grace of God is immense, and I am terrified! ”

As he spoke, the older man who suddenly stopped and bowed respectfully to the West was none other than Liang Ming, the legendary hero who led the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the former commander of the Mobile Fleet, and now a consulting researcher of the Royal War Research Society.

After the Battle of the Bay of Bengal, Liang Ming, who was considered to be suspected of disobedience, was bombarded by the top brass of the navy, and Liu Buyun, Lin Taizeng and other Fujian veterans unanimously demanded that he be sent to a military court. For a time, rumors abounded, some said that Liang Ming was pro-British and collaborating with the enemy, there were British gold coins stuffed under the bed, some said that he lived a corrupt life and kept a dozen female students, and some said that he had been retaliated against because he had abandoned Sa Zhenbing's daughter in chaos -- all kinds of strange theories sprung up all over the market tabloids, so that the Ministry of the Interior finally had to intervene and shut down several of the most ferocious newspapers in the name of "damaging the image of the navy" and "disturbing the morale of the military and the people." Only then did the turmoil be slightly eliminated.

In the end, Her Majesty the Empress personally came forward and summoned Liu Buyun and Lin Taizeng as acting chief of the general staff, and reached an agreement to exempt Liang Ming from prosecution, on the condition that he be transferred to the reserve and hired as a consultant researcher by the Royal War Research Society run by the royal family.

And just informed Liang of the inside story. It was none other than Rear Admiral Pan Guochen, who was in charge of the reorganization of the mobile fleet in his capacity as a special commissioner of the base camp, a hot confidant and important member of Her Majesty the Empress recently.

Smiling as he watched Liang Ming bow in the direction of Beijing. Bowing and bowing, Pan Guochen cleared his throat gestureously and turned to the topic.

"I've read all your suggestions, and they're very instructive."

"It's all in blood."

Liang Ming said to himself.

"Yes, the lesson of blood...... The key is still to increase. I especially agree with the number of aircraft on the mothership. Pan Guochen nodded in approval, and changed his words, "But...... Don't you feel like there's a problem with the way you're improving? Eliminating the repair workshop and a lift is too costly. ”

Liang Ming blinked and said, "I don't know what Commissioner Pan thinks?" ”

Pan Guochen was confident: "How about this? Usually put part of the aircraft system. Staying on the flight deck, only the foredeck is freed up for flight operations, only the rear deck is freed up for landing operations, and the hangar only needs to vacate space for a few aircraft to ensure that the deck is moved. In addition, the spare hangar is compressed, the standby hangar is only used to store precision parts such as engine radios, and other disassembled parts are directly hung on the ceiling of the main hangar, and then assembled when used, which can not only increase the space of the main hangar, but also greatly increase the number of spare machines. According to conservative estimates, taking the Yunpeng as an example, if it is improved in this way, it can increase the carrying capacity by at least half, and if it goes well, it may even be doubled. ”

Liang Ming listened with his back hand, but he didn't admire it. Worship shouts the meaning of the eldest brother.

"Using the flight deck as a common parking space? This is not for nothing. I thought about it, and I also did relevant tests before the war, and the conclusion was that if our canvas and wood aircraft were exposed to sunlight and waves for a long time, not only would the failure rate rise sharply, but the rate of scrapping of the whole aircraft would also be greatly increased. At that time, it was estimated that the use of the deck tethering method would result in the loss of one-third of our carrier-based aircraft every three months in non-combat, and the failure rate of continuous flight operations would be three times that of the full hangar accommodation method, and the loss of pilots would be difficult to calculate. ”

"I see......"

Pan Guochen only knew. Dao hadn't done enough in his class, but it didn't matter, he was sure that his general direction was right, and it had been tested by more blood on another plane.

If the general direction is right, the details can be slowly re-grinded, on the contrary, it will be more and more wrong, and more and more mistakes.

Liang Ming didn't notice Pan Guochen's cloudy face, and continued to comment: "The idea of hanging spare parts on the ceiling of the hangar is quite interesting, but the specific layout is probably more expensive...... For the same reason, the situation in the Roc class is only slightly better. ”

Pan Guochen made it clear at one point: "I understand, the carrier-based aircraft pilots in the initial stage are very expensive, and they are the seeds of future development, but many things have to be explored and perfected, so that the safety of pilots has become a special issue that needs to be paid attention to, so the design of the first two generations of motherships and the way of carrying aircraft are also particularly focused on this, is this what it means?" ”

Liang Ming smiled: "Commissioner Pan is clearer than I said. ”

Pan Guochen tilted his head and motioned for the two to continue moving forward, until the front of the deck came to a halt, crossed his waist, and looked left and right.

In the No. 4 dry dock on the right, the hull of a "Zhenhai"-class battleship is still under construction.

If I remember correctly, this should be the hull of the No. 4 ship "Suhai" - Pan Guochen thought to himself, and a little relevant information that he had temporarily made up in the naval staff before his departure flashed in front of him.

The "Zhenhai" class is an improvement from the "Pinghai" class, the most powerful super-dreadnought battleship in service in the East Asian Combined Fleet today, and its main performance data are not much different from the prototype: the standard displacement has increased from 32,000 tons to 33,500 tons, the main engine rate has increased from 71,000 horsepower to 72,000 horsepower, and the maximum speed is also 25 knots.

However, Pan Guochen, who has seen the Zhenhai-level design model with his own eyes, is well aware of the difference between the two – at least in appearance.

The most obvious difference is that the "Zhenhai" class has done away with the triangular mainmast that has been largely the same as the "Beiyue" class of imperial dreadnoughts, and replaced it with a tall pagoda - yes, a Chinese-style pagoda of steel.

In the terminology of the Imperial Navy, this thing is called the "integrated fire control and command tower", and in general it is an eight-sided column with a wide and narrow bottom, which is divided into four parts by a covered bridge corridor surrounding the column: the lower part includes a double-layer armored command tower, a radio room and a soldier standby room, and the middle part includes a double-decker bridge for day and night battles protruding from the inside of the column to the front and on both sides, the part is a searchlight command post, and the most part is an air defense command post and a main gun firing command post.

At first glance, the whole tower looks like a bit of a high center of gravity, but the interior is very sturdy, the honeycomb structure improves damage resistance, the communication pipes wrapped in the 150 mm armor layer ensure the reliability of wartime command capabilities, and the high-speed elevators in the elevator shafts in the middle of the tower are more secure than the exposed simple elevators of the "Pinghai" class.

Another obvious difference is the installation method of the secondary guns, in the past, all types of dreadnoughts in the empire used 150 mm secondary guns and 75 mm or 90 mm anti-lightning guns were installed in the gun frames of the broadside or storey buildings, while the two sides of the "Zhenhai" class were cleanly installed with six twin turrets, a total of 12 1903 Type 150 mm secondary guns, and a total of 14 1910 Type 90 mm 45 times diameter high and flat guns were arranged on the deck of the floor higher than the base of the auxiliary turret. In addition, for the first time, there was room for the installation of machine guns and anti-aircraft machine guns, and a total of 6 quadruple 37-mm anti-aircraft guns were arranged on the bosses built by the inside of the 90-mm high-level dual-purpose guns on both sides, and a total of 10 twin and 10 single-mounted 20-mm guns were arranged in the bridge corridor surrounding the chimney and tower.

It is not easy to see from the outside that there is also a new type of main and auxiliary artillery firing commander, an improved internal and external communication system, and all-electric living facilities...... All in all, the four "Zhenhai" class, which started construction from 1913 to 1914, gathered the highest crystallization of the pre-war imperial science and technology and industry, and can be called the best warships in the world after the "Pinghai" class.

The "Zhenhai" and "Dinghai" were launched in April and March 1915 respectively, and the outfitting work continued until the end of the year, and it was scheduled to join the active service between February and March next year.

It is estimated that the "Suhai" and the "Qinghai" that is located at a certain slipway of the Jiangnan Manufacturing Shipyard will not be launched until March or April next year, and they are scheduled to be commissioned between January and March 1917.

Separated from the hull of the "Suhai," which had gradually taken shape, in the No. 5 dry dock, the hull of the battleship "Tianqian," which had begun construction in February of that year, was tightly surrounded by curtain walls, scaffolding, and cranes, and nothing meaningful could be seen.

Pan Guochen had not consulted the latest design materials of the "Tianqian" class, which had a very high level of secrecy, which meant that his basic impression of the "Tianqian" was still five years ago when he was a lieutenant and a staff member of the Naval Intelligence Department.

Five years ago, the "Tianqian" class was only a simple "G" drawn up by Pan Guochen, as detailed in Chapter 154, and was designed to fight against the British and American super-dreadnoughts equipped with 16 to 18-inch guns in the future, and the basic requirements of the Navy General Staff for the "G" were: no less than 16-inch 406-millimeter main guns, a speed of 25 knots, and the main armor belt should have an immunity zone between 10,000 and 1,000 meters to 10,000 meters for 16-inch or 18-inch shells of a certain muzzle velocity and a certain weight......

Time has passed, and it has been constantly modified in response to changing strategic and tactical needs, and finally materialized into a definitive version of the design of the pile of steel behind the curtain wall in the distance.

However, these are not what Pan Guochen is most concerned about at the moment.

In the No. 2 dry dock on the left, which has a history for a while, the new fleet aircraft carrier "Feifeng", which started construction in March of that year, has already taken a rough prototype, and it should not be a problem to launch next spring.

As the third generation of the Empire's fleet aircraft carriers, the "Feifeng" class is based on the technical and tactical concepts that have been proven in combat in the "Golden Falcon" and "Dapeng" classes, on the one hand, it makes full use of the most mature and reliable resources available, and on the other hand, it adopts breakthrough new technology and new concepts in a small number of key equipment that can greatly enhance combat effectiveness, such as broadside lifts, integrated ship islands, radio navigation stations, etc.

The design of the hangar also gives priority to the need to hang spare parts, the space of the standby hangar is greatly reduced, and the design of the flight deck is also carried out on the premise of being used as a common parking space, so that the standard displacement is increased by 7,200 tons compared with the "Dapeng" class to 26,600 tons, and the maximum speed is increased by 5 knots to 33 knots, the design carrier capacity has more than doubled, reaching 60 commonly used 132 ship battles, 72 ship attack planes, 44 ship battle 20, and ship attack 24 - That's a total of 176 planes! It is armed with 14 120-mm single-mounted high-level dual-purpose guns, four three-seven-mm anti-aircraft guns and 14 twin-mounted 20-mm guns.

It is said that the four Ruiyun-class fleet aircraft carriers, which are scheduled to start construction after April next year, will have an even more astonishing carrying capacity, but before seeing the drawings with his own eyes, Pan Guochen does not want to squander his exclamation too much.

The older No. 1 dry dock is a Shangri-La-class luxury cruise ship undergoing aircraft carrier renovation works, the work has been going on for more than half a year, and the silhouette of the scaffolding is no longer visible in the appearance of the 30,000-ton giant ship itself - especially the iconic three huge and graceful chimneys, its original name is even more insignificant, and the ship will have a resounding name - "Yue Fei" before sailing out of the dock to the outfitting dock in the spring of next year.

The three Shangri-La-class cruise ships were once the largest, fastest and most luxurious commercial ships on the Pacific and Asia-Europe routes, and countless romantic memories of the joys and sorrows of the three Shangri-La cruise ships that flew them, including countless princes, nobles, high-ranking officials, and celebrities from all walks of life.

The National Defense Headquarters soon requisitioned all of them, as part of the new naval bill of 1915, and transformed them into fleet aircraft carriers in the docks of the Dalian Shipyard of Beiyang Heavy Industry, the Jiangnan Manufacturing Sea Shipyard, and the Guangzhou Shipyard of the Admiralty, using the same new technology of the aircraft carrier as the "Feifeng" class, but due to the limitations of the ship type, it can only be arranged with one and a half hangars The length of the lower hangar is less than half of the floor, and the whole period of the transformation is scheduled to be 1 to 20 months, and the basic technical indicators after the completion of the transformation are: 27,000 tons of standard displacement, The maximum speed is 27 knots, and the design carrier aircraft is commonly used, with 102 aircraft in 4 naval battles, 54 in naval attack, 34 in reserve, 16 in naval warfare, and 1 in naval attack, totaling 136 aircraft. It is armed with 12 single-mounted 120-mm high-level dual-purpose guns, four three-seven-mm guns and 12 twin-mounted 20-mm guns.

After the Battle of the Bay of Bengal, in order to make up for the heavy losses caused by the sinking of the two fleet aircraft carriers, the National Defense Headquarters urgently requisitioned four Yuanwang-class cruise ships that had long been converted into troop carriers, and prepared to transform them into simple auxiliary aircraft carriers with a single hangar, and the first ship will be named "Qu Sick". Before leaving Beijing, Pan Guochen had already had a preliminary understanding of this kind of temporary numbering: the standard displacement is 18,000 tons, the design maximum speed is 23 to 24 knots, and the design carrying capacity is 51 commonly used ships, 24 warships, 27 ships, 17 standby ships, and 9 ships, a total of 6 aircraft. There were no medium-caliber guns in the armament, only six quadruple 37-mm anti-aircraft guns and 10 twin 20-mm guns. The performance on paper is indeed not very good, but its biggest advantage is that the transformation period is short, but 10 to 12 months, which is only half of the Yue Fei class.

Also after the Battle of the Bay of Bengal, in order to protect the long sea lines of communication that are about to cross half the world, the National Defense Headquarters has successively requisitioned 12 8,000-ton "Wuzi" standard freighters, which are scheduled to be transformed into single-storey hangar escort aircraft carriers, and the first ship will be named "Star Island", that is, the new title of Singapore Island, with a design maximum speed of 16 knots, 21 commonly used carrier aircraft, and 7 spare aircraft, a total of 2 aircraft. It is armed with two quadruple 37-mm anti-aircraft guns and a single-mounted 20-mm cannon.

In addition, the National Defense Headquarters also directly intervened in the naval affairs of the Admiralty, proposing to transform two Kunlun reclassified fast armored cruisers that started construction in the middle of that year into fast light aircraft carriers.

The memory came to an abrupt end, and suddenly felt something, Pan Guochen sighed, and his eyes flashed alternately between helplessness and ruthlessness: "Although it is cruel to say this, but now is really not the time to discuss who is more valuable than whom, for the sake of victory, we do not hesitate to sacrifice, even if it seems meaningless." ”

"I understand, now the power is in the hands of Commissioner Pan, please let it go, you are directly under His Majesty, and it was originally a Marine Corps system, and those antique veterans can't help you."

Liang Ming obviously still had a lot of awkwardness in his heart.

Pan Guochen didn't hear it, and analyzed indifferently: "The Kunpeng is scheduled to be commissioned at the end of the year, the Jinpeng will probably wait until the beginning of next year, and the four Feifeng and Sanjo Yue Fei will have to wait until the year after tomorrow, which means that we will only have four available fleet aircraft carriers at most next year." The intelligence on the British side is that a new fleet aircraft carrier has been put into service, and next year two fleet aircraft carriers and one modified aircraft carrier will be added one after another, and we still do not have an advantage in numbers, but we will have to undertake the cover tasks of I operation and N operation at the same time, and if the number of aircraft carried by a single ship does not increase significantly, the tragedy in the Bay of Bengal will inevitably be repeated. ”

"Hopefully I can help." Liang Ming smiled and stretched out his hand.

"It's a pleasure to work with."

As soon as the two of them clasped their right hands together, a slightly jerky report suddenly came from behind Pan Guochen: "Sir, the call from the base camp ......"

After receiving the telegram carefully presented by the new adjutant Second Lieutenant Zhou Runfa, a handsome little white face who had just left school, Pan Guochen glanced at it, was stunned for a moment, and suddenly smiled, with a look of joy or happiness.

Liang Ming said with a smile: "Commissioner Pan is so happy, there must be something happy?" ”

Pan Guochen clenched the telegram with both hands, and muttered to himself: "Honeymoon, I want a honeymoon, I want to make up for my honeymoon......"

……

Krasnoyarsk, command of the Northern Front.

"Railway, railway, go to his railway, don't take this perfunctory to me, I want Novosibirsk, I want Omsk, I want to go to the Ural Mountains before the New Year to open up the wasteland, do you understand? If you understand, work for me, 25 hours a day, don't be afraid of tired people, I will bear everything! ”

Putting down the phone in a huff, Marshal Wang Zhi, the commander of the front army, got up and walked to the map, slapped the small double circle marked "Novosibirsk" with a slap, and the eagle-eyed wolf was full of murderous anger.

"This is all expected, why be so angry?"

The chief of staff, who was sitting on the other end of the telephone, comforted General Lan with a tea bowl.

Wang Zhi sneered and walked to the window with his hands behind his back: "If these expected things continue to develop, the next few days will be no different from marching in the desert." ”

Outside the window, under the thin first snow, there were large expanses of desperate black and gray.

On 14 August, the Russian army, which voluntarily abandoned the city of Croatia, deliberately set fire to almost every building, burning the third largest city in Siberia, which was composed mainly of wooden buildings, to ashes.

Not only that, in the short two or three days that the advance detachment of the Kewu group, which had become a strong crossbow, was forced to stay in Kecheng and wait for the main force, more than a dozen railway bridges between Kecheng and Novosibirsk were all blown up, and some of the railway causeways towering between seasonal swamps were also carefully blasted, which was very difficult to repair.

When Xu Soul's Kewu group and the attached 1st Army left Kecheng and continued to advance westward, they found an even greater tragedy: almost all the towns and villages on both sides of the railway were burned, it was the season when the wheat was ripe, but the main color of the wheat fields was not dazzling golden but gloomy gray black, everywhere was empty, and in the distance of the ruins were endless forests and swamps, and the bravest Mongol men did not dare to go deep into them.

The painful march began, and for almost a thousand kilometers, the biggest enemy was not the Russian ** team, it was hunger.

Although the project of repairing and rerailing the railway between Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk is going on non-stop, the distance between the advancing KVU group and the railway terminal in the rear is still getting bigger and bigger, and the exclusive transport team of the KVU group, which concentrates half of the front army and is trucked, keeps going day and night between the large and small depots on the supply line of hundreds of kilometers under repair rate, and even this is the result that it is difficult to meet the basic needs of the front-line troops and give priority to replenishing fuel and ammunition. It is to force the officers and soldiers into locusts.

A swarm of locusts rushing through the scorched earth could barely collect food, and it was difficult to find ready-made hay to feed the horses, and the Mongol cavalry and horseback infantry units assigned to the Kewu group were soon left behind—their horses were either shot by their masters before starving to death, or dying from eating poisoned forage, and some small detachments ventured away from the railroad in search of undestroyed settlements, with little to gain, and sometimes spontaneous resistance— When this happens, angry locusts tend to burn down all the buildings around them that are intact.

The more than 1,000 tanks, half-tracks, self-propelled guns, off-road vehicles, motorcycles, and trucks of all types consume hundreds of tons of gasoline every day. Many of the broken down vehicles had to be guarded by their crews because they could not be repaired in time and there were no available vehicles to tow them to the rear, which resulted in the weakening of the strength of the troops in the course of the advance, like icebergs rushing into the warm sea with ocean currents - by the time the advance detachment of the group arrived on the eastern outskirts of Novosibirsk on 7 September and joined the advance detachment of the 2nd Panzer Army of the North-Western Front from the direction of Barnaul, there were less than 300 vehicles available in the main column of the group.

Fortunately, when the weather conditions were good, and occasionally the air assistance from the special floating group directly under the base camp, the Kewu group finally did not stop due to lack of fuel, and of course no one starved to death.

The Front Army also organized advance containment teams in a timely manner to contain the broken down vehicles and personnel left behind along the various marching routes. A small number of people left behind who could not bear the loneliness or fear were listed as missing because they went into the forest far from the railroad without permission, and the containment team also found a large number of fresh animal skins and limbs, including precious mink and bear paws, in some vehicles that had broken down for many days.

The historic meeting of the two major fronts is actually far from so glamorous, and every armored fighting vehicle that arrives under the city of Novosibirsk is often ten times the number of trucks that it relays and is under repair, and every mule and horse that barely reaches the front line may be dozens of times the life of the same kind behind it......

Until mid-September, dozens of battalion-sized units of the two fronts surrounding the Novosibirsk fortress, with a total strength of less than 20,000 men, and even inferior to the defenders, were able to firmly control the passages in and out of the fortress by relying on two or three hundred vehicles whose mechanical parts had worn out to the limit.

With the introduction of a new sequence of operations on the Russian battlefield, the Northwest Front was about to be reorganized into the Central Asian Front and the Caspian Front, which were to focus on the Central Asian-Ural and Caspian-Persian operations respectively, and the strategy of the Novosibirsk fortress and the subsequent Ural defense line would be undertaken by the Northern Front alone, and Wang Zhi's anxiety began at this time.

The task given by the base camp to the Northern Front was to capture Novosibirsk within the year, to advance the front to Omsk, and to Kurgan before the beginning of spring next year, as an advance base for breaking through the Ural defense line.

However, by mid-September, only two-thirds of the railway section between Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk had been repaired, and the remaining one-third of the road still had to be transported by car relay, making the more timely and systematic damage to the section from Kyrkutsk to Novosibirsk even more frustrating.

The railway is not passable, the heavy artillery cannot be transported, what can be used to blast open those steel and concrete fortresses?

"Animals, they are all a group of animals, and they are so cruel to their own people, we can't treat them as human beings! Prepare, I'm going to go to the construction site to have a look, and I won't believe him......"

Wang scolded and grabbed his coat and horsewhip and was about to go out, but a clever little head suddenly poked out from the door of the radio room next door, and finally presented a freshly translated telegram before His Excellency the Marshal's heavy boots stepped into the corridor.

Wang Zhi squinted his eyes, and he was even more angry, pinched into a paper ball and threw it back, shouting while putting on his coat: "Meeting? Open a fucking meeting, Lao Tzu wants a railway! Railway! What kind of people are these, they will clean up these useful and useless balls......"

Still to Lan Xin, bent down to pick up the paper ball on the ground, opened it and looked at it, was shocked, and hurriedly went out to stop Wang Zhi.

"Commander, come back quickly! This is the telegram of His Majesty! ”

……