On August 22, the twelfth year of Shunzhi, the sun was shining brightly, and the autumn was high and refreshing.

On the Mulan martial arts arena, the flag was displayed, and the soldiers were excited! According to Jihua, today I have to practice the offensive and defensive tactics of this star fort.

John Tong said in the previous Shangshu that the star fortress is characterized by its many edges and corners that cover each other, so no matter which direction it is attacked, it can be attacked from the flank and rear with muskets, bows and arrows and other weapons against the besieging enemy. Not only that, but compared to the original straight walls, the edges and corners of the star-shaped castle made it difficult for the enemy to blast open an open and undefended gap even with heavy artillery, making it difficult to launch a large-scale siege. The sloping walls made the artillery fire much less powerful, and the star-shaped edges and corners allowed the defenders to move forward, using artillery and muskets as cover and counterattacks at the head of the city. Even if the attacking side made great efforts to open the gap in the city wall, it still had to face the dense fire launched from all sides, and it was difficult to break through the gap quickly. This made it almost impossible to launch a general assault on the destruction of the walls.

In order to verify this statement, there are no guards in today's Humar Castle and the Star Fort next to it, but they use "artifacts" such as red-coated cannons to take a salvo five miles away to see which one is blasted out first, a huge gap that can allow the cavalry and infantry to charge.

The walkthrough begins with a square castle. Twenty red-coated cannons and ten mortars[1] lined up south of the castle and north of Dianjiangtai. With Fu Lin's order, accompanied by the sound of artillery fire and the shaking of the ground, the artillery exercise officially began.

This red-clothed cannon, also known as "Hongyi cannon", since the Qing army entered the customs, the Qing Dynasty also vigorously used and developed the Hongyi cannon, but the Qing Dynasty people thought the name was not good, so they changed "Yi" to "clothes". The red-coat cannon was originally a type of artillery made in Europe in the early 16th century and introduced to China in the late Ming Dynasty. The so-called "red Yi" people are also the red-haired Netherlands and Portugal. In fact, since the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, all the [front-loading smoothbore cannons] imported from the West have been called "Hongyi cannons", and Ming Dynasty officials often cover these cannons with red cloth, so they are falsely called "red clothes". According to research, only a small number of Hongyi cannons imported from the Ming Dynasty were imported from the Dutch East India Company, and later became hostile to the Dutch because of the Taiwan issue, and most of them were traded with the Portuguese in Macao. The demand in the Ming Dynasty was huge, and the Portuguese also acted as middlemen to sell British ship-based cannons to China.

The self-made large-caliber firecrackers in the early Ming Dynasty were exactly the same as these "Hongyi cannons" in principle, and they were all front-mounted smoothbore fire door ignition type, but the specific production was very different. In the early Ming Dynasty, most of the guns were made of copper, the inner chamber was trumpet-shaped, the barrel was thin, and the barrel was too short for its caliber, and its appearance was basically the same as the earliest existing Yuan Dynasty "bowl mouth gun". Compared with the Hongyi cannon, this kind of firearm has less gunpowder filling, and the gunpowder gas is not well sealed, so the firing range is short, in addition, it is easy to overheat, and the rate of fire is also slow, although it is not easy to explode with copper as the material, but the cost is higher (copper is the metal that casts money), and copper is too soft, each shot will cause the barrel to expand, the shooting accuracy and range drop very quickly, the life as a weapon is too short, and the only advantage is light weight. In front of the "Hongyi cannon", which weighed thousands of pounds at every turn, the fire gun in the early Ming Dynasty was really "a small thing". The "Hongyi Cannon" does have its advantages in design, its barrel is long, the pipe wall is very thick, and it is gradually thickened from the muzzle to the tail of the gun, which conforms to the principle of high to low chamber pressure when gunpowder is burned; There are cylindrical lugs on both sides of the center of gravity of the gun body, and the gun can adjust the firing angle with this axis and change the firing range according to the amount of gunpowder; It is equipped with a crosshair and a light gate, and the trajectory is calculated according to the parabola, which is very accurate. Most of the Hongyi cannons are about 3 meters long, with a caliber of 110-130 mm and a weight of more than 2 tons.

The most outstanding advantage of the "Hongyi cannon" is its firing range, which is an important part of measuring the performance of heavy artillery, even in the 21st century. The maximum firing range of the Ming Dynasty's homemade iron fire guns did not exceed three miles; And the general 3,000-pound "Hongyi cannon" can easily hit seven or eight miles away, and the historical records can reach up to ten miles! (At that time, the countries of Western Europe already had the concept of territorial waters, which were determined by the range of coastal artillery, and the territorial waters at the end of the 16th century were three nautical miles, or about 5.5 kilometers). The long-range "Hongyi cannon" combined with flowering shells became the strongest weapon against the Qing army at the end of the Ming Dynasty. At that time, the tactics were: lure the Eight Banners cavalry into the range of the "Hongyi Cannon" at the head of the city, and then use flowering shells to concentrate fire, and the effect was remarkable.

The "Hongyi Cannon" is well-cast and powerful. Compared with traditional Chinese firearms, it can be seen from the "modulus" followed by the casting of Hongyi guns, the "cannon table" when casting, the equipment of auxiliary facilities, the diversification of shells, the distance of fire (ranging from 2 to 4 kilometers), and the high intensity of the explosive force. But its limitations are not small, such as being good at siege and clumsy in field warfare, let alone defending cities. The rate of reload firing is not high. Moreover, the cannon body is cumbersome and cannot quickly transfer positions, so in field battles, most of them can only bombard at fixed points before the start of the battle, and when the opponent's situation is reversed, they are often unable to maneuver and react. The "Hongyi Cannon" is a kind of recital, front-loading smoothbore artillery, and every time it is fired, it will seriously deviate from the original firing position. According to the normal operating procedure, it is necessary to go through the steps of resetting, reloading, and setting the direction angle and elevation angle again. The most well-trained British Navy also had a rate of fire of only 2 minutes. It is impossible to increase the rate of fire of front-loading artillery, because after firing once, it must be filled with water into the barrel, extinguish the fire star, stretch it into the barrel with a dry cloth to wipe it dry, and then fill it with gunpowder and combustibles, and stuff the shells [in the twelfth year of Shunzhi, they were all solid bullets, that is, big iron balls!] ], and then click, these actions are quite slow and cumbersome, not including correcting gun emplacements. This is a common problem of front-loading artillery, it is good to be able to fire one shot in two minutes, but it is a pity that a running war horse can run a considerable distance in one minute, so do you have to fire a second shot in a hurry? Therefore, the front-loading artillery is characterized by a slow rate of fire, but it is powerful, and there is no problem in bombarding the city wall, but it is a joke to deal with cavalry.

At this time, the mortars used by the Qing army should basically be similar to the European mortars of the same period, and most of them were local products. This mortar cannon first appeared in the Southern Song army in the 13th century, mainly firing stone shells. In the early Qing Dynasty, there were many mortar cannons, mainly used as large-caliber bombardment guns, and the shells were replaced by iron shells, and even cast iron cannonballs filled with black powder were fired by mortar cannons, and the slow-burning synthetic medicine was used as a signal tube to detonate the black powder filled inside.

This time, Hongyi instructed Tang Ruowang to go up and propose to use red-clothed cannons as the mainstay, supplemented by mortars to bombard the city, in order to maximize the power of artillery, and then attract the attention of Fulin and a group of civil and military generals.

An hour later, the walls of the square castle of the civil structure inevitably began to crumble, although according to the design of Bekotov, although this castle was smaller than the real Humar City, but the structure was exactly the same, and it was also built very strongly, but in the face of the twenty red-coated cannons in turn, it was finally blasted open a gap of more than three feet after two hours.

But in just over two hours, all the Manchurian ministers have been dumbfounded. In their eyes, it was true that the strong fortress could not withstand the siege of the red-coated cannons, but it was indeed too fast to crumble after only two hours.

Fu Lin didn't say anything, and directly signaled to drag the remaining ten red-coated cannons into the battlefield, and together with the existing thirty artillery pieces, salvo the "Star Fort" with granite as the main structure.

After another three hours, everyone on the platform was surprised to find that although the Star Castle was shattered, it had never been destroyed by the collapse of any inclined city wall! At night, the bombardment continued for two hours, and even the red-clothed cannon was used up three times, which made the military department Shangshu Kadahun heartbroken, but even so, there was still no open opening that could allow the cavalry to attack in a big way!

Seeing that it was getting late, Emperor Fulin stopped the civil and military ministers beside him who were chattering and exclaiming in exclamation and lamentation, and ordered to stop today's siege exercises, set up the imperial tent, and asked all the ministers to enter the account and discuss.

John Tang accompanied the emperor and walked off the platform. During this day, the emperor pulled him to ask questions about this so-called "star-shaped castle", and it is no wonder that at present, except for the second son of the emperor, it is he who understands a little, not to mention that the star castle pattern is still presented to the emperor for preview. With many years of experience by Fulin's side, Tang Ruowang judged from the emperor's attitude that the implementation of this Star Castle must be logical.

The group got off the stands, got on their horses and walked away, talking all the way. Hong Yi'an sat between the guard's arms and breathed a sigh of relief. Today, he never spoke much, so he let Tang Ruowang be in the limelight. After all, if you want to make a big thing, even if you are a peerless wizard, it is useless to fight alone, and you must form different teams according to different tasks. Now the most important thing is the introduction and improvement of Western firearms jishu, and Old Man Tang and his team of priests have advantages that others cannot match......

[1] Mortar is a type of smoothbore gun with a short barrel (the ratio of caliber to barrel length is usually less than 1:12 to 1:13), a large angle of fire, low muzzle velocity, and a high arc trajectory. Its firing range is short, the projectile is powerful, and it is mainly used to destroy strong fortifications. Because of its short and thick cannon body and similar shape to a Chinese stone mortar, it is called "mortar cannon" in Chinese. Small-caliber, portable mortars were later developed into mortars.