"The cannonballs equipped with new fuses can shoot down even sparrows, not to mention the eagle horses of such a large size, you can rest assured that you can hand over the air defense position to me and Kafta, and ensure that all the vultures and horses that appear above the position will not be missed." In the face of the old dwarf's questioning, Mr. Jack Duvalin, the director of artillery logistics and the chief of ordnance of the Kolas Army, patted his chest and packed the ticket, looking full of confidence.

"Really?" The dwarf did not dare to believe the dwarf's assurance, and muttered stupidly: "I'm afraid that the vulture didn't shoot down, but the bomb fell first." ”

Kafta, the deputy director of the Ordnance Institute and the chief organ warlock, pushed his glasses and slowly testified for his partner: "Mr. Popov, unless there is a serious error in my calculations, you don't need to worry about being bombed, take a step back, even if a bomb falls, our anti-aircraft artillery team will be bombed first." ”

"Well, well, you're right......" The old dwarf shook the hands of the two "freaks" with a helpless face, "Good luck to you!" ”

……

At 4:30 a.m., just after dawn, Clotz, dressed in Mithril armor and armed with a pure gold cavalry spear hanging from the Imperial flag, faced the east with the mid- and high-ranking officers of the company commander (captain) rank and above, and held up the Holy Emblem of Pero with the "Sun Face" coat of arms to make a brief pre-battle sacrament, begging the glorious Lord of Light to grant the believers the courage and luck to defeat the rebels—even though they knew very well that the rebels on the other side were holding high the banner of the goddess of fate, and that luck would probably not be a good advantage.

After the prayer, Krautz mounted his celestial horse and led his soldiers out of the city gate. The sound of horses' hooves was like a somber and solemn drumbeat, and five thousand iron horsemen galloped in the dim dawn, turning into a rolling stream of iron and rushing towards the train platform where the Koras army was stationed.

At the same time as the cavalry sorted, Colonel Junius's vulture cavalry battalion had already risen into the air first, and five hundred vulture knights flew at full speed in a rushing formation, aiming directly over the artillery position of the Kolas army.

Junius organized his knights into two sequences according to different combat missions, among which the stronger vulture horses with larger loads were selected, totaling about three hundred, and a cluster blasting barrel weighing about two hundred pounds was hung on each side of the saddle to form a "bombardment brigade", which was arranged in the middle of the rush formation; The remaining 200 vultures were divided into two groups and arranged in front of the left and right fronts, forming a "convoy brigade".

The bombardment group will try to avoid aerial combat with the enemy, and its first task will be to safely reach the enemy artillery positions and drop bombardments; The mission of the escort group is to provide protection for the bombing units and entangle the enemy eagles.

Junius knew that the success of Operation Daybreak depended on air supremacy. He is very confident in the fighting ability of the Eagle Horse Knight, the strength of the escort team is twice that of the enemy giant eagle, and it is not a big problem to entangle the opponent with two to one, but the bomb load of the bombing team is a bit stretched, and it is unrealistic to destroy all the enemy artillery in a wave of bombing, as long as he destroys more than sixty percent of the magic crystal cannons, he is very satisfied, and the remaining cannons are difficult to play a role in the position that has been blown upside down.

Looking back at the bombardment group, Colonel Junius sighed secretly. The eagle horse's bomb load was a hidden pain in his heart, and he couldn't help but envy the giant eagle in the rebel camp. The Eagle and the Eagle have about the same load, but the Eagle is smarter and more agile than the Eagle Horse, and with a pair of dexterous talons, it can complete the entire combat process from loading to dropping the bomb on its own, while the Eagle Horse does not have such an autonomous ability, and must be assisted by someone to load the bomb, and when it reaches the enemy's air, the knight on horseback needs to cut the rope that binds the bomb before it can be thrown. Under the premise that the total load remains the same, the vulture horse needs to carry the knight, and the bombs it can carry cannot be too heavy, which severely limits its bombing effectiveness. In order to save as much weight as possible, the bombardment brigade removed its armor from the knights to the vultures and went into battle almost "naked".

Junius was not too worried about the defense of the bombardment group, after all, it was either the enemy air force or ground anti-aircraft fire that could threaten the Vultures. The enemy's air force had escort groups to pinn down, and anti-aircraft artillery fire ...... According to his many years of experience in commanding air battles, the shells fired from the ground to a height of 1,000 feet were just terrifying, but in fact they were not accurate, and whether they hit or not basically depended on the clouds, and they did not pose much threat to the vultures. Think about it from another angle, if a certain vulture horse is unlucky and is directly hit by an anti-aircraft gun, even if the whole body is armored, it is a dead end, since it is the same whether it is armor or not, then why waste the load? Based on the above logic, the best strategy was to remove the armor of the bombing group, and Junius, as a veteran air commander, was convinced of this.

The vultures were flying much faster than the cavalry on the ground, and Krautz's knights were still ten miles away, and Junius had seen the station tower, a searchlight with an inextinguishable flame hovering over the top of the tower, monitoring the surrounding movements, and providing a conspicuous sign for the vulture knights in the air, indicating that the location of the light was the target of their air strike.

The vulture cavalry battalion was rapidly approaching the station, and Junius saw parallel railroad tracks stretching in the moonlight toward the end of the horizon. On the south side of the platform, a neat military camp was built along the railway, and the magic crystal cannons had already faded their gun coats, and the slender barrels pointed obliquely at the night sky, reflecting the moonlight and shining green. Junius glanced at the "observation crystal" embedded in the front of the saddle, and saw that the total number of enemy mountain guns and field guns exceeded 200, no wonder Rudolf Koras was known as the "king of artillery" in the Far East, and his shackles of breaking the traditional army tactical thinking that "artillery can only be used to attack or defend cities", and the pioneering work of using artillery in field warfare was indeed commendable.

Most of the mountain and field guns of the Kolas Regiment are "3×3" specifications, that is, the muzzle inner diameter is 3 inches (75mm), and the firing shells weigh about 3 pounds, and on the periphery of these 3-pounder howitzers are also laid a circle of 2-pounder guns with smaller caliber and slender barrels like pencils, these so-called "anti-aircraft magic crystal guns" are mainly used for air defense, and are also referred to as "anti-aircraft guns". Junius visually inspected the number of anti-aircraft guns in the number of about a hundred. As an air force commander with rich experience in actual combat, he could roughly estimate the density of the air defense barrage as soon as he saw the layout of the enemy's air defense positions, and he couldn't help but sneer secretly.

At this time, the Vulture Horse Cavalry Battalion had approached within five miles of the enemy position, and a sharp air defense alarm suddenly sounded on the station tower, and an airship slowly rose into the air and greeted the airspace where the Vulture Horse Cavalry Battalion was located.