Chapter 64, the White Emperor Caiyun

Now that the Hong army has captured 50 artillery pieces in the White Emperor City, what is it polite, Liu Hou waved his hand, and ordered all 50 artillery pieces to be dismantled and installed on the "Baling". However, these 50 guns were only enough for the "Baling" to eat half full.

There are 40 gun emplacements on each side of the ship on each side of the "Baling", plus one on the bow and one stern, a total of 82 cannons can be installed, which is 10 fewer than that of the "Jingzhou". And these cannons, which were dismantled from the walls of the White Emperor City, were slightly inferior to the "Jingzhou" in range.

The most important thing is that it is now only equipped with 50 guns, which is a little more than half of the full load, so the current "Baling" firepower is far less than that of the "Jingzhou", but even so, it is already more powerful than any warship in this era, so it can barely be called a "super battleship".

It was a big project to move 50 cannons to the ship and install them, and it took a lot of time, so Liu Hou had to garrison the White Emperor City and plan slowly.

Fortunately, Liu Houjun has always had many craftsmen of all kinds, and they learned a lot of simple mechanical knowledge from Zuo Ci, and they are very skilled in the use of pulleys, inclined planes, and levers. These craftsmen urgently built a number of cranes, with which they lowered the artillery from the city walls.

Although there is no mechanical power, but the Hong army is better than the number of people, the strength of the number of people, Liu Hou asked all the more than 1,000 people captured in the White Emperor City this time to work as coolies, to assist those craftsmen in transporting artillery, so that on average, each artillery has more than 200 people to serve, even if they carry them on their shoulders, they can be taken away.

Of course, Liu Hou will not allow such an unskilled thing as carrying a shoulder carry. After the artillery was lowered to the ground, it was placed on a wagon and pulled to the shore. These carriages were also specially made, and many of the load-bearing areas were made of coarse logs to allow them to bear the weight of the guns. The axles and wheels are made of steel.

In particular, the wheels are made particularly wide to reduce the pressure on the ground, and there are not just four, but a full 10 wheels, so that the pressure distributed to each wheel is greatly reduced, so that the wheels do not sink into the ground due to the weight of the cargo.

There were only two such wagons, but fortunately the city walls were close to the shore, and each transport time was very short, and the prisoners and craftsmen worked in three shifts day and night, and they could transport eight cannons in one day and one night, and fifty of them for seven days.

Transporting the cannon to the shore is not the end of the matter, and hoisting it onto the ship is the most troublesome thing in the whole project. The craftsmen made the rafts out of stout logs, on which the bevels were built, and then the guns were pulled up the rafts along the slopes with pulleys.

Then the raft was propped up to the side of the "Baling", on which a crane had already been installed, and three iron chains hung down from the crane. The men on the raft tied the guns with these thick chains, and the soldiers on board began to push the arms of the winch.

This kind of winch is actually a large wheel that is placed vertically, but it has ten power arms stretched out in all directions, which can be pushed by 10 soldiers together. The winch is connected to the pulley block of the crane, which has the labor-saving effect of the pulley block, and there are ten strong men as the power, so it is also a very easy thing to lift a gun of one or two thousand catties onto the ship.

During the period when the artillery was installed, one of the things Liu Hou was doing at the same time was to integrate the army. The original 6th Regiment had been used as a reserve because it had no fire# guns, but now more than 2,000 fire# guns have been captured, and more than 2,000 fire# guns are enough to arm a regiment in addition to replenishing the damaged guns for each regiment.

So, Liu Hou ordered to select 1,500 soldiers from the sixth regiment to form the sixth regiment of the regular army.

The remaining 500# people will form the seventh regiment with more than 1,000 people captured this time, and they will be the new reserve army. Liu Hou directly promoted Wu Daniu to the head of the Seventh Regiment. This is not only to reward him for his great achievements, but also because Liu Hou feels that others are very clever and can be made.

His biggest flaw is that he has not received systematic training from the academy and the Hong Army, and lacks a lot of knowledge, but knowledge can be learned slowly, and it is difficult to develop that kind of adaptability and the spirit of courage to take responsibility, and Wu Da Niu has these excellent characteristics.

Liu Hou promoted a battalion commander in the original Sixth Regiment to join the regiment and joined the army as an instructor of the Seventh Regiment to assist Wu Daniu in training and managing the Seventh Regiment. At the same time, some of the older soldiers in several other regular regiments were transferred out and let them serve as junior officers in the Seventh Regiment.

This is because these veterans are too old to continue to charge into battle, and promoting them to officers is also a reward for their contributions to the army, and continuing to serve in the Seventh Regiment is a good way to retire to the second line.

Second, it is also to let them continue to exert their residual enthusiasm and pass on their rich experience to the recruits. After all, the Hong Army is a new-style army, the specialization is relatively high, and the soldiers have to learn much more knowledge than the traditional army.

Especially when the regiment commander is also a recruit, he himself needs to learn the rules of the Hong army, and he needs to rely on these veterans to teach the recruits. Of course, using these veterans as grassroots officers is also a means for Liu Hou's army, because these veterans can be said to be absolutely loyal to themselves, so even if Wu Da Niu wants to rebel, it is impossible to find someone to follow him.

During this time, Liu Hou did one thing in addition to integrating the army, and that was to blow up the reef. There are many places in the Yangtze River with steep reefs, which can easily lead passing ships to hit the reef and lead ships to destroy people.

The last time Liu Hou returned to Chengdu on the "Jingzhou", he had some reefs blown up, but there were still some larger reefs that had not been removed. This time, if you want to transport troops to Chengdu, you need to have more ships to pass through Guò, and these reefs still have a greater risk, so Liu Hou simply didn't do anything, planning to blow up more reefs and clean up the river a little.

Blowing up the reef will use the underwater bomb # bomb, just this time a large number of gun# powder was seized in the White Emperor City, Liu Hou asked the craftsmen of the army to work overtime to make a batch of underwater bomb # pop up.

It is not difficult to make underwater bombs, first take a clay pot and fill it with eighty percent full of gunpowder, the reason why it is only eighty percent full is because the remaining space is used to place the lead.

The leads are coiled inside in a special way so that they burn sequentially rather than in series to the side.

This is not difficult to do, after all, Hongjun craftsmen now even have fireproof materials such as water glass. Just make a clay tray and put the lead coil inside, if necessary, and then coat the water glass at the interval between the adjacent leads, so that you can make a coil of leads that will not be skewered and burned.

Depending on the length of the lead, the explosion time can be adjusted, and the longest can even be set to half an hour later. So, this clay pot is both an underwater bomb and a time #bomb.

Before going into the water, the lead is lit, the clay pot is quickly sealed, and the waterproof treatment is done, and then the water ghost (diver) takes the clay pot underwater, places it at the detonation point, and the personnel quickly evacuate, waiting for the lead to burn out and explode.

The lead is made of paper rolled with some fire # powder inside, and the combustion of fire # powder does not need to obtain oxygen molecules from the air. Saltpeter (potassium nitrate) can provide oxygen atoms to supply the oxygen needed for this redox reaction. Therefore, in a sealed tank or under water, the explosion of fire# is not affected by the lack of oxygen.

The step of placing explosives is very simple, but the most difficult part is determining the location of the explosives#. This requires a large number of water spirits to dive underwater to reconnoiter to find a location where explosives can be placed at the bottom of the reef, and if necessary, a hole in the smooth reef to plant explosives#.

This process is very difficult, because the time for people to stay under the water is short, the resistance in the water is high, and it is very difficult to chisel things. At this time, I had to use the tactics of the sea of people, that is, many water ghosts took turns to go into the water, each of them chiseled a few times, and after exhaustion, they went ashore to replace people.

In order to keep them in the water for a longer time, Liu Hou asked the craftsmen to make some air sacs out of pig urine bubbles (bladders), and each of them carried a few air bags into the water, so that they could change their breath in the water several times.

Later, Liu Hou felt that this was not enough, so he could only change his breath a few times, and the time they stayed in the water was only ten minutes, which was still too short, so he asked people to open all the knots in the long bamboo pole and make a hollow tube, and then put a copper suction head at the end of one end.

This suction tip is placed on a bamboo pole, and the other end is stretched out horizontally, and the outlet is made to be the thickness of a thumb, which is just right for holding in the mouth. In this way, these water spirits can continuously absorb air from the water through the guò suction head when they are underwater, because the tip of the bamboo pole is exposed to the water.

Of course, they have to learn the technique of inhaling through their mouths and exhaling through their noses, and if they still exhale the exhaust air through their mouth, then the carbon dioxide will accumulate in the bamboo pole, and the next time they inhale, they will inhale the exhaust gas.

With these bamboo poles for oxygen supply, the speed of the project was greatly accelerated, the Red Army captured a lot of people in the early stage of Dongwu, and many people in Dongwu knew how to be water-based.

These people, who have been begging for a living in the nearby waterways for a long time, are most familiar with the conditions of the river, and they know very well where there are reefs, which ones are the most dangerous and easy to hit the reef. According to their guidance, the demolition team of the Hong Army selected the target of the blast in a targeted manner, which greatly accelerated the clean-up.

These things caused Liu Hou to be delayed in the White Emperor City for ten days, and early in the morning ten days later, the sky was full of colorful clouds, and a qiē was ready to stop, Liu Hou led the troops to bid farewell to the White Emperor City and re-embarked on the journey to Chengdu.

The first to set off were the two super warships, the "Jingzhou" and the "Baling", which had the most powerful power systems and went the fastest, each ship could transport a regiment of soldiers when squeezed, and two ships could transport 3,000 people.

Liu Hou sat on the "Jingzhou" and set off for Chengdu with two regiments first. Others will depart on other transport ships one after another. Due to the upstream, the transport ships behind are very slow, and many times they need to rely on fiber pulling to advance, so they will be far behind the two super battleships.

The building ship "Chang'an" could not pass through the Three Gorges, and even if many reefs were blown up, only some shallow reefs were blown up, opening up a channel that was not too wide. The "Chang'an" was too huge and the draft was too deep, and it still could not pass through the newly opened channel of Guò, so it could only stay in the lower reaches of the Three Gorges and did not participate in this war.