491 Pacific upheaval

Summer palace. (Full text reading, all in. (.i. Want. Wen. Learning Network)

On the idle grass on the shore of Kunming Lake, the horizontal net separates this place in two, and a milky white ball shuttles back and forth on the net, and the sound of contact between the snapping racket and the small ball is endless.

"Oops"

After just a few rounds, Li Enfu waved his hand, handed the tennis racket to the guard next to him, and said with a smile: "No, I'm old, I used to be in the United States, and I didn't feel tired after playing all afternoon." ”

"Hehe, sir, are you fifty-one? This is not old, Zuo Zongtang was in his sixties when he recovered Xinjiang, so you are in the prime of your life to contribute to the country. Li Mo smiled, and also withdrew from the tennis court that had been built not long ago, and the two princesses with hot eyes immediately occupied the court and started fighting.

"Retreated." Li Enfu rolled his eyes at Li Mo and said with a smile: "Your Majesty, I am retired." ”

"Really? How did I not know? Da Zhuang, you know what? Li Mo smiled and asked Du Dazhuang knowingly, but the poor big man had to shake his head vigorously.

"Okay, Your Majesty, just say what you have to say." Li Enfu hurriedly begged for mercy and played tricks, there is no one in the world who can compare with Emperor Li.

"Hehe, Mr. Li, what you said is wrong, as if I forced you." Emperor Li turned his head, looked at the two daughters who were running back and forth towards the fawn-like in the field, and showed the fox's tail: "Actually, I'm almost a person in a panic, so I want to ask you to go out of the mountain and be a royal advisor." ”

"Royal Advisor?"

"That's right, it's just that I usually play chess with me, play ball, and then go to the theater, it's very easy" Emperor Li didn't blink.

"Blame" Li Enfu smiled bitterly in his heart, but he really had nothing to do at home, but he was annoyed by his protégé or something, so he was not hypocritical, and said: "Then Enfu will take your salary in the future?" ”

"Well, it's guaranteed to make you a millionaire in ten years."

"Haha."

While joking, the two watched the two princesses play, the warm sun shining on their bodies, warm, and indescribably comfortable, and the topic turned to Italy and Ottoman, who were still fighting.

"It's not long coming." Li Mo took a sip of his teacup, got up and walked towards the lake with Li Enfu, and said as he walked: "I got information yesterday that after Serbia and Bulgaria had signed an alliance in March, Greece also joined in yesterday, and I heard that they were lobbying for Negro (now Montenegro), so Muhammad V has sent representatives to Britain, France and Germany to ask them to mediate." ”

"So, Osman is going to cut meat again?"

"There's no way to cut meat, the Balkans are too important for them, what can that place in North Africa have? And don't forget, Britain controlled Egypt, and even if he wanted to fight, he couldn't send troops at all, and the navy was afraid of going out and being retaliated against by the Italians after winning a small battle. ”

Li Enfu nodded, the Balkans were indeed too important for the Ottomans, and for Italy, if the Ottomans could be forced to cede the whole of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, then the loss of a few hundred planes and two battleships was nothing.

"Then our North African eagles are coming back, right?" Li Enfu smiled, during this period of time, European newspapers hyped this unit, and even China was affected, and even in the past few months, the number of young people who went to flight schools in various places in China to fly and drive has increased more than three times, but with the absolute dominance of Italy, their space is getting smaller and smaller, so they will only become prisoners of Italy if they stay.

"Yes" Li Mo nodded: "Feng Qi has already negotiated with the Italians to withdraw safely with 100 old planes, and now the ship should have arrived in Benghazi." ”

"Now for them, Long Guozhang, Le Fei and Xue Muhua have all quarreled, and they even made trouble with Chen Ping a few days ago."

"Falling out? Why?"

"It's not that they have taken a fancy to their experience, Long Guozhang and Le Fei insist that their navy should be divided into half, but Xue Muhua said that the personnel were selected according to five to one, so they should also be distributed according to this ratio after they come back."

"Hehe, a bunch of bastards." Li Enfu scolded with a smile.

"Good scolding, it's really a bunch of bastards, they're all idle and have nothing to do." Li Enfu's laughter and scolding made Li Mo laugh too, and continued: "But they won't be idle for long. ”

"Not long after?" Li Enfu glanced at him in surprise, thinking that Li Mo had just mentioned the Balkans, could it be? Hurriedly asked in shock: "Your Majesty, don't you want to go to the Balkans?"

Li Mo didn't expect Li En to be full of conjecture, and immediately laughed. 【 I want: super fast update 】

The laughter made Li Enfu confused, but in fact, he can't blame him for thinking blindly, as a former prime minister, he knows about Li Mo's help to the Ottomans, but saying that Hua wants to get involved in the Balkans, it is not a trivial matter, the dispute between Italy and the Ottomans is just a piece of cake, but the taste of the side dishes has caused boos all over Europe, if you go to a place where Europe is chaotic, it will be full of cannonballs.

Judging by the current situation, the Balkans will definitely make a fuss, and if you don't go there, how can you explain the phrase that the Navy and Air Force are not idle? Just as Li Enfu frowned, Li Mo beckoned Du Dazhuang to bring the confidential information he received, handed it to him and said, "Take a look." ”

Li Enfu took the information, looked at it twice, his face was already full of shock, and asked, "Your Majesty, have these news been confirmed?" ”

"I've asked the Ministry of Intelligence and the Security Service to do it all." Li Mo said.

"No, that doesn't make sense, does it? Now that Britain is at its peak, after Fisher returned to the Admiralty, he has readjusted his previous changing strategy, and began to suppress Germany with all his might, and openly declared that Germany would build one battleship, and Britain would build two to suppress this kind of arrogance, how could he suddenly make such a major decision? Li Enfu asked hurriedly, his face a little shocked.

"That's not easy." Li Mo turned his head and happened to see Long Guozhang coming happily, so he pouted at him: "Oh, it's not because of this guy." ”

Seeing that Li Mo and Li Enfu had turned around, Long Guozhang ran over with a smile and said hello: "Your Majesty, Mr. Li, you look a lot younger."

"I'm sorry," Li Enfu scolded with a smile: "I see that you are full of spring breeze, what happy event has you encountered?" ”

"What other happy thing can he have" Li Mo scolded angrily: "The first two Orion-class battleships of the British were delivered, and the bench of the world's first throne has not yet sat down, so he pulled the Hebei delivered last month to the South China Sea to act, and deliberately chose it at the gate of Gapo."

"Isn't this looking for trouble, you say?"

"Your Majesty, how can you say that? Britain has built four Orions, three Centurions, and four Iron Duke-class ships in three years, all of which are big guys, but we have only received the first one. ”

"You bastard, 30,000 tons of people's big ones, didn't you drive 35,000 tons to make trouble for me" Seeing that Long Guozhang was still stiff in his mouth, Emperor Li, who was depressed by the information just now, suddenly spit and flew everywhere.

"Tsk", Li Enfu seemed to feel that it was not lively enough, squinted his eyes next to him and snorted a few times, and said with a smile: "I just said it, I read the newspaper a few days ago that Britain came to protest again, and I thought it was a matter of North Africa, but I didn't expect it to be caused by you, Lao Long."

After Emperor Li scolded him, his anger was much easier, but Britain was too pitiful, and in three years they had started construction of eleven inch battleships in a row, and now they began to enjoy the joy, and they were beaten with a dull stick, because Hua's Hebei-class battleships were equipped with 14 inches, and it took three more months to increase the 45-fold body tube to 50 times before delivery

Dumbfounded, the British naval guns are all five twin-packed, but the Hebei-class is four triple-packed, which is enough to add two super-large-caliber naval guns, isn't this to anger Churchill

"Your Majesty, don't worry, I said that the construction of the last four ships was a cruiser, and I also released information confusion." Long Guozhang seemed to be a little proud of his little plan, but he didn't expect Li Mo to roll his eyes, cruiser? It's a shame that this guy can figure it out

Forget it, anyway, since the battleship was hungry, it couldn't hide it for long, so he changed the topic and asked, "By the way, do you have anything to do with this time?" ”

"Yes" Long Guozhang rubbed his hands, immediately took out a thick piece of design information, and handed it to Li Mo: "Your Majesty, the design department of the things you asked for a year ago has been made." ”

After the three of them found a place to sit down, Li Mo carefully looked at the design information.

A year ago, when Li Mo learned that the United States had built six Pensacola-class heavy cruisers, he had been thinking about ways to deal with them, and Hua completely gave up the heavy cruiser after the Dalian class, although the four Dalian class performed well in the naval battle of Xibilu Island, but because of the tonnage and naval gun caliber problems, they had begun to fall behind, and because of the major breakthrough in power, Li Mo turned to build the Beijing class.

The Beijing class is a major attempt by Li Mo to speed battleships, although the speed and firepower have met the requirements, but the armor has been unsatisfactory, the main armor belt is too narrow, and the horizontal armor is too thin, all of which limit the Beijing class to go one step further.

So when it was still very difficult to go further in power, Li Mo chose to reduce the speed and started the construction of the Hebei class.

The Hebei class is a battleship that he is personally satisfied with, which is basically similar to the Beijing class, and also uses a triangular mast, in addition to the first time that four symmetrical stabilizer wings have been added underwater, making the seaworthiness perfect.

The standard 31,500 tons, the data of 35,300 tons at full load, is even larger than the Queen Elizabeth class that Britain is about to build, of course, this is not to say that the level of Chinese ships is high, on the contrary, in terms of tonnage utilization, China and Britain are not an order of magnitude at all, and even worse than Germany.

The firepower of the Hebei class is carefully built, after abandoning the long bow tower and adopting the central bridge tower ship type, the whole ship looks more compact, the ship gun is bow and stern backpack layout, four triple 356 mm / L50 naval guns, each gun has 100 ammunition, all using electroslag refining and internal chrome plating technology, 84 rifling, muzzle velocity 835, large range of 32000 meters, when firing heavy 680 kg armor-piercing shells, the penetration depth reached 17000 m / 356 mm and 25000 m / 254 mm respectively, The speed has also reached 17 pieces per minute, which can be said to be only a little lower than the British Queen Elizabeth-class 15-inch naval guns that are about to start construction, but they are stronger than the United States will soon be equipped with the New York-class naval guns of the same caliber.

Six twin 130mm/L47 rapid-fire guns, eight single-mounted 76-mm high-level dual-purpose naval guns, eight quadruple 37mm rapid-fire machine guns, and twelve twin Mi Viper machine guns constituted a complete means of close defense.

At the same time, when the whole world was installing planes on the capital ships, Hua took the initiative to completely cancel the planes on the capital ships, because the naval battle of Sibilu Island and the subsequent research found that the large-caliber naval guns vibrated too much when they were fired, and the planes were easily damaged when they stayed on the warships, and the planes could not take off and land during the war, which was simply a chicken rib, so it was better to send a special light patrol to release the planes on the side for reconnaissance.

The protection is also after several twists and turns, the German small watertight cabin layout and the key protection concept of the Beijing class has been continued, the 11 ° inclined arrangement of the 330 mm main armor belt for the first time extended to the underwater, the width reached 58 meters, the initial solution to the problem of near misses, the front of the turret and the command tower are 350 mm, the gun mount and the top of the turret 305 mm, the bow and stern secondary armor 152 mm, above the waterline to 180 mm, the important horizontal armor is 127 to 180 mm, The main part of this is the 60 mm carburized steel welded as in the Beijing grade.

In the face of the increasing threat of underwater torpedoes, Li Mo also put forward high requirements, and needed to be able to resist the direct hit of at least three Lance-2 torpedoes used by Hua without sinking.

This is a great test, the Lance II charge is as high as 300 kg of TNT, let alone three, and if one is unlucky, don't want to live.

For this reason, McKinson once again modified the underwater compartment part to increase the reserve buoyancy, but still could not solve the problem, just when everyone was in a hurry, a young Chinese designer proposed that another layer could be added to the structure of the Beijing-class two-layer bottom, using a three-layer composite bottom, plus a 127 mm protective wall joint design scheme, this scheme also won the design award that year.

However, the weight increase of the underwater part also led to the excess tonnage, and the design department had to return to the country to adjust the armor layout, at this time Li Mo gave the box layout of the "armored enclosure" pioneered by the North Carolina class in later generations, which made the armor protection more concentrated, and saved a thousand tons of weight, and finally reached the standard.

But even so, the unprecedented total weight of 13,000 tons of armor still reduced the speed of the Hebei class to 25 knots, in order to improve the endurance, the design department even came up with a way to replace part of the ballast water with heavy oil, and finally made the endurance reach 22 knots / 6000 nautical miles, 12 knots / 15000 nautical miles tactical requirements.

The Hebei-class can be said to be a first-class battleship that Li Mo is basically satisfied with, so after learning that the development of large-caliber naval guns did not meet expectations, he chose to continue to build four such battleships.

Although the Hebei class was very strong, the weakening of the speed led to the abrupt end of Li Mo's initial dream of a fast battleship, especially when recent intelligence showed that the British steam turbine technology had also achieved initial results, and it is said that Fisher had considered forcibly installing the steam turbine on the Queen Elizabeth class, striving to increase the speed to 22 knots

The technology and manufacturing capacity of the old European empire began to eat away at Hua's huge advantage in power little by little, although their own side is also stepping up research on a generation of power, but after all, they are a hundred years of industrial countries, and they are much stronger than China at the bottom, and the precision manufacturing capacity is not comparable at all, otherwise the tonnage will not be 2,000 tons higher than the Queen Elizabeth class in the case of comparable firepower.

You must know that in order to train the current batch of skilled workers, Hua spent five or six years, resulting in Li Mo having a golden finger, and the processing and manufacturing capacity cannot be reached, and for Europe and the United States, people don't have to think about this problem at all, so as long as a breakthrough in technology is made, it can be very manufactured.

From now on, the advantage is still in their own hands, and it will take at least four years for Europe to raise the battleships of more than 30,000 tons to the first level, so the Hebei class has no problem against the Queen Elizabeth class, and he is worried that the steam turbine technology is installed on the battlecruisers, and once that happens, Europe will have a large number of battle cruisers with a speed of about 25 knots.

The relationship between Britain and the United States has begun to undergo extraordinary subtle changes, so a year ago Li Mo handed over the design task to McKinson, restarting the design and research of the fast battleship, and striving to overpower all the capital ships of each country in terms of speed

But the problem is that he can't make up his mind now, because Adel has already sent him a telegram not long ago, the first monowing 650 horsepower all-aluminum fighter can be tested in July, although the horsepower barely meets the requirements, but the naval reform has begun to dawn, whether to concentrate resources on building aircraft carriers, or continue to build second-generation fast battleships?

Li Mo withdrew his gaze from the design materials and glanced at Li Enfu and Long Guozhang.

Long Guozhang insisted on building this kind of fast battleship first, although Li Mo had explained to him the great power of the aircraft carrier, and he was convinced, but at present, the world is still the world of warships.

There are two problems, one is that the aircraft carrier design scheme currently taken out by the design department is simply impossible to achieve the endurance of the fast battleship at a low rate of 15 knots / 10,000 nautical miles, which is seriously insufficient for the Chinese Navy, which needs to defend the vast sea frontier and need to reach quickly.

In addition, the lack of horsepower of the aircraft has led to a limited bomb load, and the 650-horsepower aircraft can only hang about 300 kilograms of bombs, and two are not as good as a 356-mm shell, once they encounter a tough attack or support from the other side, dozens of planes will not be used at all, even if they send three or four aircraft carriers, they are not as strong as the delivery capacity of a Hebei-class battleship.

As for Li Enfu, he doesn't know much about naval warfare, only judging from the number of capital ships that Hua currently has, leaving aside the remaining three Duke-class ships that are being semi-retired in Lushun, including a total of 20 ships that are being re-inspected and rebuilt, which are basically enough for defense, but the offensive is insufficient.

Originally, there was no need to think about the attack for the time being, but the information just now changed the situation, so he immediately said: "Your Majesty, whether you want to build these battleships, I think you should first find out whether the information just now is true."

"Intelligence? What intelligence? Long Guozhang hurriedly asked.

Li Mo nodded, asked Du Dazhuang to hand over the information to Long Guozhang, and said: "I just received it, Britain learned from Germany, and mortgaged a large number of Pacific colonial islands, including the Gilbert Islands, Samoa Islands, Fiji Islands and Vanuatu, to the United States in exchange for a loan of two billion dollars. ”

"What"

Long Guozhang held the information and stood up suddenly.

As the commander-in-chief of the Navy, he is not the reckless Beiyang pipe belt more than ten years ago, and he has already developed a pair of fine eyes over the years.

The Gilbert Islands, Samoa Islands, Fiji Islands and Vanuatu are all extremely important strategic support points in the southwest Pacific Ocean.

But I didn't expect that now Britain has mortgaged these areas to the United States, which means that the United States' hand has officially reached into the core area of the Pacific, and the key thing is that if Britain and the United States join hands to land in Australia, coupled with Australia's original human resources, then the Pacific advantage that China has painstakingly built for more than ten years will completely disappear

Looking at the frightened Long Guozhang, Li Mo couldn't help but smile bitterly, he spent twenty years, from a twelve-year-old child to a thirty-year-old now, to build a huge Pacific defense circle single-handedly, but he almost lost it because of a transaction

Is this God playing tricks on himself?

Is it really because Britain is short of money that the arrogant Britain will exchange these extremely important strategic support points in the southwest and Pacific for the United States?

No

Li Mo knew better than anyone that these islands and regions, which were taken over by the United States until after World War I, were given to the United States in advance because of his own appearance.

The rapid rise of China in the Pacific had aroused strong uneasiness in Britain, and if this uneasiness had been a concern before, it had now been transformed into a real worry because it was going all out to deal with Germany.

Britain is not afraid of China entering Europe, because as long as it chokes Malacca and closes the Suez Canal, it is unlikely that China will want to threaten the British mainland anyway, which is the main reason why Britain is so afraid of the rise of Germany at its doorstep, but it is not too worried about China.

But not being afraid does not mean that you can relax your vigilance, British interests in the Pacific are still very extensive, especially Australia, the previous Australian crisis has not yet ended, the Chinese self-defense forces in Northwest Australia are still in a state of confrontation with the Australian army, and now a war in Europe is almost inevitable, which leads to the British fear that once they go to war with Germany, Australia will be quickly occupied by China.

Therefore, Britain deliberately put the United States, which is also not a small ambition, into the southwest Pacific to contain the Chinese empire.

This is like the trick played in Africa and India during the dissolution of the British Empire, deliberately complicating the division of power, and then forcing the decades-long religious and land disputes that followed

It can be said that the big hooligan of later generations was the United States, and the big bastard was Britain, because it was Britain that deliberately left behind countless conflicts when it retreated, which led to all kinds of conflicts that later filled the world

Obviously, Britain is sending an unmistakable signal that either you will watch obediently, or you will have to defeat the United States first

"Your Majesty, Mr. Li, Commander Long."

Duan Fei, who came in a hurry, broke the almost frozen atmosphere in the pavilion and handed over the information he had just received to Li Mo: "This is just received, Britain has transferred seven cruisers, including the tireless-class battlecruisers Australia and Sealand, to Australia, and the Indian intelligence station also discovered that six Nelson-class battleships have entered the naval base in Delhi this morning."

"Made"

Li Mo gritted his white teeth fiercely