Today's anti-submarine weapons are not very efficient, and although depth charges are powerful, the low hit rate can easily allow submarines to escape.

In order to prevent the noise of their own propellers from interfering with sonar and hydrophones, ships performing anti-submarine missions must maintain a low speed, generally no more than 15 knots.

Depth charges are usually placed in the stern of a ship, and they often have to sail directly above the target position before starting to attack, and it takes a while to sink after the depth charges are dropped.

The sinking speed of the depth bomb is about 2.5m/s, which means that if the submarine hides at a depth of 150m, it has a full minute to evade.

Well-trained submariners can respond quickly after hearing the popping sound of a deep bomb falling into the water through a hydrophone, and this minute is enough time for the submarine to go more than 100 meters away.

With such a long lag time in attack, it is easy for anti-submarine ships to pounce and allow enemy submarines to dodge attacks.

What's more, when the depth charge explodes at a predetermined depth, the huge movement will interfere with the ship's detection ability, so that the anti-submarine ship must wait patiently for everything to calm down before continuing to track the enemy submarine.

In response to this weakness, the British, who attached great importance to anti-submarine, developed the famous hedgehog shell.

The Hedgehog Bullet System is essentially a multi-barrel grenadier with a launcher with many poles, hence the name Hedgehog.

When used, 24 rounds of anti-submarine grenades are inserted into the pole and then fired at the target area at a range of up to 200m, and the landing point of the 24 grenades will form a circle, encircling the enemy submarine like a lasso.

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These anti-submarine grenades sink three times faster than depth charges, about 7.5 m / s, which significantly reduces the reaction time left for enemy submarines.

Interestingly, the grenade is not fitted with a deep pressure fuse, but instead uses a seemingly inefficient collision trigger fuse.

But it is precisely this that gives the Hedgehog Bullet system excellent combat efficiency, because if the grenade does not hit the enemy submarine during the dive, then it will not explode and affect the detection of sonar and hydrophones.

Once it explodes, it means that a hit has been made.

Even more ingeniously, each anti-submarine grenade has a second fuse in addition to the collision trigger fuse, which is effective by the impact of the explosion.

This means that if any one of the 24 grenades in each round explodes, it will cause a chain reaction that will cause the rest of the nearby grenades to explode one after the other.

However, the reason why the Allies were able to successfully strangle the wolves in history relied on a complete set of anti-submarine systems, rather than a cutting-edge anti-submarine weapon.

Surface-navigating submarines are detected by seaplanes' on-board radars, which then fly over to launch rockets and drop depth charges.

The submarine's communications are detected by radio, triangulation is used to locate it, and destroyers and aircraft are used to track the encirclement.

All of this eventually eliminated the once-rampant threat of wolves.

Because of this, Zhou Changfeng considered temporarily hiding the hedgehog bomb, an anti-submarine weapon, and now is not a good time to put it into use.

The British put the excellent ASV-2 airborne surface search radar into service about 41 years, and later the Americans also got permission to copy it for mass production.

With Daming's electronic technology, it would be good to be put into use two years later.

If the hedgehog bomb system is applied early, not only will the anti-submarine efficiency not be greatly improved, but once it is captured by Britain and the United States, it will be the submarine forces of the Ming Navy and the German Navy that will suffer in the end, and the unpredictable risk is too great.

Therefore, Zhou plans to wait for the submarine snorkel technology to mature and the airborne radar to be mass-produced, and then seize the opportunity to apply the hedgehog missile system and take a three-pronged approach, so as to occupy the advantage of anti-submarine efficiency within a certain period of time.

Anyway, its technical difficulty is not high, and it can be put into small batch production in a few months, and there is no situation where there is no weakness at that time.

Zhou Changfeng took leave the next day and made a special trip to the Metropolitan Staff Office to discuss the strategy of strategic offensive.

The tough and square buildings are embellished with traditional ornaments, and the appearance of most of the Metropolitan Governor's Offices is much more modern, and the feeling of being here is significantly different from that of the military headquarters and other places.

"Hey, it's late, it just so happened that I started a deduction early today, and it was half an hour since it started."

Zhou was a frequent visitor here, and the staff of the staff office welcomed him very warmly, and the group immediately went to the No. 4 hall on the second floor, that is, the naval battle deduction room.

In order to increase the lag and distortion of information transmission and feedback in actual combat, the staff officers responsible for the exercise on both sides are behind the screens in the corners.

There are tables and maps hanging over there, and orders are passed on by the errand runners to the people in charge of the huge sand table in the middle of the hall, and then the battle is fed back to the corner.

Today's exercise is held in the Solomon Sea, and it is expected that the Ming army will seize the Solomon Islands to cut off the connection between the United States and Australia, and the Ming and American fleets will fight here.

"By the way, this is a battle at the level of a detachment, right?" Zhou Changfeng asked.

The admiral who brought him nodded and said, "That's right, it's not the main fleet, the main forces are cruising on the outside." ”

"Hmm... Have you done any recent rehearsals for the decisive battle of the fleet? ”

"I did it a few times a few days ago, but not in the past few days."

The rehearsal of the decisive battle of the Mingmei fleet usually comes several times a year and a half, and every time a new warship enters service on both sides and a new tactical thinking is tested, it will be rehearsed again, and there have been hundreds of rehearsals in the past 20 years.

In previous battles, the aviation proved its strength, and the previously conceived model of naval warfare with large ships and huge guns naturally had to be rewritten.

While adjusting the combat strategy and organizational mode, we will also conduct tests and deductions to verify them.

Even in this period of the thirties, there was a big difference between the Ming Navy (ICN) and the historical Japanese Navy (IJN) in terms of specific guiding ideology and campaign deployment.

Although the IJN has a military disadvantage due to the difference in national strength, the USN is a labor expedition after all, and there is a disadvantage, so there is a saying that "the United States is seventy percent of the theory", which refers to the fact that the IJN only needs about 70% of the strength relative to the USN to effectively resist it.

Later, however, at the Washington Naval Conference, the Japanese only won 60% of the tonnage of capital ships relative to the Americans.

Because it could not reach seventy percent, the Japanese could only adopt the strategy of weakening first and then fighting a decisive battle, so there was the famous "nine-stage gradual reduction of the invitation battle".

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The general idea is to send ocean-going submarines to harass the USN from the beginning, then weaken with aircraft carriers, then further weaken with submarines, then send a night battle fleet to carry out night surprise attacks, and finally let the main fleet and the incomplete USN expeditionary fleet fight a decisive battle.

This strategy influenced the development of many weapons, and the superstitious Japanese mass-produced the Type 93 spear torpedo using oxygen, which was extremely powerful in range and power, and was the only one in the world.

However, the ideal is plump, and the reality is notoriously skinny.

Compared with the paranoid and extreme Japanese because of their natural disadvantages, the Akito's strategy against the Americans is much more relaxed.

The tonnage of the capital ship of the Ming Dynasty was as much as 435,000 tons, and because of the size of the navy and geographical factors, the Ming people believed that they would not have a disadvantage in strength.

Unless the Americans lose their minds and go all out, they would rather abandon their Atlantic and European interests altogether and risk the rise of one of Britain, France and Germany.

In fact, the Ming court and the military department have always believed that it is only necessary to force the United States to retreat in the face of difficulties - just be the hegemon of the American continent honestly, and not fight the idea of Asia.

Therefore, fundamentally speaking, the guiding ideology of ICN is always that deterrence is greater than decisive battle.

Since it is a deterrent, it is natural to pursue the pursuit of forcing the USN to retreat at the lowest cost, which can be seen from the design of the cutting-edge Yongle-class battleships.

Her main armor belt is only 304mm and has a passing level of 16° caster, but the deck armor is exceptionally good, reaching 240mm, which takes up a lot of tonnage.

Her tungsten alloy super-heavy gun has an excellent long-range horizontal armor-piercing depth, and the trial 39-type 416mm armor-piercing bullet weighs 1410kg.

At the same time, she also has a speed of about 33 knots.

Obviously, ICN did not intend to let this class of battleships fight the enemy, she only needed to keep the enemy fleet at a distance of 20km and keep firing, that is, kite flying tactics.

The hit rate at such a distance must be low, but it is only secondary, because once it hits, it will be devastating, while the Yongle level is basically immune to the opponent's attack at this distance.

As for how to improve the hit rate as the icing on the cake, ICN made extensive use of aircraft, guiding and coordinating the battleship to correct the shooting elements by catapulting seaplanes taking off from battleships.

During this period, the aircraft carriers accompanying the battleships will also fly carrier-based aircraft to seize air supremacy and carry out air strikes to weaken the USN fleet.

Admirals generally believed that even with a 2% hit rate and 120 rounds per gun, a Yongle-class battleship could get three hits, enough to damage one or two USN battleships and force the opponent to retreat.

In addition to deterrence, if the Americans are determined to seek a decisive battle regardless of their losses, the ICN commander can implement a decisive battle strategy if he judges that it is really necessary.

In such an extreme situation, the ICN does not have to worry about saving itself, and the guiding ideology is to go all out and annihilate the USN fleet at any cost.

According to this idea, ICN, which has been fond of small boats since ancient times, built a large number of excellent light cruisers and high-speed heavy mine-mounted destroyers.

Different from the Dinghai-class and Jieyang-class fleet destroyers, the Wenchang-class and Penglai-class should actually be classified as high-speed lightning strike ships.

The Penglai-class destroyers are very expensive because the ship's power system has always been expensive, and they are equipped with five high-pressure boilers and two steam turbines to achieve ultra-high speeds, capable of producing 82,000 horsepower.

In the event of overload, the actual output power can reach 100,000 horsepower, which can drive the Penglai-class destroyer with a standard displacement of 1,800 tons to an ultra-high speed of 45 knots.

Such astonishing speed was matched only by the French Fantasy-class destroyers, who could reach 42 knots, but only the Dreadful ran 45.02 knots during sea trials.

However, the world record holder was the Penglai-class No. 10 ship Mianzhu, who reached a maximum speed of 45.8 knots (84.8 km/h) with a light load during sea trials.

Its core armament is four four-pack 480mm torpedo launchers, each of which has seven launch tubes arranged in an isosceles trapezoidal shape, and the whole ship can drop 28 torpedoes at a time.

ICN believes that the underwater protection systems of warships of various navies are relatively perfect, and it is difficult to effectively damage only a few standard 21-inch (533mm) torpedoes that hit them.

Based on fragmentary information, the Naval Ordnance Institute built a model of the USN underwater protection system and conducted repeated tests.

They concluded that the damage effect of multiple medium-yield explosions was better than that of a few large-yield explosions, because the bolts, rivets, and welds of the bulkhead lightning wall would gradually fail due to impact.

Based on this conclusion, ICN specially ordered the development of 480mm torpedoes, which are relatively light in weight and can be equipped in seven combinations, while the 512mm torpedoes used by surface ships of the Ming army can be installed in up to five units.

In an all-out decisive battle, the specific strategy of the ICN is to weaken the USN fleet with carrier-based aircraft during the day, and wait until evening, with the cover of the red sunset, to launch an assault with two or three assault fleets.

At the same time, more than 50 Wenchang-class and Penglai-class destroyers approached at high speed under the cover of their own light cruisers and carried out intensive lightning strikes at close range.

In this process, the carrier-based aircraft taking off from the aircraft carrier are divided into two parts, one waiting for the opportunity to sneak attack, and the other part is responsible for cover - they have to spread smoke screens and smoke curtains on the shock course of the destroyer formation to obscure the view of the USN fleet.

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In short, the so-called strategic decisive battle is actually a gamble on the fate of the army, and if it is not necessary, it will either not be done or it will be absolutely destroyed.

Even if the Ming Navy is completely wiped out and retreats to the mainland, the US Navy will have to sink more than half of the sand in the Pacific Ocean, and from now on there will be no strength to stretch out its hand to Europe.

However, this was a strategy of the past, and now that the air force has proven itself, this strategy should also be adjusted.

"Yes, even if the response to this game is quite negative, it can still ensure the balance of power, and the utility of the aircraft carrier is indeed extraordinary."

"Uh... Sir, are we setting the attack coefficient of carrier-based aircraft too high? ”

"No, it's actually a bit low."

The naval officers were all energetic and interested, and Zhou Changfeng could not interject into the topic they were talking about, so he simply became a bystander.

After patiently waiting for the whole morning exercise to end, he said, "I want to do a landing drill against Oahu, when will I have time to organize it?" ”

"Hmm......" Several staff officers glanced at each other, and one of them muttered: "Last month, there were two deferrals against Pearl Harbor, but they were only sea and air attacks, and they did not land. ”

"Okay." Zhou Changfeng raised his hand and looked at his watch, and suddenly felt even more hungry, "Now it's time for dinner, talk while eating, tell me about the difference between the two sea and air attacks." ”

"Yes, please come over here."

While Zhou is concentrating on how to seize Oahu, someone is also seriously considering his future.

In the same room as the staff office of the Metropolitan Governor's Office, Cheng Han was busy looking at a literary publication, but the phone on the table suddenly rang.

Accustomed to it, he stared intently at the book and reached for the microphone, but the human voice from inside was unexpected.

Cheng Han closed the book and stood up directly, "Your Majesty? What are the instructions? ”

(End of chapter)