I want to be emperor

Chapter 1172 Aerial Gunboat

In the fifty-fourth summer of Chengshun, the most important military affairs in the Great Chu Empire were a series of problems surrounding the equipment of light machine guns.

The Guards took the lead and placed a large order for one thousand Type 54 light machine guns, regardless of the high price. They soon received dozens of trial production batches of the machine guns, which were then quickly assigned to an infantry battalion in the Guards' First Division.

It is worth noting that unlike the Army which was still considering how to use the light machine guns, whether to deploy them to the infantry platoon level first or directly to the infantry squad, the Guards went straight to the point and deployed the Type 54 light machine guns to the infantry squad level.

Make the light machine gun a true squad weapon, and then explore new tactics around the newly equipped light machine gun.

The use of a new weapon or equipment cannot follow the old tactics. New tactics must be developed based on the characteristics of the new equipment.

This means that the basic infantry tactics of the Guards will undergo major changes.

The extent of this change can even be compared to the army's switch to automatic rifles that year. Even more impactful was the switch from smoothbore rifles to single-shot breech-loading rifles.

When the Chu army switched from percussion-cap rifles to single-shot breech-loading rifles, the infantry tactics of the Chu army underwent a radical change. The line tactics that had been used for two or three decades were directly abandoned and replaced by skirmisher tactics.

When the 11mm repeating rifle was used, the skirmish tactics of the Chu army changed further. Specifically, the distance between soldiers became larger, from the previous three or four meters to five or six meters or even wider.

This is because the infantry firepower has become even more intensive. If the previous dense skirmish formation is continued, the firepower would be wasted.

As the intervals between the skirmishers are further expanded, a wider area can be controlled with fewer troops. The front line that previously required an infantry company can now be controlled by an infantry platoon.

Of course, when necessary, the Chu army's infantry would increase the density of their forces, thereby greatly increasing their firepower and inflicting devastating damage to the enemy in front of them.

Now that they are equipped with light machine guns, the Guards believe that the original skirmish tactics also need to be changed. Although the light machine gun is not as good as the heavy machine gun in terms of sustained firepower, its firepower density is still very high compared to riflemen.

With such fierce light machine gun firepower, it would be inappropriate to continue using the previous skirmish tactics.

Therefore, it is imperative to explore and improve existing infantry tactics.

After all, the Guards' intended targets were never the indigenous people, but the army and navy...so when the Guards carried out tactical innovations and training, they were all aimed at the army.

This also led to the abnormal firepower of the Guards, and most of the technical weapons and even tactics were useless or unnecessary if used to fight against the indigenous people.

  But the Guards are still determined to do so!

Because if this is not done, the Guards will lose the greatest significance of its existence: to deter ambitious people from rebelling with the army and navy, and to maintain the rule of the Rothschild Dynasty!

  The army and navy of the Great Chu Empire are the country's armies. Their core goal is to fight foreign wars and safeguard the interests of the entire Chinese nation... and the Royal Guards are the private armies of the royal family, safeguarding the interests of the emperor and the royal family!

The difference between these two points is huge and must be viewed separately.

This is also the reason why the Guards were so happy to purchase expensive light machine guns and distribute them directly to the infantry squads in one go.

In fact, it's not just light machine guns. The number and proportion of heavy machine guns and artillery in the Guards also far exceeds that of the Army.

As for the Army, until now, only machine gun companies have been set up at the battalion level, equipped with four heavy machine guns and two 60mm mortars. During combat, the heavy machine guns or 60mm mortars in this machine gun company will be reinforced to a certain infantry company performing combat missions.

Therefore, although in actual combat, the front-line infantry company can obtain fire support from heavy machine guns and 60mm mortars, in fact, these two technical weapons do not belong to the infantry company.

But as for the Guards, the 60mm mortars and heavy machine guns had already been directly transferred to the infantry company level. Each infantry company had a 60mm mortar and two 1949-type air-cooled heavy machine guns.

As for the 80mm mortars and infantry guns, the Army is only assigned to the infantry regiment level, while for the Guards, these two weapons belong to the battalion-level firepower.

When it comes to the 75mm mountain gun level, it is used as divisional firepower in the army, but in the Guards, it is the artillery belonging to the infantry regiment.

Each infantry regiment of the Guards was equipped with an artillery company with four 75mm mountain guns and four mm infantry guns.

At the division level, the army only had 31-caliber mm field guns and -caliber mm mountain guns, but the Guards were equipped with -caliber mm field guns with a longer range and mm mountain guns with a larger caliber and longer range.

Another point is that after the artillery reform, in order to improve mobility and command, the old-style large artillery company structure of six guns per company was abandoned and replaced by a company structure of four guns per company.

However, the artillery battalion in the Guards' divisional artillery regiment had not three companies, but four artillery companies. Each artillery battalion had sixteen artillery pieces, and the three artillery battalions together had a total of forty-eight artillery pieces.

After a series of reforms, the Army's artillery regiments, in order to control costs and enhance mobility, adopted a system where each artillery regiment had three field artillery or mountain artillery battalions, each battalion had three artillery companies, each artillery company had only four artillery pieces, and each artillery regiment had only thirty-six field artillery or mountain artillery pieces.

This also resulted in the Guards having much stronger firepower than the Army's Class A Division...

The reason for this is that the Guards have been seeking to overpower the Army in units of the same level... Your Army artillery regiment is equipped with 36 artillery pieces, I will use 48, and then transfer the 75mm mountain guns to the infantry regiment.

You deploy the 70mm infantry guns and 80mm mortars to the regiment, and I will deploy them directly to the battalion...

In the end, the current situation has emerged: an Army Class A division has thirty-six 75mm field guns or mountain guns (two to one for plains divisions and one to two for mountain jungle divisions)... and the performance is not very good.

However, a division of the Guards had thirty-two long-range 75mm field guns and sixteen 100mm mountain guns. In addition, there were more than ten 75mm mountain guns at the regiment level.

In terms of the firepower of tube artillery alone, a Guards infantry division is roughly equivalent to two Class A divisions.

The reason for this result is simple: the Guards must always have a head start over the Army in terms of firepower.

After all, the total strength of the Guards is relatively small. Until now, the total strength of the Guards' various units, including the fleet and the air force, is only over 100,000, while the regular army alone has more than 1.5 million.

This does not include the Foreign Legion.

At the same time, the Guards are restricted by various issues and it is impossible to expand indefinitely to hundreds of thousands of people... If there is a large-scale expansion, the Guards will no longer be the Guards, but will become a new army.

If we cannot compete in quantity, then we can surpass the army in quality. This is the core idea of ​​the Guards Ground Forces.

The same is now true for light machine guns. While the Army is still considering whether to deploy it in infantry companies or infantry platoons, the Guards directly deployed this thing to the infantry squad.

If the plan of this squad light machine gun can be completed, the guards of the Great Chu Empire will actually be similar to the armies of various countries during the interwar period in the original time and space in terms of firepower configuration.

Of course, the guards created in this way will cost more because they have more technical equipment.

But the Guards don’t lack this little money!

As for the army, it’s not that they don’t want to, but... they don’t have the money!

Due to the tight budget and large scale, the army's light machine gun equipment plan was very slow, and the price was very restricted during the procurement negotiation. Although the Huguang Weapon Company tried its best to fight for it, it was forced to give up in the end... According to the price given by the army, they calculated that they would not only not make money, but would lose money. They really couldn't continue. After all, their Type 54 light machine gun was more complex and sophisticated, and the production cost was very high.

  In the end, the ugly-looking sleeve-cooled light machine gun from the Guangdong-Guangxi Weapons Company won the bid... Although this thing is very ugly, it was even nicknamed a big plate of chicken... and its weight was also the heaviest of the three candidate light machine guns, but because of its very cheap price and relatively good firepower sustainment capability, it finally won the bid. The Army gave it an official number: Type 55 light machine gun... This number was purely to avoid a collision with the Guards' Type 54 light machine gun, so the year of the next year was used.

In order to win this large order of 5,000 guns starting from 5,000 and possibly tens of thousands in the future, the Guangdong-Guangxi Weapons Company offered a very attractive price for the first batch, as their light machine guns had simple manufacturing processes and low production costs. The price was lowered to 130 Chu Yuan, and as production increased, subsequent batches would continue to drop in price.

By the time the last batch of the order for 5,000 machine guns is delivered, the price will be lowered to one hundred Chu Yuan.

He also signed a pre-order contract for the second batch of 5,000 guns with the Army, promising that the price of the second large order would be 80 Chu Yuan.

  After hearing this price, Huguang Weapons Company simply gave up the competition for subsequent orders... They had no chance of winning because the selling price of Guangdong and Guangxi Weapons Company was higher than their cost!

Even the Jiangnan Weapons Company's automatic rifle proposal could not bear the pressure of such an ultra-low price, and finally had to give up... Even though the light machine gun proposal in their automatic rifle plan was lighter than the Type 54 light machine gun of the Huguang Weapons Company, and easier to carry in combat, it still lost in the end.

However, the Navy took a fancy to the automatic rifle proposal of Jiangnan Weapon Company and tried to purchase a batch for land warfare equipment. After being officially equipped, it was also given the official military standard weapon number: Type 53 light machine gun, also known as the Qiming light machine gun.

This light machine gun was developed and produced by the Qiming Firearms Factory, and many of the firearms produced by the Qiming Firearms Factory are very famous. The famous Qiming shotgun series has the largest production and sales volume in the Great Chu Empire, and has exceeded tens of millions to date... Almost every household in the overseas territories has one. This large shotgun is very convenient to use, and there is no need to aim when shooting. It can be used by men, women, old, young, women and children.

They also have special models with less recoil for the elderly, the weak, women and children...

Compared with the big guns with a production and sales volume of tens of millions, the Type 18, Type 24, Type 27 and other series of military standard rifles are all little brothers.

This also brought a very good brand effect to the Qiming brand of firearms. Although the light machine gun that was launched was numbered as the Type 53 light machine gun, when it reached the navy, the naval officers and soldiers were more accustomed to calling it the Qiming light machine gun.

It is worth noting that the armed tax police also used the Qiming light machine gun as their light machine gun rifle... The armed tax police have always been loyal users of the Qiming Firearms Factory. They have used the Qiming automatic rifle with an internal magazine for many years, and are also equipped with Qiming shotguns on a large scale.

It is not surprising that the Qiming light machine gun is still in use today.

The newly formed air force followed the army's lead and used the Dapanji light machine gun, but their ground forces were very small, with only a small number of troops to defend airports.

What they valued more was Huguang Weapon Company's series of air-cooled heavy machine guns, because they wanted to move the heavy machine guns onto airplanes to use them as air-to-ground strike firepower.

In the summer of the 54th year of Chengshun, after perfecting the training, exploring and building the reconnaissance fleet, the Air Force began to explore a new type of attack method, air-to-ground attack.

In many actual tests, they found that if they used airplanes to carry shells directly, the hit rate was too poor. For the same reason, using airships was not very effective either.

The contemporary Chu airships had very poor maneuverability and were greatly affected by air currents and wind direction. The hit rate of aerial bombing was extremely poor and they could only be used for strategic bombing.

This is also the fundamental reason why the Chu Army has deployed airship squadrons in India, Europe, West Asia and other regions, but rarely uses airships to carry out ground attack missions.

However, there are a lot of problems when using airplanes to carry out bombing missions. For example, the airplane has too little bomb capacity. Carrying a few hundred kilograms of bombs may seem powerful, but that's all it can do.

At the same time, the hit rate of horizontal bombing by aircraft was also not very good.

The air force of the Great Chu Empire has proved through many experiments that whether it is using airships or airplanes, direct horizontal bombing has no practical use except wasting ammunition.

At least with the aircraft of the contemporary Chu Empire and the corresponding bombing aiming technology, it is useless!

However, as an independent military branch, the Air Force has its own ambitions and is unwilling to be used only for reconnaissance and become a subsidiary force of the Army.

The Air Force wants to gain air-to-ground strike capability to prove its value.

After a lot of people in the Air Force pondered over it, they thought it would be possible to move machine guns onto the plane and create a special air-to-ground fire support aircraft...

Well, please note that this machine gun is not used as an air combat weapon, but as a ground attack weapon.

In fact, what the Air Force wanted at the beginning was artillery, but they found that the artillery was heavy and had a large recoil. The current aircraft were not very good either. If they barely moved them up and fired a shot, the aircraft might be directly blown apart.

So we temporarily gave up on artillery and prepared to use machine guns. However, we cannot choose machine guns casually. Water-cooled machine guns are not very suitable, and the light machine guns that have been very popular in recent months are not very suitable either.

Air-cooled heavy machine guns are more suitable. They took a fancy to the 11mm heavy machine gun developed by Huguang Weapons Company. This heavy machine gun has multiple sub-models. The vehicle-mounted model is used in some medium and large armored vehicles. In addition, there is a ship-mounted model, which serves as the auxiliary firepower of the ship.

According to the idea of ​​these people in the Air Force, they want to make a twin-engine or even four-engine aircraft with a long range, high flight time, good stability, and especially good low-altitude and low-speed hovering performance, and then equip this aircraft with several 8mm heavy machine guns, a number of mm heavy machine guns, and carry thousands or even tens of thousands of bullets.

During combat, they would fly over the enemy's head, hover at an altitude of several hundred meters, and when they spotted the enemy, they would fire at them with heavy machine guns...

This combat mode is the modern aerial gunboat in the original time and space... But in order to use this kind of aircraft, there must be a prerequisite, that is, you must have absolute air supremacy, and the enemy must have no anti-aircraft firepower, otherwise they will shoot you down in minutes.

Even so, the combat altitude of the US aerial gunboats is often three thousand meters or even higher. This is to avoid ground-based anti-aircraft guns and individual anti-aircraft missiles, and its use is actually very restricted.

Therefore, most of the time, this kind of aerial side-strike firepower is carried out by armed helicopters or even general-purpose helicopters equipped with machine guns.

As for the Great Chu Empire Air Force, there is naturally no problem of air supremacy, because those natives don’t even have planes.

At the same time, these natives do not have any anti-aircraft firepower. So far, the Chu Army has not exported heavy machine guns to the indigenous vassal states, not even the early heavy machine guns that fired 11mm black powder.

Not to mention heavy machine guns, even the 11mm automatic rifles have not been released by the Chu army yet.

However, a few vassal states of the Chu clan were granted the right to purchase a series of Type 8 rifles and heavy machine guns that fired 8mm black powder bullets. However, the number of mm heavy machine guns they were able to purchase was very small and all were restricted for export.

This also means that the air force of the Great Chu Empire does not actually need to face ground anti-aircraft firepower. Even if the aircraft is slow and flies lower, it will not face any threats.

Under this premise, a low-altitude, low-speed, long-range aircraft specifically used for air-to-ground strikes has its value.

This also makes the development of the Chu Army's air force different from the early air force development of any country in the original time and space.

In the Great Chu Empire Air Force, there is no such concept as aerial combat. Although there is the concept of horizontal bombers, the Air Force does not think it is useful and therefore does not implement it.

Instead, they are planning to develop the "side-fire ground-attack aircraft" that the early air forces of various countries in the original time and space did not play, or dared not play.

The people in the Air Force had a good idea. This kind of long-range aircraft could hover over the enemy for a long time to conduct reconnaissance and attack.

Some people who advocate the construction of this type of aircraft even claim that only one such air-to-ground fire support aircraft is needed to provide comprehensive and long-term machine gun fire coverage on the battalion-level or even regimental-level battlefield.