Daming Yuanfu

Chapter 1487 Beiyang Expedition ([-])
"The whole formation turned left and turned around, and quickly opened up the distance."

Takagi-san added another battle order after this order: "Sign the signal to inform the whole formation: change the chain bombs and attack the opponent's sail cables. This ship will also follow the same."

This order is a direct supplement to his "flying a kite" tactical thinking.The characteristics or advantages of warships with hard sails are mainly that they can "eat wind from all directions" and that small battle damage is not easy to expand, and these two points happen to be the disadvantages of warships with soft sails.

Now Takagi-san has pulled out a situation where both sides are on the sidelines. Although it is not the best situation, it has already made the advantages obvious.And while it will take some time for the two sides to distance themselves, attacking the opponent's sails at this time is a typical means of maximizing benefits.

In particular, Takagi-san did not forget his mission for this battle: he did not need to use a decoy formation of only four warships to truly defeat the opponent. His mission was to hold back the Spanish fleet and create a way for the main force of the Beiyang Expeditionary Fleet to encircle and capture the enemy fleet. Chance.

Now that the opponent is not far or close to him, although his own side will also be bombarded, it is obviously impossible for the warships of both sides to be sunk by the opponent in a short time.At this time, giving up the attack on the enemy ship's hull, and taking the opportunity to attack the sails and cables, trying to slow down the opponent's speed, is obviously a move that is more in line with the grand strategy.

However, something interesting happened.Just when the Jinghua Lure formation fired the first round of chain bomb salvos, it was suddenly discovered that the round of salvos fired by the Spaniards was also chain bombs!
In the command room, Gao Musan witnessed a chain bomb flying somewhere on the deck of the "Dengzhou", cutting an unlucky sailor into two sections, and spraying blood and internal organs everywhere.

He lowered his face, and said to the other people in the command room: "It seems that the Spaniards are smarter than I thought, and I thought of the same thing. However, I guess their purpose of this move should still be aimed at Reduce our speed, and we are going to fight with us.

Inform the hawser and boatswain that damage management is the most important thing now. Our hard sails are much cheaper than their soft sails, and they are easy to operate. I am responsible for the consequences. "

After all, the Jinghua Liangyang Fleet is a commercial fleet that is “self-financed” to a certain extent. Its usual income mainly comes from sea trade sales and escort revenue—other merchant ships travel with the fleet to do business, and they have to pay 5% of the trade volume to the fleet. Escort fee, the escort fee does not accept physical objects, and will be cashed at a uniform discount.

By the way, most of the Jiangnan maritime merchants, even the Xu family, still choose to run with the Jinghua Fleet when sailing to Nanyang and Japan.Because although the pirates these days are not as rampant as before, but the times are here, it is very difficult to wipe them out.These pirates are like leeks, after one crop is cut, another crop emerges.

Besides, Jinghua's escort fee—also called protection fee outside—is not harsh. Compared with the current maritime trade profits, the protection fee of "every hundred and half" of the trade volume is still acceptable to everyone.

But precisely because the Liangyang Fleet is such a highly commercialized fleet, it attaches great importance to losses, and its proportion in the calculation of military exploits and achievements is also very high.Therefore, generally speaking, all ships are usually accustomed to "resolutely not replenishing those that can still be used, and resolutely not replacing those that can be replenished", so as to avoid reductions in merit and rewards or even fines and deductions.

At this time, Gao Musan said that he would be responsible for all the consequences, that is to let everyone go.The rigging master and bosun immediately mobilized their subordinates again, striving to perform well.

The solid cannon was replaced with chain bombs, and the distance between the two sides was not too far away, so the mutual losses began to increase.It stands to reason that the Spaniards' shipboard artillery is more suitable for launching chain bombs with a relatively short attack distance. However, they soon discovered that Jinghua's "hard sail fleet" not only seems to have a clear advantage in terms of rate of fire, but also chain bombs have a relatively short attack distance. Their damage is also far less effective than expected.

The chain bomb itself is two halves of iron balls connected by iron chains, which are stuffed into the barrel and fired together. The iron chain will be pulled apart by centrifugal force during the flight of the shell, and it will become a "swinging and rotating" motion state, which is easier to hang up the thinner enemy ship. The mast can also cut the cable or tear the sail.

This situation led to some phenomena that neither side expected before the war:

Takagi-san only knew that after the soft sail was damaged by chain bullets, it was easy to be pulled by the wind and the hole would become bigger. In the end, it was out of control and had to be discarded.

However, the problem right now is that the wind off the northern coast of the Philippines is not too strong, and the sails of the Spanish galleons seem to be of particularly good quality. Obviously, their sails were damaged in several places visible to the naked eye. But until the distance was increased step by step, there was no obvious ideal situation of "the hole getting bigger".

Gao Musan's theory of "the hole will be blown up by the wind" is pragmatic, and "the master is beyond doubt" is Gao Musan's creed, so he can only regret in his heart: Fuck, the wind is not strong today!

However, although the "holes and holes" almost didn't appear, Gao Musan accidentally discovered another weakness of soft sail warships: the cables on their ships are too many and too dense.As a result, as long as there are enough chain bombs hit, even if you are lucky, you can interrupt many of their cables from time to time [Note: In fact, most of them are stay cables].

Most of these cables are connected to various parts of the sail surface, and the soft sail needs them to make itself unfold and catch the wind smoothly.Even these cables (stays) have the function of keeping those tall masts standing firmly.

As a result, when they are interrupted too much, all sorts of unexpected things start to happen.For example, the flagship "San Antonio" of the Spanish fleet had too many cables on one side of the foremast knocked off, and there was obviously a problem with the force of the wind when it was eating.

In such a fierce artillery battle at this time, the Spanish sailors obviously had no time to remove the sail surface immediately-compared with the two types of sails, the soft sail at this time is fast to raise and slow to withdraw, while the hard sail is to raise the sail. Slow and fast.

The reason why a hard sail can be withdrawn quickly is mainly because its sail surface has brackets, so there is no need to untie the many thin and dense stays first.And its slow sailing is also due to this problem. Because of the support, the weight is relatively large (only the weight of the sail surface).The records of the Qiying by the British in the original history also illustrate these characteristics.

It is precisely because the hard sailboat does not have so many stays, the sail surface cannot be as large as the soft sail.Gao Wushi raised this issue with the shipyard before, asking if they could improve in this direction, but the shipyard directly rejected it.

The reason is quite simple: although adding these stays can make the sail bigger, but in that way, the sail surface cannot be changed as it is now.In other words, the main advantage of "eating the wind from all sides" is gone-then what do I want you to do?
For this reason, the fore-mast of the "San Antonio" leaned completely to one side with great difficulty, and as a result, it slowly bent under the incredible eyes of everyone...until there was a loud "click", and the whole part broke. The upper half of the fore-mast together with the huge The sail fell down.

Fortunately, the Spaniard's luck was not too bad. The broken foremast did not hit the mainmast and the bridge command room backwards, but fell sideways to the port side, and finally fell into the sea-the sea wind still helped. They gave them a hand, but when it fell down, the hull was damaged a lot, and at least three or four sailors were crushed to death.

Of course, the fall of the foremast has a huge impact on a battleship. The speed of the "San Antonio" immediately slowed down by a notch, just like later generations riding a bicycle with the handbrake on.

As for the other ships, although the situation was not as dire as that of the "San Antonio" that was under special attention, they faced very similar troubles, all of which were due to the large number of damage to complex cables and stays that affected the speed of the ship.

In addition, the operation of the soft-sail battleship itself is very complicated, and it is even more difficult to repair the damage immediately, so the entire fleet began to appear in a "difficult" predicament.

But correspondingly, Jinghua's hard-sail warship also encountered some unexpected troubles.

The first problem lies in the item "hard sails don't matter to small holes".Yes, the hard sail is indeed not afraid of individual small holes. A few holes have little effect on the wind of the hard sail. Too often, hard sails may break!

The root of this problem lies in the hard sail material of the Jinghua battleship at this time.The definition of hard sails in later generations is different from that of this era. The so-called hard sails in later generations do not mean that you have to use bamboo strips and reed mats to weave the sail surface. It is whether there is a bracket.

However, today's Jinghua hard sails are relatively primitive hard sails mainly made of bamboo strips. It is only after Gao Yushi has the tung oil processing technology for bamboo and wood products passed down from generation to generation by the chieftains of Guangxi that he made these bamboo strips hard sails " Reworked" a bit to make them more resilient than stiff sails of the past.

It's a pity that no matter how "more resilient", they are still bamboo strip products, and there is still a critical point of fragmentation under the sea wind.As long as this critical point is exceeded, what should be shattered will shatter—a large area will fall down piece by piece, and then gradually lose the ability to eat wind.

If the trouble for the Spaniards now is that they are often too late to withdraw the sails when they clearly see the damage, then the trouble for Takagi-san and the others now lies in "whether I withdraw the sails or not".

It is easy to withdraw a hard sail, just untie a few main parts and do a little auxiliary work to remove the whole thing.But the problem is how to hang up the spare sail after it is pulled down now-it is not difficult to install it, but it is difficult to raise the sail, especially now that it is still in the artillery battle.

Imagine, a group of people shouting loudly around the mast, pulling the huge TM heavy hard sail to go up little by little. If the Spaniard happened to hit a chain bomb at this time, wouldn't that scene sweep the army? ?

What's more, although some hard sails are broken in large pieces, compared to the entire large sail surface, it is not an overall broken, but a part of the "small overall broken" between each bracket and the bracket. .In other words, you are right to say that it can still be used, but the wind-eating area has become smaller. As for how much smaller, it depends on how many pieces are broken.

Due to their respective disadvantages, both sides suffered varying degrees of loss in speed, and the situation on the field became complicated as a result.Judging from the current situation, it seems that the warships with hard sails have a slight advantage-because although everyone has damaged a lot of sails, the characteristics of the hard sails themselves "eat eight winds" make the enemy formation at this time In the situation where the side string is against the wind, it has some advantages.

This is also what Takagi-san is most fortunate and afraid of at this time. If he hadn't actively designed and achieved such a posture from the beginning, the long-term close-range artillery battle between the two sides would not be his strong point.And if one is unlucky and the opponent succeeds in launching a boarding battle, the situation will be even more unimaginable.

However, unexpected situations continued to occur: due to the different degrees of sail loss of the ships of the two fleets, the formations between the fleets have become uneven, and it can even be described as a canine tooth.

The distance between the distant ships has been extended to two miles, basically out of reach of each other, but the two closest ships are only about 400 meters away, and the sailors on both sides have even started to shoot at each other with muskets ——This is actually beyond the distance of precise shooting, and it is normal to be unable to hit each other.

However, Jinghua's consistent emphasis on range and accuracy has played a little role at this moment. Although the corresponding power is weakened, occasionally a few bullets hit the Spaniard's battleship is enough to shock the opponent with this range. ——Although it can't actually play any practical role at this moment.

The formation of the entire Jinghua Fleet has also changed. The "Dengzhou" and "Jinzhou" slowly fell behind the formation, while the two high-speed reconnaissance ships "Left Wing Hussar" and "Right Wing Hussar" Begin to show their unique "powers".

Under the propulsion of the propellers, although the two ships also had a lot of damage to the sail surface, their speed has hardly dropped compared to before (because the Dengzhou was in front of them before, which actually suppressed their speed), which made them The two first-class cruisers that surpassed the "Laizhou class" were the farthest away.

Gao Musan noticed this situation keenly, and with a movement in his heart, he suddenly ordered: "Signature, order the 'Left Wing Light Cavalry' and 'Right Wing Light Cavalry' to break away from the formation to hunt freely and carry out harassment operations." Dun added: "Let them judge according to the situation whether they can try their best to launch chain bombs during harassment operations and continue to attack the opponent's mobility."

The messenger went down, but the first officer was a little worried and reminded: "Captain, if this happens, the pressure on us and the 'Golden State' will be even greater."

Gao Musan nodded heavily, but still firmly said: "I know, but it doesn't matter. At present, we still maintain a slight advantage in speed. Now as long as we can maintain this point, wait until the two 'light cavalry' find an opportunity to take the Spanish fleet The damage to the rigging is greater, they will not be able to escape, and we can escape from danger. From the perspective of time, the Grand Fleet should also arrive at that time..."
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(End of this chapter)