afterglow

Chapter 381 Hedgehog Bomb; Ming Navy Decisive Battle Strategy
Today's anti-submarine weapons are not very efficient. Although depth bombs are powerful, their low hit rate can easily allow submarines to escape.

In order to prevent their own propeller noise 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 set at the stern of the ship, and they often have to sail directly above the target position before starting the attack. After the depth charges are dropped, it takes a while to sink.

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

A well-trained submariner can respond quickly after hearing the popping sound of a depth bomb hitting the water through the hydrophone. This 1 minute is enough for the submarine to drive more than 100 meters away.

With such a long attack lag time, anti-submarine ships can easily miss the target, allowing enemy submarines to escape the attack.

More importantly, the depth bomb explodes when it reaches the predetermined depth, and the huge movement will interfere with the ship's detection capabilities, so the anti-submarine ship must wait patiently for everything to calm down before it can continue to track enemy submarines.

In response to this weakness, the British, who attached great importance to anti-submarine warfare, developed the famous Hedgehog bomb.

The Hedgehog grenade system is essentially a multi-barreled grenade. Its launcher has many poles, hence the name Hedgehog.

When used, 24 rounds of anti-submarine grenades will be inserted on the pole and then launched towards the target area, with a range of up to 200m. The impact point of the 24 rounds of grenades will form a circle, trapping enemy submarines like a lasso.

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The sinking speed of these anti-submarine grenades is three times that of depth bombs, about 7.5m/s. This greatly shortens the reaction time left for enemy submarines.

Interestingly, the grenade is not equipped with a depth pressure fuze, but uses a seemingly ineffective impact trigger fuze.

But it is precisely this that gives the Hedgehog bomb 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 a hit has been achieved.

What's even more clever is that in addition to the collision trigger fuze, each anti-submarine grenade has a second impact fuze. This impact fuze will take effect due to the impact of the explosion.

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

However, historically, the reason why the Allies were able to successfully kill the wolves relied on a complete anti-submarine system, rather than a cutting-edge anti-submarine weapon.

The seaplane's airborne radar detects submarines sailing on the surface, and then flies over to launch rockets and drop depth charges.

Submarine communications were detected by radio, located using triangulation, and then tracked and suppressed by destroyers and aircraft.

In this way, the threat of wolves that was once flourishing was finally eliminated.

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

The British put the excellent ASV-2 airborne surface search radar into use in about [-]. Later, the Americans also obtained authorization and copied it for mass production.

With Ming's electronic technology, it would be great if it could be put into use two years later.

If the Hedgehog missile system is applied early, not only will the anti-submarine efficiency 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. The unpredictable risks are too great.

Therefore, Zhou plans to wait until the submarine snorkel technology matures and airborne radars are mass-produced, and then seize the opportunity to apply the hedgehog bomb system, a three-pronged approach, so as to gain an advantage in 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, so there is no need to be powerless by then.

Zhou Changfeng took leave the next day and made a special trip to the capital staff office to discuss strategic offensive strategies.

The tough and square buildings are decorated with traditional decorations. The appearance of the Metropolitan Governor's Office is much more modern. The feeling of being here is obviously different from that of the Ministry of War and other places.

"Hey, I'm late. I just happened to have an early rehearsal today. It started half an hour ago."

Zhou was a frequent visitor here. The staff of the staff office warmly entertained him, and the group immediately went to Hall No. [-] on the second floor, which is the naval battle deduction room.

Like the previous formal deductions, in order to increase the lag and distortion of information transmission and feedback in actual combat, the staff officers responsible for the deductions on both sides are behind screens in the corner.

There is a table and a map hanging over there. Orders will be passed from the errand boy to the person in charge of the huge sand table in the middle of the hall, and then the battle situation will be fed back to the corner.

The location of today's deduction is the Solomon Sea. 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 army fleet and the US fleet will clash here.

"By the way, is this a squadron-level battle?" Zhou Changfeng asked.

The navy captain who led him nodded and said, "That's right, it's not the main fleet. The main force is cruising outside."

"Hmm...Have you done any simulations of fleet battles recently?"

"I've done it several times in the past few days, but not these days."

Deductions for the decisive battle between the Mining and US fleets usually occur several times a year and a half, and whenever the two sides have new warships entering service and new tactical ideas are tested, they will be conducted again. There have been hundreds of times in the past 20 years.

In previous battles, aviation has proven its strength, and the previously envisioned naval battle model of large ships and cannons will naturally have to be rewritten.

While adjusting combat strategies and organizational models, tests and deductions are conducted to verify.

Even during this time period in the 30s, there were great differences between the Ming Dynasty Navy (ICN) and the historical Japanese Navy (IJN) in terms of guiding ideology and campaign deployment.

Although the IJN has a military disadvantage due to differences in national strength, the USN is still at a disadvantage because it is an expeditionary force. Therefore, there is the "70% theory against the United States". This conclusion means that the IJN only needs about [-]% of the USN's military strength. Effectively resist it.

However, at the Washington Naval Conference later, the Japanese only secured [-]% of the capital ship tonnage relative to the Americans.

Because it could not reach [-]%, the Japanese could only adopt the strategy of weakening first and then fighting decisively, so they came up with the famous "Nine Stages of Gradually Reducing Invitation Operations".

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The general idea is to continuously send ocean-going submarines to harass the USN from the beginning, then use aircraft carriers to weaken it, then use submarines to further weaken it, and then send out a night battle fleet to carry out night surprise attacks. Finally, the IJN will let the main fleet waiting to work and the incomplete USN expedition fleet carry out the attack. decisive battle.

This strategy influenced the development of many weapons. The superstitious Japanese mass-produced the Type [-] spear torpedo that uses oxygen. Its range and power are extremely amazing, and it is the only one in the world.

However, the ideal is very full, and the actual situation is known to be very skinny.Compared with the Japanese who are paranoid and extreme because of their natural disadvantages, Akito's strategy against Americans is much more calm.

The Ming Dynasty's main battleships had a tonnage of 43.5 tons. Due to the scale of the navy and geographical factors, the Ming Dynasty believed that their side would not have a military disadvantage.

Unless the Americans are crazy and would rather give up their Atlantic and European interests completely and go all out at the expense of the rise of Britain, France and Germany.

In fact, the Ming court and the military have always believed that they only need to force the United States to retreat - just be the hegemon of the American continent, and don't think about 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 forcing the USN to retreat at the minimum cost. You can get a glimpse of it from the design of the cutting-edge Yongle-class battleship.

Her main armor belt is only 304mm and the inclination is 16°, but the deck armor is exceptionally excellent, reaching 240mm, which takes up a lot of tonnage.

And her main gun that fires tungsten alloy super-heavy bullets has excellent long-range horizontal armor-piercing depth. The trial-produced Type 416 1410mm armor-piercing bullet weighs [-]kg.

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

Obviously, ICN has no intention of letting this class of battleships engage in a decisive battle with the enemy. She only needs to keep firing at the enemy fleet at a distance of 20km, which is a kite-flying tactic.

The hit rate at such a distance must be very low, but it is only secondary, because once it hits, it will have devastating consequences, but the Yongle class can basically be immune to the opponent's attacks 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's corrective shooting elements through seaplanes ejected from the battleship.

During this period, the aircraft carrier accompanying the battleship will also launch carrier-based aircraft to seize air superiority and conduct air strikes to weaken the USN fleet.

Navy generals generally believe that even with a 2% hit rate and 120 rounds of ammunition per gun, a Yongle-class battleship can score 3 hits, which is enough to severely damage one or two USN battleships, thereby forcing the opponent to know. Retreat from difficulty.

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

In this extreme situation, ICN does not have to worry about preserving itself. The guiding ideology is to go all out to 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-armed destroyers.

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

The Horai-class destroyers are very expensive because the ship's power system has always been expensive. In order to achieve ultra-high speeds, they are equipped with five high-pressure boilers and two steam turbines, which can output 8.2 horsepower.

When overloaded, the actual output power can reach 10 horsepower, which can drive the Penglai-class destroyer with a standard displacement of 1800 tons to reach an ultra-high speed of 45 knots.

Such an astonishing speed can only be matched by the French Fantasy-class destroyers - they can reach 42 knots, but only the Terrible ran 45.02 knots during sea trials.

However, the world record holder is the Penglai-class No. 45.8 ship Mianzhu. During sea trials, she reached the ultimate speed of 84.8 knots ([-]km/h) with a light load.

Its core weapon is four seven-unit 4mm torpedo launchers. The seven launch tubes of each launcher are arranged in an isosceles trapezoid with three above, three below, and four below. The entire ship can launch 480 torpedoes at a time.

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

Based on fragmentary intelligence, the Naval Ordnance Academy built a model of the USN underwater protection system half-guessing and conducted repeated tests.

Their conclusion is that the damage effect of multiple medium-yield explosions is better than the damage effect of a few large-yield explosions, because the bolts, rivets, and welds of the compartment mine protection wall will gradually fail due to impact.

Based on this conclusion, ICN specially ordered the development of a 480mm torpedo. It is relatively light and can be installed in seven units, while the 512mm torpedoes used by Ming army surface ships can be installed in up to five units.

During the all-out decisive battle, ICN's specific strategy was to use aircraft carrier-based aircraft to weaken the USN fleet during the day, and wait until evening to launch an attack with two or three assault fleets under the cover of the bright red sunset.

Our own heavy cruisers were responsible for suppressing the opponent's heavy cruisers. At the same time, more than 50 Wenchang-class and Penglai-class destroyers approached at high speed under the cover of our own light cruisers and carried out intensive lightning strikes at close range.

During this process, the carrier-based aircraft taking off from the aircraft carrier were divided into two parts, one part was waiting for a sneak attack, and the other part was responsible for covering - they were to spread smoke screens and smoke curtains on the impact route of the destroyer formation, blocking the view of the USN fleet.

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In short, the so-called strategic decisive battle is actually a bet on the fate of the army. It is not done unless it is necessary, and it is either not done or done at all.

With all the pressure on, the outcome is [-] to [-]. Even if the entire Ming Navy is destroyed and retreats to the mainland, the U.S. Navy will have to sink more than half of its army in the Pacific, and will no longer have the strength to reach out to Europe from now on.

However, this was the previous strategy. Now that aviation power has proven itself, this strategy should also be adjusted.

"Yes, even if the response in this round is quite negative, the balance of power can still be ensured. The effectiveness of the aircraft carrier is indeed extraordinary."

"Uh...sir, have we set the attack coefficient of the carrier-based aircraft too high?"

"No, this can actually be said to be a bit low."

The naval officers were all full of energy and interest, and Zhou Changfeng couldn't get in on the topic they were talking about, so he simply became a bystander.

After patiently waiting for the end of the exercise that lasted all morning, he said: "I want to conduct a landing exercise on Oahu. When will I be free to organize it?"

"Hmm..." Several staff officers looked at each other, and one of them mused: "Last month we conducted two simulations of Pearl Harbor, but they were only sea and air attacks, no landings. Commander Zhou, why don't you choose one of the simulations? The result, and then what happens next?”

"Okay." Zhou Changfeng raised his hand and looked at his watch, and suddenly felt hungrier. "It's time for dinner now. While eating, tell me the difference between the two naval and air attack drills."

"Yes, please come this way."

While Zhou was concentrating on studying how to seize Oahu with everyone, someone was also seriously considering his future.

The staff officer of the Metropolitan Governor's Office was on duty. Cheng Han was flipping through a literary magazine while he was busy, but the phone on the table suddenly rang.

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

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

(End of this chapter)