Lin Gao Qiming

Chapter 1487
Therefore, more than anyone else, Hale hopes that the Zheng Group can regain its vitality.For this reason, he hit it off with Zheng Zhifeng who came to seek an alliance.In his view, although Zheng Chenggong has the identity and appeal of his son-in-law, and the official support of Ming Dynasty, his decisive strategy in capturing Anping makes his group not to be underestimated, but after all, the strength is the weakest - the most important ship Teams and commercial channels have been carve up, and it will not play a big role.Moreover, he himself has nothing to do with the main members of this group, and it is unknown whether the other party can understand his own strength.

Zheng Zhifeng has cooperated with him for a long time, and he is the most powerful faction in Weitou Bay—his appeal is much greater than that of the Zheng Gongcheng Group, which is in charge of Shaoguoyi. Obviously, he also has much more ships and payment capabilities.

"Mr. Feng, you are very haggard."

Zheng Zhifeng took off her cloak, "The Zheng family is in danger, but the situation in Weitou Bay is treacherous. I can't sleep peacefully."

"That's right. I think with your charisma and strength, you shouldn't have such troubles. It's just that you are less decisive."

Zheng Zhifeng nodded silently, and took the hot cocoa brought by Marcos.Did not continue this topic

"I want to get the goods, are you ready?"

"Of course. This is the product you want, let's take a look at it first." Hale was still habitually efficient, without extra politeness.

In the space outside the hut, there are cylindrical objects tightly wrapped with straw ropes, which are nearly ten feet long, and dozens of large and small wooden boxes.

Zheng Zhifeng's gaze could not help but focus on the object. As the package was opened, dozens of workers set up the sturdy scaffolding, and then hoisted the long pipes in the box with simple iron pulleys and skillfully placed them on the already assembled Good on the cannon.

Zheng Zhifeng glanced back and forth at this novel weapon with greedy eyes. There are six cannons that have been fully assembled, two large and four small.The larger ones have a diameter of about four inches (Ming Chi, about 125mm) and a length of more than eight chi (Ming Chi, about 2.5 meters).The smaller ones have a diameter of more than three inches (Ming Dynasty, about 100mm) and a length of more than seven feet (Ming Chi, about 2.35 meters).

These cannons are not the Hongyi cannons familiar to the Ming people—usually half-snake guns or big snake guns, but cannons made by integral casting and milling out the barrel according to more modern technology. After the rifling is drawn, it is already a A very powerful front-loading rifled gun.Knowing his material flaws, Hale added iron hoops to the cannon.Therefore, the artillery is very bulky.Fortunately, Zheng Zhifeng's main needs are naval guns and fortress defense, so it doesn't matter if it is bulky.

As for the better-performing Dahlgren guns he made, there were very few of them, and he was neither willing nor convenient to sell them to Zheng Zhifeng.However, even such a modified version can counter Australian warships to a certain extent.

"Mr. Paul, is this the kind of powerful cannon that you said is comparable to the Australians? Why is it not as good as the Hongyi cannon?" Zheng Zhifeng asked suspiciously. After all, the cannon in front of him was the same size as Zheng Zhifeng had seen before The massive 18-pound red-coated cannon was different.

A trace of contempt could not help but appear on the corner of Hale's mouth, and he said coldly: "Mr. Feng, you have reason to question what you saw. After all, not everyone understands cannons. The bigger the cannon, the better." He paused After a pause, completely ignoring Zheng Zhifeng's ugly face from being ridiculed, he continued: "I said before, my products will never disappoint you. If you had acted faster back then, maybe you wouldn't have lost in Xiamen." So dire."

Zheng Zhifeng was silent. Indeed, if the gun factory could start work earlier, the "new guns" against the Australians would not only be the few guns removed from the Australian ships.During the entire campaign, apart from the few "Australian cannons", none of the Zheng family's firearms posed any threat to the Australians. Whether on land or at sea, the Australians had an advantage in range. When there is no artillery support, the gunners of one's own side are defeated with muskets.The most frightening thing is that they shoot with amazing accuracy-not even the European gunners they hired can achieve such accuracy.

The gunfire of the massacre at Weitouwan and Jinsha was deeply burned in his mind, making him restless.Although he has accepted most of the Zheng Group's inheritance, he seems to be the most powerful faction in Weitouwan.But he is well aware of his fragile position. The Australians' two-masted clippers appear from time to time off the coast of Jinsha, as if declaring their sovereignty over this sea area.The Lingqi, which could once be sold for 2000 taels of silver, is no longer cared about, because the Australian patrol boats will seize the ships of the Zhengjialing Banner when they see them, and once captured, all the goods will be confiscated.So the ship owners who sailed to the West began to fly the Australian flag instead.The escort and patrol system established by the Australians made them completely powerless.We can only sit back and watch this huge loss of income.Even some small forces that splintered out of Zheng's group began to buy Lingqi from Australians.

Waiting for powerful enemies outside, Weitou Bay is not peaceful.The Zheng Cai brothers are entrenched in Xiamen, and they don't buy into him at all. Zheng Chenggong's occupation of Anping, relying on his official position, also makes him stern.As for the other small forces, although they are not enough to cause trouble, they have already colluded with each other, shared their voices, and helped each other so as not to be annexed by the three major forces.Let him eat the small ones first and then take down the big ones, and the plan to reunify the Zheng family has repeatedly failed.

Zheng Zhifeng is very clear that the current silence of the Australians is only temporary. They deliberately do not intervene in the disputes in Weitouwan in order to let them fight each other to the death, consume each other, and finally swallow them in one bite-not even the bones are left.

To break the deadlock, the only way is to refresh the armaments.The Australian's offense was an eye-opener for him, and it really taught him a lesson about "gap".In the past, the Zheng Group also realized its backwardness in ship guns during armed conflicts with Europeans, so it introduced European ships, guns and technical personnel.However, the gap between the two sides was not so great that Zheng's group could not fight back. Most of the several conflicts along the coast of China were able to use the geographical advantage to win.It is not unheard of for Australians to have strong guns, but due to lack of practical experience, the backbone of the Zheng Group had great objections to whether to cooperate with Hale to establish a new cannon factory—— After all, this expense is too large, and it is bound to affect the distribution of profits.

Zheng Zhifeng regretted more than once that too much time was wasted on discussions. If the cannon factory could be put into production earlier, although the situation could not be reversed, at least it would not have suffered such a disastrous defeat, and her brother would not have been brutally murdered, causing the current split. situation.

Now, his only hope lies with Hale.Zheng Zhifeng's men have traveled between Manila and Quemoy many times, bringing not only Hale's letters, but also what they saw and heard in Hale's workshop and shipyard.This made his determination to refresh his armaments at all costs even stronger.

"As an original agreement, I will show you the power of this artillery. You will know that you are worth your money."

After all, Hale waved his hand and directed his staff to start manipulating the cannon.

"Do you need a target?" Hale asked. "I don't want to be told I'm playing gunpowder in mounds." He handed the binoculars.

Zheng Zhifeng nodded, took the binoculars and looked in the direction of the island for a while.

"Mr. Paul, I want your cannon to hit that mound two miles away. Is there no difficulty?"

Hale picked up the binoculars: the field of vision was a thousand meters away, to be precise, from his professional point of view, there should be a mound with a radius of about 1150 meters at about 9 meters, standing alone on the corner, very conspicuous.If you look at it with the naked eye, you can barely see it clearly, but it is indeed difficult for artillery aiming.

"No problem," said Hale. "Marcos, you take some gunners to fire. Six guns fire together."

Marcos professionally adjusted the position and balance of the artillery, and silently calculated the redundant compensation of the recoil distance, so that there would be no large error when the artillery repositioned; then, according to a large number of previous shooting experiments, According to the gun table data, the pitch angle was adjusted with the wooden quadrant inserted at the muzzle and the adjustable sight at the gun tail, and the gun carriage tail bracket was moved to determine the direction of the shooting angle;
Afterwards, the gunners used the charge calibrated by the gun table data to load the paper-wrapped charge and the conical shell with a copper bottom;
所有的火炮皆放列在一条火炮射击线上，并标定序列号四寸炮为A1、A2,三点二寸炮为B1、B2、B3；各炮相互间隔6米，都已瞄准就位。一切准备就绪后，黑尔首先对A1、B1号炮进行校准射击。毕竟火炮经过长途运输和重新组装与原始最佳的状态相比肯定会有所改变，所以新组装的火炮也要进行校射。

Under normal circumstances, the situation of each artillery is also different, at least one calibration shot is required to determine the deviation compensation, but Hale is very confident in the results of a large number of previous shooting experiments, and is also very satisfied with the professional quality of these assemblers , so only one of the two types of artillery was selected as the benchmark for calibration.

After the two deafening cannons of "Boom, Boom", through the telescope, you can clearly see two points of smoke and dust raised by the calibrating bullets at a distance of less than 30 meters from the front and back of the small mound, and less than 15 meters from the left and right.

Hale nodded secretly in his heart. After all, it is a rifled gun, and its accuracy is far from that of a smoothbore gun, and the first calibration test can achieve this accuracy.

"Two degrees up the muzzle!" Marcos put down the binoculars and called out the new password.The gunners immediately swung their sledgehammers and hit the wooden wedges, raising the muzzle.

(End of this chapter)