golden scales

"Kill!" Xiao Mo drew out his saber, which reflected brightly in the sunlight. The saber turned from straight up to the sky and turned into a 45-degree angle, as if it had scratched the itch of a giant beast, and immediately galloped forward with murderous aura, causing the whole earth to tremble.

There are more than one-third of the new recruits in the newly formed First Guards Battalion. The training time is not long, but because of the influence of the surrounding veterans, the growth rate is significantly higher than that of the original Eastern Palace Guards Battalion.They proudly held weapons in standard postures without fear, stepped on the drums, and followed the seniors they had admired for a long time to kill the enemy.

Liu Fangliang's heart sank when he heard the gunfire behind him, and soon he received a report from the scout: there was a large group of people a mile away, rushing towards the rear camp of the army.

——To charge and kill from such a distance, you are really a chick who has never fought!When they rush to the front, how can the soldiers still have strength!

Liu Fangliang put down his heart instead, and said loudly: "Zhang Hong, you come to attack the city, wait for me to turn back and kill those Zhu thieves."

"Obey!" Zhang Hong also responded loudly, but he was a little uneasy: Cihou could not see the limelight and wanted to withdraw, right?

Liu Fangliang really didn't think of retreating.He turned around with his guards and guards, waiting in formation, and issued an order: "When the enemy army stops the whole team, first shoot to disrupt their positions, and then kill them in one go!"

The guards below responded one after another, sharpening their knives and preparing to fight.

The rushing army did not intend to stop the whole team.The formation of mandarin ducks is like a long snake advancing side by side. When rushing fifty steps ahead of the enemy's formation, the killer team equipped with short soldiers showed extremely high combat quality.

Only then did Liu Fangliang realize that the Eastern Palace Army was far stronger than he had imagined, and quickly ordered to release arrows, but he had already lost the opportunity.What made him even more dumbfounded was that after a round of arrow rain, the formation of the Eastern Palace Army was still neat and stable, and they continued to charge.The short soldiers who followed behind also continued to shoot arrows to cover, without any worry that the arrows would fall on their own heads.

--How can this be!

Liu Fangliang had never seen such a cooperating charge team. His heart seemed to be tightly grasped by a big hand, and he shouted loudly: "Let the arrows! Let the arrows!"

"The enemy army is in disarray! Change formation, kill!" Xiao Mo's accumulated battle experience allowed Xiao Mo to see the faint chaos in Liu Fangliang's formation, and bravely unfolded the mandarin duck formation and charged into the enemy formation.

This is exactly the opposite to take a thief. The courageous side is full of power, while the timid side is shy, and they are scattered in just one face-to-face.

"Kneel down to avoid death!" shouted the soldiers rushing into the enemy line.

"Liu Fangliang is dead!" A sharp voice sounded on the battlefield. It was a psychological warfare arranged early in the morning. No matter whether the enemy general was captured or killed, shouting like this could always break the enemy's will to fight.

Liu Fangliang saw that his personal guards were like thin paper, which could be torn apart at the first poke, and he felt confused and lamented in his heart.He took two steps back slowly, and suddenly heard the earth-shattering "tiger, tiger, tiger" coming from behind him, like thunder, like a landslide, and the situation on Zhang Hong's side would not be much better.

"You," Liu Fangliang grabbed a soldier, "go to Yanjing, report to the emperor, and say that I, Liu Fangliang, are ashamed of him."

"Lord Hou!" the soldier roared, "If you keep the green hills, you don't have to worry about running out of firewood!"

Liu Fangliang looked at the red-robed Ming army who were getting closer and closer, drew out his sword, put it on his neck, and sighed: "The army has been defeated like a mountain, and this Marquis is now a general of a country, and he cannot be humiliated by restraint. You go quickly."

"Master Hou!" Seeing that Liu Fangliang was going to kill himself, the surrounding soldiers rushed over one after another.

Liu Fangliang closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, heard his heart beating, and felt the cold touch of the sword's edge on his neck, thinking to himself: Soon, soon...

"Master Hou! You can't die!" The soldier yelled violently and rushed towards Liu Fangliang, knocking him off his horse and throwing his long sword aside.

A teardrop rolled out of Liu Fangliang's eyes, and he sighed: "No one dies, why do you..."

"If you die, the brothers will die here with you!" The soldier interrupted Liu Fangliang, grabbed Cihou's wrist, turned over swiftly, and shouted loudly: "Liu Fangliang will be arrested!" ! We're down!"

Zhang Hong saw Liu Fangliang knocking down the commander-in-chief of the flag, knowing that the defeat had become a settlement, so he fled with his personal guards.It's just that he didn't know the place well, so he turned around and bumped into Xiao Mo's hand.Fortunately, Zhang Hong was not bound by his status as a "Hou Ye", and surrendered to the army without hesitation, preserving the revolutionary friendship between him and his soldiers.

On the battlefield, the soldiers will be courageous, and if the flag is turned down, the soldiers will not be foolish and die.

Seeing that the battle was coming to an end, Zhu Cihong couldn't help feeling relieved.This battle is the battlefield I have chosen, and I have taken great advantage of calculating with my heart and others without my heart.However, the Guards Battalion fought bravely, and did not flinch even in the face of ten times the enemy. This is the courage of a strong army.

"Sun Du, if we move to another place, what is the strategy for our army to attack such a Wubao?" Zhu Cihong asked Sun Chuanting beside him.

Sun Chuanting took one last look at the joyous battlefield, and said in a deep voice, "The artillery, we can only use the artillery to force the defenders to fight, and then annihilate them."

"Indeed." Zhu Cihong said: "That's why I specially placed Xiao Tugeng's artillery bureau on the mountain, just to calculate the range of Liu Fangliang's artillery, and set it up for him. This time we came prepared, Liu Fangliang thought he had a plan , from the beginning to the end is in the palm of my hand, it may not be so easy next time."

"The speed of casting cannons is still slow." Sun Chuanting said helplessly: "I went to the cannon factory to inspect before. At the current speed, I am afraid that no more than [-] cannons can be cast in a year, and these are all small Francophones. , if it is more than a thousand catties of red-clothed cannons, I am afraid that it would be good to have ten."

Zhu Cihong was originally superstitious about management, thinking that with a management method that transcended the times and a reasonable division of labor, the output of the gun factory could be accelerated.After he personally inspected and listened to Tang Ruowang's patient explanation, he found that it is simply fantastic to cast cannons on a large scale in this era.

The first is that the material quality is difficult to monitor, and the tolerance is out of control; the second is that the chamber pressure formula has not been summed up, and it can only be manufactured according to the regulations, otherwise it is easy to explode the chamber; the third is that the manufacturing process is backward and the scrap rate is high.Wanting to improve the process is beyond Zhu Cihong's level of knowledge in science and engineering, and he can't even come up with a guiding opinion.

"I look at the old archives in the palace. In the ninth year of Jiajing, it was also an imitation of the Francois machine gun, and 32 cannons could be cast a year. At that time, the Taixi cannon casting method had not been passed on to my Ming Dynasty, and the craftsmen were groping for casting by themselves. On the contrary, it is not as good as during the Jiajing period?" Zhu Cihong said.

Sun Chuanting was not clear about this matter, but he realized the importance of artillery when he was in Shanxi, and he had thought about it for a long time, so he answered after a little thought: "I am afraid that many of the skills of the Jiajing period have not been handed down. After Wanli, the artisan households were divided seriously by wealthy and noble relatives, and more people fled after Chongzhen. Today, the artillery cast by the imperial artillery factory is not even as good as Wu Sangui's Guanning artillery factory in terms of quantity and quality."

After Yuan Chonghuan was arrested, Zu Dashou fled overnight and never entered Beijing again.After the battle of Dalinghe, Zu Dashou was captured and fled back, and he didn't even enter Shanhaiguan.Liaozhen has long regarded the land outside the pass as private property, and the gunpowder factory and artillery factory have even moved outside the pass, refusing to rely on the imperial court for military weapons.

Hearing what Sun Chuanting said, Zhu Cihong remembered that Liaozhen had already been able to cast composite-layer guns with copper bodies and iron cores.The core of this gun is mostly forged from wrought iron, and the outer layer is covered with bronze. When the gun is fired, the inner wall is compressed and the outer wall is pulled, which is much stronger than a single-layer gun of the same thickness.Compared with the high rejection rate of the mud casting method, the cost of the composite layer gun is much lower.

Even a novice in science and engineering like Zhu Cihong knows that although the difference between forging and casting is a letter, it represents a generational difference in technology.

"The research and development of artillery can't be saved. In less than a hundred years, all sea and land battles will be about this thing." Zhu Cihong thought for a while and said: "If the number of artillery can't increase, can some people be selected to improve the artillery shells?"

"Your Highness, did you mean shotgun?" Sun Chuanting asked.

"The shooting range of the shotgun is too short, and the actual combat effect is too sloppy." Zhu Cihong said: "I think the blooming bullet has great potential to be tapped."

flower bomb...

Sun Chuanting thought it was worse than shotgun. (To be continued.)