Arc of Gunfire

Wang Zhong watched the artilleryman push the cannon into position and complete loading.

The gunner saluted Wang Zhong: "Your Excellency, the shooting is ready, please give instructions!"

Wang Zhong first turned to confirm whether the researchers had finished replacing the dummy - this was to make it easier to judge the damage. After all, the No. 4 short 75-pound high-explosive shell in the previous test had shattered the inside of the armor, and the fragments scratched the dummy.

After confirming that the researcher had sent the "replacement completed" signal, Wang Zhong said to the gunner: "Aim a little bit and fire."

"yes!"

As soon as Wang Zhong picked up the telescope, the gunner opened fire, and Wang Zhong didn't even have time to change the angle of view.

Through the telescope, it was clearly seen that the shell hit the steeply inclined front of the No. 2 car. Although it was bounced away, it still left a clear scratch.

The researchers immediately rushed up to check the dummy inside the destroyer. After a while, a signal was sent that "there is no internal damage and the test can continue."

Wang Zhong: “Keep firing.

As soon as he finished speaking, the gunner opened fire. The second shot was fired high and flew past the roof of the destroyer. "

Wang Zhong: "What happened?"

Brigadier General Zinov said: "Under normal circumstances, it is best to re-fix the sight. I mean the sight of the 76 gun."

Wang Zhong frowned: "You mean the scope was just damaged?"

Before the brigadier general could speak, Anatole spoke first: "The vibration is distorted. It may also be that the gun mount was shaken out of a small error. As long as our equipment is a precision part, there will be this problem. I know the answer Some people in the tank gun platoon would rather aim at the enemy through the barrel than use unreliable sights.”

Wang Zhong: "Isn't it too much to aim at the enemy with a gun barrel? No matter what, the sight is more reliable than the gun barrel, right?"

Anatoly spread his hands and said, "The gun barrel may be more reliable if the target is closer."

At this time, the inspection on the target side was completed. This shot did not penetrate, and the dummy inside was unscathed.

The gunners also checked the sight according to the brigadier general's suggestion and reported to Wang Zhong: "There is no problem with the sight. It should be a normal error just now."

Wang Zhong was stunned. If it were in the game World of Tanks, how big would the dotted circle around the crosshair be (representing the possible impact range of the cannonball).

"Keep shooting!"

"yes!"

The third round was fired immediately, this time hitting the gun mantlet of the No. 2 car. Since he didn't see Ricochet, Wang Zhongxin mentioned it directly.

Soon, the test results came: the upper and lower aircraft were stuck, but the artillery was faultless, and it took time to repair the upper and lower aircraft.

Wang Zhong turned to Ke Jing and said: "The protection of the gun mantlet needs to be strengthened, but no members were injured, which is pretty good."

Ke Jing: "I want to see the damage to the gun mantlet."

Wang Zhong: "Okay, let's go together. Gunner, stop shooting."

After a while, Wang Zhong and Ke Jing led a group of people to the No. 2 car 800 meters away.

You can see obvious craters left by shells on the gun mantlet.

Ke Jing pushed up his glasses: "It looks like the shell directly destroyed part of the armor of the gun mantlet."

He got closer to the gun mantlet, carefully inspected the back of the gun mantlet, and then sighed: "The gun mantlet is deformed and jammed the helicopter. As I expected, the gun mantlet is too thin."

Wang Zhong: "Did you know that the gun mantlet was very thin from the beginning?"

"Yes."

Ke Jing raised his hand and explained while gesticulating: "The tank turret is located above the vehicle body. Even if the T34 is designed with the turret forward, it is easy to place the overall center of gravity in the middle of the tank. In fact, the T34's turret is placed forward. Designed to balance the weight of the engine and fuel tank.

"But this car is different. It has no turret. The entire artillery is placed in front of the car body. Then the front of the car body is equipped with such thick armor, and there is also a height machine and steering machine, so the counterweight of this car has changed. It's very difficult.

"I'm afraid that adding more weight to the gun mantlet will cause the suspension of the first pair of dive wheels to be crushed."

Wang Zhong: "So that's it."

He suddenly remembered that Santoku's Hunter Tiger on the other side of the earth also had the fighting room placed in the middle of the car body. At the time, he didn't understand why it was designed like this. Now he finally understood that it was for counterweight, with the 128mm gun and armor placed together. too heavy.

Wang Zhong: "Wait a minute, are the height and steering gears electric?"

Kejing: "Switching from hydraulic to electric can reduce weight, but there may be difficulties in production. The current supply of motors cannot meet demand, and most motors are installed on tanks."

Wang Zhong: "Hydraulic pressure is very heavy, right?"

"It's not too heavy. After all, the trip is short."

"What is the shooting range of this thing?" Wang Zhong continued to ask, he wanted to understand the situation as clearly as possible.

Although the shot just now was "absorbed" by the gun mantlet and the helicopter and caused no casualties to the crew, the vehicle lost its combat effectiveness on the battlefield - it is not repaired on the battlefield after pressing a button for more than ten seconds.

Even a minor glitch like a stuck turret will take a long time to repair, and it can basically be regarded as saying goodbye to "this time" battle.

So Wang Zhong wants to avoid this situation as much as possible.

In response to his inquiry, Kejing immediately reported the data:

"The left and right sides are fifteen degrees each, the maximum depression angle is 7 degrees, and the elevation angle is 50 degrees."

Wang Zhong was shocked: "Such a high elevation angle?"

Ke Jing: "The engineers of the Navy said that this is a high-level dual-purpose gun, and it has grenades for direct fire."

In fact, the Soviet Army on Earth habitually classifies SU85 and SU152 as self-propelled artillery. When actually used, they often let them fire in a straight line, and even deploy them next to a howitzer regiment equipped with straight fire to fire in a straight line together.

Obviously this space-time Ant also inherited this idea, but Wang Zhong did not intend to let them inherit it-at least not this 100mm carrier vehicle.

Wang Zhong: "No, no, no, no, reduce the functions and do what I want it to do. An elevation angle of 18 degrees is enough. The depression angle can be increased a little, to 9 degrees."

The data given by Wang Zhong is the pitch angle range of the Tiger tank: -9 to 18 degrees.

"This..." Ke Jing hesitated.

Wang Zhong: "I will add it to the technical parameters I proposed. I only mentioned the depression angle before, but I didn't expect you to actually want it to shoot straight."

When he said this, he took over the pot, and Ke Jing immediately said he had no objection. .

Wang Zhong continued: "There is no need for hydraulic pressure for the pitch angle and left and right shooting range. The hydraulic devices have been removed and replaced with hand cranking."

This time it was Brigadier General Zinov who raised the objection: "This will make the reaction very slow. What should I do if I encounter an enemy tank at close range?"

Wang Zhong: "Rely on the covering infantry to discover the enemy tanks. Do not engage in close firefights with the enemy."

As soon as he finished speaking, Anatoly smiled bitterly: "Where did the tank troops come from to accompany the infantry?"

Wang Zhong: "My troops will have them, and they will also have accompanying anti-aircraft artillery, accompanying artillery regiments and accompanying maintenance regiments."

"Wow," Anatoly gasped, "I'm so lucky to be a tank crew in your army. I can understand why your army has so many tank crews who destroyed a lot of enemy tanks."

Yebao's newspapers may have been tired of reporting on Wang Zhong's own deeds. I don't know who started it, so they went to interview Wang Zhong's tank crews who had killed a lot of people. These interviews were then embellished in major taverns. After that, all of Wang Zhong's tank crews became armored heroes.

It is said that it made the tank crews of the brother units feel competitive.

Wang Zhong was too lazy to care about this. He said to Ke Jing: "Don't worry about how to use me. Your task is to build the vehicle according to my requirements. In fact, if these destroyers mainly fight at a distance of 1,200 meters, the hand-operated That's enough."

When the enemy is far away, you only need to move your hand at a very small angle to aim at the target. Anyone who has studied relevant geometry knowledge knows this.

Ke Jing: "Okay, I'll dismantle the motor when I get back and thicken the gun mantlet, so that there will be no defense holes on the front."

Wang Zhong: "Wait a minute, if you want to redesign the car, do you have to build a new car? After all, it is quite complicated to remove the hydraulic pressure and so on."

Ke Jing: "It is indeed necessary to redesign the structure near the breech block, and the gun mantlet also needs to be adjusted. In fact, these two vehicles can be towed back to the factory for modification, but that is very time-consuming, so it is better to just build a new one."

Wang Zhong: "Then what is the number of car No. 2?"

"Sika deer." Vasily reminded.

"Yes, the Sika Deer will stay at the shooting range to practice target and comprehensively test its defensive capabilities. The 76-gun mantlet can jam the high and low aircraft. We already know this. Next, we will continue to test whether it can penetrate at different distances.

"Maybe we can find new problems and let Kejing's chief engineer improve them together."

After Wang Zhong finished speaking, he looked at Ke Jing for advice, but this look was obviously misunderstood. Ke Jing stood at attention and said: "Promise to complete the task."

"Just be determined." Wang Zhong looked at the sky. "It's already dark. The gunner probably won't be able to fire accurately under these conditions, right? We'll test again tomorrow and send the report to my desk."

————

The next day, on the afternoon of January 2, 915, a report was delivered to Wang Zhong's desk.

According to this report, the frontal main armor of the 100mm artillery carrier can withstand the fire of the ZIS3 anti-tank gun at a distance of 500 meters.

But the gun mantlet can be penetrated at a position of 600 meters. Once it is penetrated, there will be problems with the high and low aircraft.

After reaching a distance of 500 meters, shooting the gun mantlet with the 76 gun may cause the gunner and loader to be injured or even killed. In three of the ten tests conducted, only the gunner was injured or killed, twice only the loader was unlucky, and three times Two people were unlucky together, and the other two times two people were unscathed at the same time.

Because the commander had two "human shields", he had a higher survival rate and was only scratched twice.

If I have to say it, this shortcoming is not a problem at all. In the game, it may be because the high and low machine and the breech will swallow up the aftereffects of the shells, and it will be nicknamed "black hole armor" by players.

But this is reality. Those crews injured by fragments may be unlucky enough to hit an artery or something and die.

This is a crew carefully selected by Wang Zhong. They are all veterans and are very precious.

Therefore, it is imperative to improve the gun mantlet, even if it sacrifices aiming speed.

About seven days later, Kejing tinkered with the second-generation prototype.

The protection level this time has been impressive. The 76-gun cannon may not be able to penetrate the frontal armor of this thing even at a distance of 300 meters.

So Wang Zhong ordered on the spot to drag the 85mm anti-aircraft gun over and test-fire the prototype. The results showed that as long as the distance was kept above 800 meters, the second-generation prototype basically had no worries about Ant's own 85mm anti-aircraft gun.

However, Proson's 88mm gun can penetrate the gun mantlet of the second-generation prototype vehicle at a distance of 800 meters, but it does not cause much damage to personnel, and only a few fragments enter the fighting room.

After the test results came out, Ke Jing's head shook like a rattle: "No, no, no, we really can't put anything on the gun mantlet anymore. If you want to get better protection, you have to move the fighting room backward. This way the artillery installation The position also needs to be improved, and the overall position will become higher.”

Wang Zhong imagined it according to Ke Jing's statement, and what appeared in his mind were the Ferdinand tank destroyer (also known as the Elephant) and the Jagdtiger tank destroyer.

A major feature of these two cars is that they are tall, so they can be spotted from afar.

But what Wang Zhong wanted was a relatively low vehicle like the No. 3 assault gun and the No. 4 tank destroyer, suitable for ambush.

And at a distance of 800 meters, the 88 gun only penetrated the gun mantlet and produced some shrapnel in the vehicle. Compared with other tanks that were killed by one shot of the Tiger, this is amazing, isn't it?

When the Wang Zhong Research Institute of Chemistry and Textiles comes up with the "anti-collapse lining" requested by Wang Zhong, the survival rate of its members will be even higher.

Overall, Wang Zhong is quite satisfied with the new things.

Brigadier General Zinov, who has been paying close attention to the testing of this new weapon throughout the process, believes that "this thing should be mass-produced immediately."

Unfortunately, this was impossible. Subsequent production tests showed that the production time of this thing was 1.3 times that of T34W.

The T34W cannot completely replace the T34 because it is too labor-intensive to produce.

To truly increase the production of T34W, we must rely on the transfer of better production technology and equipment from the United States.

Wang Zhong knew very well that wars are not won by "specially installed machines" or "decisive weapons". Productivity is a very important point in large-scale wars.

So he just had the idea of ​​​​trying it out to see if the elite troops could achieve better results by using special machines that were difficult to produce.

In the end, this tank destroyer was designated as SU100. SU is the abbreviation of "self-propelled artillery" in Ant language, and 100 represents the gun caliber.

And Wang Zhong personally assigned its nickname: vortex.