I want to be emperor

The Guards are mainly stationed in Jinling City and surrounding areas. They each have a military camp in the eastern suburbs, southern suburbs, western suburbs of Jinling City, and the northern suburbs on the north bank of the Yangtze River, protecting Jinling City from all directions.

The more peripheral areas of Dangtu, Jurong and Zhenjiang Chuzhou all have Guards camps.

In this area, more than 50,000 Guards ground troops are stationed all year round.

At the same time, Zhenjiang and Jinling City are also the main bases of the Guards Fleet, with at least a dozen medium and large offshore and shallow water warships stationed all year round.

It can be said that the Guards have wrapped up the entire Jinling City. If an accident occurs, no matter which direction the rebels attack from, they will be resisted by the Guards.

At the same time, the Guards are also the most well-funded army in the Chu Empire, so their various weapons and equipment are also the most advanced.

For example, things like armored vehicles and military trucks have actually just appeared a few years ago. Military vehicles or armored vehicles of the Army and Navy are still in the stage of small-scale test equipment and have not yet been finalized.

But the Guards are different. The first military truck purchased through bidding by the Guards has been finalized and equipped at the end of the 49th year of Chengshun.

The equipment they use is a 1.5-ton military truck developed by Hebei Weapons Company, and the military number is Hebei Type 15 military truck.

One of the five refers to the carrying capacity of 1.5 tons.

Through in-depth cooperation with Tangshan Machinery Company, Hebei Arms Company developed its own research and development sites. Prototypes and early mass-produced models used the 30-horsepower gasoline engine specially developed by Tangshan Machinery Company for large models. However, Tangshan Machinery Company’s A fifty-horsepower engine has been successfully developed, and the models actually mass-produced and delivered to the Guards are actually equipped with a fifty-horsepower engine.

The Hebei Type 15 military truck adopts a rear four-wheel design. The transmission has two forward gears and one reverse gear.

Its maximum highway speed can reach forty kilometers per hour, which is already considered a very good speed... As for off-road speed and climbing ability, don't expect too much with only fifty horsepower. Said it was barely usable...and definitely better than horses.

After all, no matter what, this is still fifty horsepower... If you use draft horses, you can probably harness dozens of horses... When you usually drag a 75mm field gun on the march, it is usually four horses. , the terrain is more complex and only six horses.

In short, whether it is used to transport goods or to haul field artillery, this thing is better than horses... and even the terrain requirements are not much higher.

You wouldn’t think that horses pulling artillery would not use roads when marching... In other words, wherever horse-drawn artillery can go, cars can also pull artillery, and the speed is faster...

Of course, there is no way for cars to go to the place where the cannons were dismantled and transported by horses... But this is already a completely different combat scenario and cannot be generalized.

Therefore, although the army, navy and guards of the Great Chu Empire have begun to vigorously promote vehicle-pulled artillery, these actions are limited to field artillery units, and include expansion to mountain artillery units.

After all, the combat scenes of mountain artillery troops are usually in complex mountainous areas. In such complex mountainous areas, there are not even roads that can be used by carriages... During combat, you even need to walk some small roads, even shapeless roads.

As long as your car cannot climb mountains and take mountain trails, it cannot replace the role of pack horses in the mountain artillery unit... In fact, in the original time and space, even in the 21st century, there are still mountain artillery units with traditional horse-based transport.

Therefore, in the next many years, even if the Chu army undergoes comprehensive so-called motorization, there will still be a large number of pack horses in service.

In addition to transporting artillery, it also needs to be used to transport supplies...

Even when superpowers fight in complex terrain areas, they have to use mules and horses to transport supplies... Therefore, riding horses will disappear from the army, and draft horses will also disappear from the army, but pack horses will not!

At least judging from the timetable from the original time and space until the 21st century, the human army still has a long way to go before it can completely eliminate the packhorse... Of course, this is only limited to combat operations in a very small number of special and complex terrains. If it were an ordinary terrain or even a large plain, there would naturally be no need for pack horses.

Of course, it is still too early to talk about these. Today’s automotive applications in Chujunli are still very primitive and small-scale.

Currently, there are only two types of concentrated vehicles... or gasoline engine vehicle platforms that are mainly used.

The first is a tractor developed and produced by Tangshan Machinery Company. This thing is actually a civilian version, but it has good performance and very good reliability. So now the army, navy and guards have successively placed orders and equipped this large tractor. , mainly used to transport heavy artillery...especially those heavy artillery that are several tons or even more than ten tons in size.

The three major military services have successively equipped three to four hundred tractors of this kind... mainly serving in independent heavy artillery units.

The speed of this equipment entering service is very fast. While other military vehicles are still in the drawing and development stage of prototypes, this thing has already started to be delivered, and the initial order of 300 vehicles, from signing the order to handing it over, Tangshan Machinery Company It only took a month..., strictly speaking, twenty-five days.

As for why it was delivered so quickly, it’s because this thing is for civilian use. Tangshan Machinery Company produces tens of thousands of units a year and sells them to major agricultural development companies and large farms around the world.

Your military purchase is only a few hundred vehicles, but to be honest, Tangshan Machinery Company didn't even pay attention to it... At the beginning, the military also required various delivery deadlines, saying that all of them must be delivered within one year, otherwise the consequences would be huge...

Then the person in charge of Tangshan Machinery Company said: If you give me the money now, you can immediately go to the warehouse at the port and take it away...

At that time, they had hundreds of vehicles in stock in the warehouse at the port that were shipped to the Americas and other places.

I will pull 300 vehicles out of the warehouse for you on the spot...and then paint them with military-style paint on the spot, and deliver them to you on the spot...

Then the military side said coquettishly that the contract had just been signed and the process had not been completed yet, so the allocation would not be so fast.

Therefore, the twenty-five-day delivery period is not the time it takes Tangshan Machinery Company to organize production and delivery, but the time it takes for the military to go through the process, approve the payment, and receive the payment for this batch of military procurement!

Basically, as soon as the money arrived, Tangshan Machinery Company delivered the goods. The main focus was on speed.

And this... is the strength of a large comprehensive automobile company like Tangshan Machinery Company. They have a huge integrated automobile assembly line production, with an annual output of more than 100,000 automobiles... of which the annual output of tractors alone is tens of thousands. The military purchases only a few hundred vehicles, which to be honest is a fraction of their annual output.

This also gave the military people a slight shock... Damn it, what if all the cars they produced in a year were taken out, including their tractors, civilian trucks and so on. Come here, wouldn't their military have tens of thousands of tractors and trucks every minute, which would be enough to form an army of automobiles?

It's a pity that they can't afford it... After all, military spending is limited, and it's impossible to spend so much money for you to buy a bunch of tractors and trucks.

In addition, although the tractors produced by Tangshan Machinery Company are good and suitable for military use without improvement, the trucks are not.

Whether it’s Tangshan Machinery Company or several other automobile companies, the trucks they put on the market actually have poorer performance due to cost and selling price restrictions. The general price is several hundred yuan, and the power is not very good. , there is almost no off-road capability... Because the cars that major automobile companies put on the market, whether they are cars, buses or trucks, are actually intended for use in towns and cities, and are nominally in suburbs, but in fact There are still a large number of paved roads on the road, and no matter how bad they are, there are urban suburbs with perfect dirt roads.

Ordinary cars and trucks will naturally have no problem driving on these roads, but once they leave these pavements, they will have to stop driving directly after the hard gravel road!

Although these civilian cars can run happily on cement roads, even reaching speeds of dozens of kilometers per hour, they are really not suitable for military use.

Military cars are meant for fighting... In fact, most of the intended use scenarios are unpaved roads, or even completely unshaped roads, that is, wilderness.

After all, you can't expect the frontline artillery troops to build artillery positions directly on the road, and then the infantry will also fight on the road...

Therefore, the Chu Army requires military vehicles, whether they are trucks, passenger cars or tractors, to have off-road capabilities... Under off-road conditions, you are not required to run fast, or even how high you can climb. Strong, but you should at least drive at low speed in ordinary wilderness.

And this is also the biggest difference between the Hebei 15 military truck developed by Hebei Arms Company and the civilian truck produced by Tangshan Machinery Company!

In addition to directly transporting goods, the Hebei No. 15 military truck is also equipped with a hook that can directly pull the 75mm field gun.

This truck can also be regarded as a multi-purpose military truck.

The compartment is an open compartment, but a rainproof cloth can be temporarily installed. In addition, the compartment is not made of steel, but uses a large number of wooden boards... This is not to save costs, but to reduce weight... The horsepower is originally small, Naturally, the weight of the body must be strictly controlled, otherwise the maneuverability will be too poor.

The front windshield in the cockpit is made of laminated glass with a plastic middle layer, and an electric light is installed on the front of the car.

In terms of performance and configuration, this is actually the pinnacle of trucks these days... You must know that laminated glass is not equipped on many ordinary cars. Some cheap and cheap cars even have electric lights. no……

But for military trucks, although the cost is important, it is not very important... Anyway, this thing is much more expensive than a civilian truck... The price quoted by Hebei Weapons Company to the Guards is, each More than 1,600 Chu Yuan is not cheap, it is more expensive than a luxury car in Tangshan.

The reason why it is expensive is mainly because the output of this thing will not be too high, but various research and development costs and production line costs are fixed... The low output will naturally be high when amortized.

At the same time, when actually purchasing military vehicles, you actually need a lot of spare parts and technical training. After all, military vehicles cannot be returned to the factory for repairs if something goes wrong. The military will purchase spare parts directly. Then train repair personnel to solve the problem themselves... These costs are spread equally to each truck, which increases the unit price of the vehicle, making the Hebei No. 15 military truck look expensive.

Well, it’s actually quite expensive!

In today's world, when an ordinary worker's annual income is about 100 yuan, a military truck costs more than 1,600 yuan, which is equivalent to sixteen years' wages.

The Guards were not short of money and ordered hundreds of vehicles in one go. However, they were not directly allocated to the various units of the Guards. Instead, they were centralized and established as the First Transport Group of the Guards.

This transportation group is actually not used for combat, and it is not even a long-term fixed establishment. It is used for training, training, and exploring how to use military trucks.

The First Motor Transport Regiment of the Guards has initially formed an army after about half a year of training and has achieved some training results. A group of senior generals of the Guards can't wait to see the results.

At the same time, Luo Zhixue was also more concerned and sent Prince Luo Jian to inspect on his behalf.

Prince Luo Li is actually quite interested in this thing himself. He is no stranger to cars. Before cars were commercialized on a large scale, he had accompanied his father on many inspections.

Among the first batch of royal cars in the royal family, he was the second person to use the royal car.

This time he came to inspect, and he was also riding a car that was exclusive to him, embroidered with eight dragons and four claws exclusive to the prince... The use of dragon patterns in the Chu Kingdom was strictly restricted.

The emperor's dragon robe uses nine dragons. Each dragon has four legs and five claws on each foot!

And the prince is eight dragons, each with four legs and four claws on each leg... According to the folk saying that five claws are dragons and four claws are pythons, this can also be said to be a python robe, not a dragon robe.

The prince can use up to seven dragons, and the prince can use six dragons... The prince and the crown prince can use five dragons.

In addition, some great heroes, mainly the few Dukes who founded the country, were authorized to use python robes, but they were all under five dragons.

Therefore, the dragon pattern cannot be used casually in the Great Chu Empire, let alone worn casually... Of course, performance purposes are a special case. For performance purposes, such as performing on stage in various dramas, actors can Anyone wearing dragon pattern clothing can wear it, even those from Kowloon...but the dragon cannot have five claws, only four claws.

In the whole world, there is only one person who can wear and use the five-clawed dragon... that is the emperor!

Without exception!

There is only one person who can use the eight dragons and four claws pattern, and that is the prince!

This symbol of clothing is also embodied in the frame of the car. The royal car of Prince Luo Jian has eight four-clawed dragon patterns.

They took the vehicle all the way to the station of the First Transportation Regiment of the Guards in the southern suburbs. As soon as the prince passed by, he saw that the training ground in front was full of military trucks... To be honest, although Luo Jian had seen a lot of cars, he often took them himself. He travels in a royal car, but this is the first time he has seen so many vehicles parked together.

These two to three hundred military trucks are parked together, even if they are not moving, just looking at them is enough to shock people: this is the power of industry!