national surname chiming

Chapter 370 Technological talents are needed not only to build weapons, but also to fight wars
Under Tong Tulai's persuasion, Azige adopted two-handed preparations to slow down his attack on Nanyang City.

But slowing down does not mean not attacking. Those troops who are idle are also idle. They still need to test every day, further build siege fortifications, and carry out some routine sabotage work without too much loss.

The general principle is nothing more than changing from a swift and furious attack that might have killed thousands of people every day to a low-intensity destruction that only lost hundreds of people every day.

For example, on the third day after setting up a new siege strategy, Man Dahai, under the orders of Azig, brought a large number of captured peasants and Han Chinese who had no value for their labor to surrender, and surrounded the city of Nanyang several times. A main attack direction, build a long trench and earth wall.

The base of the earth wall is very thick, and the height does not need to be too high. It looks like a dam from a distance, and the bottom is at least three or four times wider than the top of the slope.This kind of design is also learning and selling now, imitating Zhang Huangyan's design ideas, not seeking to defend against the impact of melee, but only seeking to withstand the damage of shelling, and not afraid of the Ming army bombarding these walls from the top of the city.

As for the purpose of these fortifications, one is to prevent Zhang Huangyan from suddenly sending death squad cavalry to break through the siege to deliver letters and get in touch with the outside after the Qing army relaxed the siege that day.

After all, there are only those who can be thieves for a thousand days, and there is no one who can guard against thieves for a thousand days. When the siege party first arrived, everyone must be very vigilant.And one more trench to block the gate and siege the city with a long wall can give a little more reaction time. Even if there are cavalry in the city who go out of the city in the dark, they will be blocked.

Secondly, it was also Tong Tulai who told Azig: After the walls were repaired, he could deploy the remaining Hongyi cannons on the reverse slopes of the walls, and use a relatively elevated shooting angle to lob them. Destroy Nanyang City Wall.

Although this kind of shooting accuracy will be worse, and the shell hits a more slinging parabola, it will lose some kinetic energy, resulting in a decrease in the efficiency of breaking the wall (of course Tong Tulai does not understand the law of kinetic energy, but life and war experience tell him that the shell slings will lose destructive power),
But this deployment has an advantage, which is incomparable to the original deployment of flat and direct fire. When shooting flat and direct fire, it needs to confront the forts of the Ming army at the four corners of the city. Unfortunately, three cannons were blown up at once.

Now deployed on the back of the embankment, at least the Ming army's shells will not be able to hit the Qing army's cannons.Although the Qing army's cannons still couldn't hit the Ming army's cannons, it didn't matter. Tong Tulai didn't expect to use the Hongyi cannons to kill the Ming army's Hongyi cannons. His goal was only the city wall of Nanyang.

So there will be such a combat form: the cannons of both sides can destroy the other side's city wall/earth wall, but they can't hurt the other side's cannons.However, the Qing army was not afraid that the Ming army would blow up the earthen wall. If it was broken, it would be repaired, or it would move its own cannon to a certain position and redeploy it before it broke.

After hearing all these plans, Azig felt that Tong Tulai was simply a genius in artillery warfare. Although he suffered a small loss, he quickly thought of countermeasures to make up for his shortcomings. This kind of person should be reused!
So of course he didn't say anything, and he supported Tong Tulai without reservation. He asked Man Dahai to cooperate with Tong Tulai in whatever resources Tong Tulai needed.

The Qing army repaired the walls and the artillery positions were still unambiguous. Within a few days, the new artillery battles resumed. The Qing army concentrated more than 20 Hongyi cannons, and once again attacked the Nanyang city wall like a hard bone.
At the beginning, the accuracy was relatively low, mainly because the artillerymen were not familiar with this kind of high-throw ballistics, and they either shot far or close, which was far less convenient than flat-fire direct aiming. At least hundreds of shells a day were wasted in vain.

If it is far away, it can still have some effect. At least flying into the city can destroy a few houses. It even made the high-level civil officials of the Ming army dare not hide in the safe area behind the original wall for inspection and command. Minimize front-line appearances.

However, the shells that hit close were completely wasted, falling directly outside the city, and they couldn't even catch a hair.Tong Tulai was also very patient, and did not criticize the artillerymen for their blind adjustment period in the first few days.

In addition, the Qing army was not idle in other sabotage work—didn’t Tong Tulai say that day that the city wall built by Zhang Huang was resistant to shelling, but it was not resistant to excavation and immersion.

Now that the water level is low in winter, it is impossible to store water and flood the city, but it is still possible to dig walls.

So the Qing army built hundreds of wooden donkey carts made of thick and rough wood to cover the city while the artillery fire covered them. It is to transport all the floating soil scattered and piled up at the base of the wall after the bombardment as much as possible, or to push it back directly into the moat next to it, and fill up a few more moats along the way.

However, this method of attack is definitely more dangerous than deploying artillery bombardment on the reverse slope of the earth dam. The Ming army's defensive firepower at the top of the city can often mobilize Francophones to bombard the Qing army's wooden donkey carts.
Although the explosive bombs were not necessarily used, the soldiers inside would be buried and injured at most if they collapsed, and they might escape.However, the musketeers, crossbows, kerosene, and ash bottles of golden juice provided by the Ming army were not vegetarians either. They would coordinate and pour them on the roof of the destroyed wooden donkey cart, and shoot the survivors inside, or burn them until they cried. Calling a mother, or directly festering the skin and flesh, dragging it back will also cause infection and death.

The Qing army had no choice but to continue to increase the size, repairing countless strong long shields, erecting them on the position in front of the city, and then let the Qing army's archers step forward, under the cover of the long shields, throw arrows at the city, killing the Ming army Buddha. Lang machine gunners and musketeers crossbowmen.

It is nothing more than the constant exchange of human lives between long-range soldiers on both sides, and this kind of exchange must be a loss for the Qing army, which has an absolute disadvantage in terrain.

In addition, before the siege, Zhang Huangyan prepared for the siege for half a year, so he hoarded a lot of firewood and fuel.Before the arrival of the Azig Army, Zhang Huangyan's troops cut down all the trees within a hundred miles around Nanyang County!

Doing so will of course destroy the ecological environment, but the fire is imminent, how could the ancients care about the ecological environment!They don't understand this either.

Cutting down all the trees will help to get more firewood, so that soldiers in the city will have more opportunities to drink hot water and eat cooked food, and minimize the loss of soldiers caused by unsanitary diseases.

Secondly, when Azig wanted to build wooden donkey carts and long shields for siege bunkers, he had to cut trees at least a hundred miles away, which greatly increased the logistical pressure on the Qing army.So now every time the Qing army is blown up and a wooden donkey is blown up, the logistics officer of the Qing army has to scold its mother anxiously, and has to try to raise wood from more than 100 miles away before transporting it over.

Calculating carefully, under such an intense fighting style, the Qing army could kill or injure at least two or three hundred wooden donkey cart soldiers responsible for digging the city every day, plus slightly fewer archers.The Ming army only needs to lose fewer soldiers than the Qing army's archers, and the comprehensive comparison is at least four or five times the exchange ratio.
Therefore, Zhang Huangyan's comparison to changing lives is definitely worthwhile. If it continues to consume, before the 15 defenders and strong men in his city die, all [-] people in Azig will die.What Zhang Huangyan was really afraid of was that after the fortifications were gradually destroyed, Azig could successfully launch a general offensive that was not too disadvantageous in terms of geographical advantages, so he needed to delay the progress of the opponent's destruction.

……

The Qing army constantly upgraded its siege strategy, slowed down the rate of blood loss, and strived to destroy more city defenses with as few casualties as possible, and trade time for lives.

Naturally, Zhang Huangyan will not just sit still, he is also considered a resourceful man with great potential, and Tong Tulai will upgrade his technical means, so of course he will also see tricks.

In the first two days when the Qing army started to build earth dams and deploy Hongyi cannons on the reverse slope, Zhang Huangyan couldn’t react for a while, but he had no way to deal with it. He could only rack his brains every day, and then called together the technical personnel in the army to work together. .

Fortunately, in the first two days when the Qing army switched to the new tactics, they were also looking for the ballistic laws and experience of the shells, and the accuracy was extremely poor.So if the Qing army bombed for two days first, the loss of the city wall of Nanyang City would not be too great. This time difference was just used to think of countermeasures.

After sorting it out, Zhang Huangyan discovered that the most reliable person he had at hand was a grassroots technical official named Song Mingde——

This Song Mingde is actually an old acquaintance, he was discovered two or three years ago when Zhu Shuren had just used tricks to drive away Zuo Liangyu and occupy Wuchang, and when he was developing the Daye Iron Mine.Later, through Song Mingde, he caught up with his cousin Song Yingxing, a great technology expert in the late Ming Dynasty. Who made them all come from Nanchang Prefecture, since they were already very close to Wuchang.

In the past two years, Song Mingde followed his uncle to raise armaments in the rear area, and also competed with Fang Yizhi, the prefect of Wuchang and the Huguang military preparation officer, and he was also good at it.

Originally, the Song family, including Song Yingxing, were relatively strong in engineering and technical practice, but their theoretical level in science was quite poor, and they all relied on empiricism to do things.

But with Fang Yizhi's cooperation, Song Yingxing, Song Mingde's uncle and nephew have improved a lot, and even Song Yingxing has lived and learned.

Fang Yizhi's achievements in science can be regarded as the highest echelon in the country. After all, he is the person who wrote "Physics" - of course, limited by the atmosphere of the Ming Dynasty, his science level is comparable to those in the West at the same time. The top big cows are definitely incomparable, and the Dutch have already produced Descartes at the same time.

But Fang Yizhi's knowledge of physics and mathematics was used to give advice to the Song family's uncles and nephews, and in cooperation with Zhu Shuren's occasional visits, he provided them with some finishing touches.So when Song Mingde came into contact with such things as "trigonometric function tables", he immediately made great progress in Huguang Mingjun's ballistic theory.

This time Nanyang was under siege, and Zhu Shuren also needed to arrange capable artillery technicians for his cousin, so he asked the young Song Mingde to go deep into the enemy's siege to participate in the battle, and promised to give him a direct promotion of at least one rank after the war regardless of his actual merits!He was originally in charge of the sixth grade, so he was promoted to Yuanwailang in the Ministry of Industry!If he does a good job, he will be promoted to a doctor in two years!
And his uncle Song Yingxing was old after all, and Zhu Shuren couldn't let such a great sage take risks, so Song Yingxing followed Fang Yizhi to guard the Hanshui defense line in the rear and stationed in Wuchang.In this way, the uncle is in the rear and the nephew is sent into the siege, which can be regarded as respecting the elderly and preventing wavering.

Song Mingde pondered for two days about Tong Tulai's new trick this time, and then he came up with the idea of ​​how to use the high-efficiency ignition fuze explosive ammunition newly developed by Daye Arsenal this year and the new large-caliber mortar specially prepared for this explosive ammunition. Specialized in observation, positioning, and restraint.

The ordinary Hongyi cannons on the four-corner bastion forts of the city wall cannot be used to sling and destroy the Qing army's Hongyi cannons on the reverse slope of the earth dam, but the mortars with a large elevation angle similar to the siege mortars are designed for this purpose Yes!

Usually, if you want to hit a moving target, this kind of mortar has low accuracy and cannot guarantee a single hit. It is not as efficient as direct fire.But the artillery is against the artillery, and both sides are very heavy and difficult to move fixed targets. It is a big deal to miss a single hit and shoot a few more times.

It doesn’t matter even if you have to adjust the time of a stick of incense to gradually find the feeling after the first cannon is fired. Anyway, after the Qing army’s Hongyi cannons are deployed, it is impossible to change positions within the time of a stick of incense——

Don't think that this kind of deployment speed is very slow. In fact, this is the normal state of artillery deployment speed in the 17th century.

In many ancient costume films of later generations, in order to save trouble for props, it is actually wrong to use the cannon with two large wheel mounts to shoot the Hongyi cannon at the turn of the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

The Hongyi cannons at the turn of the Ming and Qing Dynasties all had only one cannon barrel placed directly on a fixed position, and there was no cannon mount with wheels.In order to place the cannon, the gun position on the fort often has a groove, so that the cannon can be directly embedded in the groove, so it is very troublesome to move.

It's not that the ancients didn't want to install gun mounts, but that the strength of the materials and the mechanical design of the recoil buffer structure at that time were still unable to meet the unloading force of the recoil of the cannon.If you forcibly attach the wheel mount to the artillery, the recoil of the gun will directly shake the wheel and collapse it.Only by placing the cannon on a fixed turret and letting the turret and the ground absorb the recoil can it be safe.

The real recoil gun was basically not installed by Frederick the Great of Prussia in the Western world until the mid-18th century and the Seven Years War, and based on this, he came up with a flexible and forward-deployed gun that could follow the cavalry. Artillery, Megatron Europe in one fell swoop.Decades later, in the era of Napoleon, Napoleon developed the retractable gun to its peak. Since then, all Western European countries have generally equipped with retractable guns, and eliminated all the old-fashioned things that have only one tube that cannot be maneuvered.

Therefore, with the mobility of the Qing army's Hongyi cannons and the speed at which they can be reassembled and loaded after deployment, it is impossible to handle it within a quarter of an hour. If there is no preparation at all, it will be normal for half an hour if it is slow.

……

Song Mingde's attempt this time can be regarded as the first opportunity for actual combat after the flowering mortar and mortar of the Daye Arsenal of the Ming Army were produced.

The thick, short and thick cannon barrels forged from high-quality steel were deployed on the bastion forts at the four corners of the city wall, and were specially equipped with solidly fortified observation posts.

The bombardment effect observers were all elites trained by the artillery of the Ming Army, and they used the best binoculars, not only with high precision, but also craftsmen who specially engraved several vertical and horizontal black scales on the lenses. Wire--

If you don’t have any impression of this description, you can imagine the lines on the 4x lens that the Russian-made VSS company sniper comes with in the chicken eating game.

There is no doubt that these lines are used for accurate distance measurement, so that the distance of the impact point can be accurately calculated.

Considering that there are so many noobs in the later generations, after playing chicken eating games for several years, they still don’t know how to read the rangefinder lines on the quadruple mirror. They only know to aim at the enemy with the main crosshair in the middle.In the late Ming Dynasty, one can imagine how rare it was to find talents who knew how to read the rangefinder line of a lens.
These artillery observers have all read a lot of books, and have specially read the basic mathematics and physics textbooks written by Fang Yizhi, and they can also memorize trigonometric function tables. It can be said that everyone is very valuable.The life of this kind of military technical personnel is more than ten times more expensive than Guan Ning's iron cavalry. Even under Zhang Huangyan's command, if you want to call them, you have to apply strictly to ensure safety.

(End of this chapter)