Many celebrations were held in Yingzhou Victory, Biyang, Xiangyang and other places. Countless messages of congratulations came to Biyang from all over the country like snow, and there were also many voices for Xu Huai to be promoted to a higher rank.
However, in addition to the orderly and timely advancement of the merit rewards of the generals and generals, Xu Huai was completely uninterested in his personal promotion and promotion, and even deliberately refused the invitation to him.
After he returned to Biyang, he mainly focused on how to decisively defeat the main cavalry group of the Red Hu in Guanzhong and the Hebei Plain.
If the elite troops of Sikong Prefecture did not have the ability and confidence to decisively defeat the main cavalry group of the Red Hu in the Guanzhong and Hebei plains, expel the Huru and recover the Central Plains, they would have failed halfway.
Regarding the acquisition of horses, in addition to increasing the tea-horse trade with the Dali Kingdom and supporting the expansion of the Tubo Highlands by the remnants of the Khitan in the name of Xiyan County to the west of the Qionglai Mountains, the Sikong Prefecture in June also officially transferred nearly two miles between Ruying and Ruying.
The floodplain area, which is hundreds of miles deep, is designated as the horse ranch of the Qun Mu Division.
After autumn, even if a dyke is built north of Zhaoling to lead you into Ying, dykes will also be built on both sides of Ruying. However, the floodplains formed in the past ten years, especially in the areas north of Pingyu, Xiacai and other counties, will
, it is also a traditional low-lying area, and there is no way to drain away the floods in a short period of time. It can be expected that large swamps and wetlands will be formed in this area.
Reclamation in these areas is extremely difficult and the cost will be extremely high, no less difficult than the development of Xincai and Jingbei counties.
With the recovery of Xu, Chen, Ying and other places, especially the follow-up plan to recover the entire Heluo area, as long as the land system and people's resettlement issues are solved, farmland will no longer be a problem. There is no way to reclaim the floodplain area for the time being.
Urgent necessity.
However, this area has been desolate and flooded for more than ten years. The land fertility is amazing, and wetlands and semi-aquatic plants grow luxuriantly. If some artificial control is carried out to promote the growth of alfalfa and other vegetation, it will undoubtedly be the best in the Hehuai area.
horse breeding land.
In recent years, Beijing and Xiangzhou have exploited every opportunity to develop more than a dozen mountain horse farms in Tongbai Mountain, Funiu Mountain and other places, but the total area is only more than one million acres. Once the Ruying Horse Farm is put into use, it will occupy an area of more than the total area of the horse farms developed in the past.
Ten times as big.
Of course, on the one hand, a huge amount of resources need to be invested. For example, in the early stage, thousands or even tens of thousands of high-quality stallions need to be obtained from Dali and the Tubo Highlands, and a large number of ancillary facilities such as breeding grounds, stables, and official residences need to be built.
In the end, it will be necessary to recruit tens of thousands of horse-breeding troops. On the other hand, it may take several years or even ten years of persistent management to finally form a herd of tens of thousands of horses in Yingnan, and it will be possible to have a steady stream of horses every year.
It continuously provides tens of thousands of fine war horses and thirty to forty thousand pack horses to the army.
However, this work has also reached the stage where it must be implemented.
Maybe after entering Guanzhong and the Hebei Plain, the reliance on cavalry is not so serious, but if one day, Vietnam's warriors want to regain Yunshuo and Yanji, they want to conquer Longyou, Liaodong, Bohai, Hexi and even the Western Regions, and the vast north and south of Yinshan Mountain
The grasslands have all been re-incorporated into the empire's territory. Without mastering an elite cavalry force of 100,000 people, this goal cannot be achieved.
Of course, Xu Huai would not forget that the foundation of the rise of Jingxiang (Chushan) was a manufacturing system that surpassed the current times and had just begun to take shape.
Since the Chihu people brazenly launched the Second Huainan Battle, Xu Huai's main energy has been involved in the war, either leading the troops to fight, or trying every means to strengthen the combat effectiveness of the soldiers and horses in various states. During this period, he also had to deal with various conspiracies and machinations of the original Qiandi system.
, but in the past four years, Jingxiang Industrial Manufacturing has still maintained a strong momentum of rise and development.
Refined iron smelting, mainly based on Yunyang Iron Works, annual production scale
The number exceeded 200 million kilograms, and coal mining reached a billion kilograms. People in major cities along Jingxiang Road have adopted coal to replace traditional wood. Charcoal heating, cooking, and porcelain firing have exceeded 10 million pieces.
Cotton planting in Jingxiang area expanded to 2 million acres, with more than 20,000 large and small looms.
In the seventh year of Shaolong's reign, Beijing and Xiangzhou exported more than 5 million pieces of cotton cloth, and its total value even exceeded that of iron materials, becoming the largest commodity exported by Beijing and Xiangzhou.
With the current weaving and spinning technology, weaving is much faster than spinning. Generally speaking, four or five skilled female workers work hard to spin, but the yarn spun may not be able to meet the weaving needs of one female worker.
Therefore, in the production process of a piece of cotton cloth, spinning may account for 70 to 80% of the labor cost.
The large water-spun spinning wheel was successfully used for the spinning of cotton yarn, which directly turned Biyang and Xiangyang into the cotton yarn spinning centers of Dai Viet. A large amount of cotton was transported from Jinghu North Road and other places to Biyang and Xiangyang, which not only made up for the cotton demand in Beijing and Xiangyang
, also made cotton yarn become a bulk commodity exported by Beijing and Xiangzhou.
New water wheel equipment, represented by large water-driven spinning wheels, hydraulic looms, and hydraulic crushers, have entered the stage of large-scale manufacturing, constantly putting forward new requirements for equipment manufacturing accuracy and strength.
At the same time, as stricter quality measurement standards were immediately promoted within the Industrial and Manufacturing Department and the Ordnance Supervision, the metal smelting industry in Beijing and Xiangzhou seemed to be stable.
Xing, for the time being, there has been no breakthrough progress with historical significance such as the "Shen Lian Inverted Flame Method", but it is laying the foundation for a deeper and advancing step by step.
The iron arm crossbow, which was attempted in batches only a few years ago, is a typical representative of the in-depth development of metal smelting technology.
Dai Yue has long mastered the preparation technology of the three-bow bed crossbow, but this powerful weapon cannot shine or play a decisive role on the battlefield, mainly due to the limitations of traditional bow materials.
For walking bows made with traditional bow materials, the three-stone bow is almost at its limit.
In order for a qualified three-bow bed crossbow to reach an effective shooting range of three hundred steps, it needs to provide at least three thousand kilograms of stored energy, which means that each giant crossbow can provide thousands of kilograms of stored energy alone.
Known as the "Eight Ox Crossbow".
The strength of traditional bow materials has an upper limit, and the only way to make a fuss about the size is to make the crossbow thicker and longer.
A qualified three-bow bed crossbow in the world has an arms spread of nearly one foot, and the crossbow body is more than one foot long - such a huge three-bow bed crossbow, even if the overall weight is not too terrifying, how can it be deployed on the battlefield?
On top of that, fighting in cooperation with armored soldiers who pay attention to solid formations?
Therefore, for a long time, the number of three-bow bed crossbows has been very small, and they are usually placed on the city wall to defend the city, and are rarely used in battles.
In the early years, the elites of Jingxiang (Chushan) were able to bring a small number of crossbows to the battlefield. This was mainly due to the independent combat capabilities of the elites of Jingxiang and Chushan. A small team of troops could form a relatively independent combat unit around the crossbows or refined iron shield vehicles.
Even so, the thick and clumsy three-bow crossbow still failed to become the main battle weapon of the soldiers of Beijing and Xiangyang.
The world has long discovered the power storage and elastic deformation properties of fine iron, and its strength is far beyond the traditional reach. Even a single iron-spine crossbow arm can provide three to four thousand kilograms of power storage. However, using traditional iron smelting methods, it is difficult to prepare such a The iron spine crossbow is purely based on luck.
Not to mention batch preparation, in the past it was extremely difficult to forge an iron-spine crossbow arm five or six feet long in one piece, and when cast in sections, the strength of the iron-spine crossbow arm was far from meeting the requirements.
Therefore, the iron-spine bow and iron-spine crossbow made in the early years belong to the category of individual combat weapons. However, even though the iron-spine bow has strong penetration, it is too bulky as an individual combat weapon, and the yield rate is too low, so it has not been developed. Standard bows and crossbows
.
After Jingxiang adopted the sinking smelting inverted flame method to smelt refined iron, it first made breakthrough progress in the preparation of large-scale forged castings. At this time, it even had the ability to integrally forge iron anchor castings weighing 20,000 to 30,000 kilograms.
Then in recent years, more stringent quality measurement standards have been formulated, and the technical development of fine iron smelting has been accumulated for more than ten years, and the control of forged castings has become increasingly precise.
Iron wire drawing and casting has been developed for nearly ten years. Crossbow strings are made of thin iron wire ropes with sufficient rigidity. Their performance is far better than traditional crossbow strings and they are not afraid of moisture and rain.
In the early stage of the Battle of Yingzhou, the Ordnance Supervisor prepared 1,780 iron-spine crossbows and put them into the army to cooperate with the armor and soldiers to fight in formation, and achieved quite good results.
However, the captive soldiers did not have a particularly violent reaction to the appearance of the iron-spine crossbow. In addition to the fact that the soldiers were not familiar enough with operating the iron-spine crossbow to cooperate with the armored soldiers in array operations, the main reason was that the number of iron-spine crossbows put into the battlefield at one time was too limited. .
The Beijing and Xiang armies have long had the tradition of fighting in formations with three bows and crossbows. On a single battlefield where both sides have invested close to 100,000 or even more than 100,000 troops, it would not be too surprising for either side to concentrate on using hundreds of giant crossbows.
When a group of Red Husband cavalry attacks the flanks and intercepts the battlefield, be prepared to suffer heavy casualties.
On the whole, the soldiers killed directly by the iron-spine crossbow, which was extremely slow to load and launch, were not that conspicuous compared to the 20,000 enemy corpses left on the flank interception battlefield. The vast majority of the enemy The corpses were all killed by the soldiers' swords and guns.
What if hundreds of iron-spine crossbows appeared at a time on a battlefield with less than 10,000 people?
What if a crossbow cart places two or three giant iron-spine crossbows on the top, middle and bottom at the same time?
Xu Huai, Chen Zixiao, and many generals from the Military Intelligence Staff Department have recently repeatedly studied the use of iron-spine crossbows on the battlefield. They believe that using a pulley winch to open the string will not allow the crossbow to be used by captives for three or four hundred years. It is redundant, even unnecessary, to shoot two arrows within the charging time of one pace, thinking that the iron-spine crossbow will control the effective shooting distance to three hundred paces.
The previous penetrating requirements for iron-ridge crossbows prepared by the Ordnance Supervision were somewhat redundant compared to the traditional three-bow bed crossbow - there was no need to shoot through the body of a war horse with one arrow, and there was no need for one arrow to penetrate two to three layers of war.
Zijia.
By controlling the effective firing range between 200 and 250 steps, and ensuring penetration performance through the war armor, we can achieve a good effect of suppressing enemy cavalry group assaults. This will not only further reduce the difficulty of preparing the iron-spine crossbow, but also
Can further reduce the size of the Iron Spine Crossbow.
This not only allows the width and width of the crossbows to be further reduced, and is more conducive to the coordination of armor and soldier formations, but also makes double crossbows in one vehicle and three crossbows in one vehicle a reality, which actually doubles the intensity and power of the crossbow array's rounds.
.
Not only Chen Zixiao and the generals of the Military Intelligence Staff Department, but also all military commanders generally believe that the iron-spine crossbow can be further improved and stably prepared, and can replace the previous small and medium-sized war weapons such as cyclone cannons that were more complicated and inconvenient to transfer.
Even in siege battles, iron-spine crossbows can be used intensively, and their power is far more powerful than the stone cannons of the Western Regions that were once popular on the battlefield.
In addition, the iron-spine crossbow with a range of 200 to 250 steps is still too heavy to be used by a single soldier, but if it is set up on a horseback saddle, it can form a force that advances and retreats like the wind on the battlefield.
What kind of power does the Iron Spine Crossbow Cavalry have?
Chen Zixiao, Liu Shiwang and others all developed the habit of accompanying Xu Huai to the Ordnance Supervisor's experimental site. Seeing the dozens of prototype crossbows newly produced by the Ordnance Supervisor, they couldn't help but sigh: "The unparalleled brave general is standing in heavy armor.
The scene of the battlefield may be gone forever..."
