Although the tonnage of the Banten battleship is still only 10,000 tons, there is nothing we can do about it. Currently, the largest shipyard in the empire can only build 10,000-ton battleships. No matter how large it is, there is no way to build it.
And even if there are 10,000-ton shipyards, there are actually only two of them at present!
The Tang Empire Navy did not continue to build a third battleship before. Apart from other factors, another important reason is that the Datang Empire currently only has two 10,000-ton shipyards, which are the two 10,000-ton shipyards in Hong Kong Dingsheng Shipyard.
, the first one was used to build the Guangdong, and the second one was used to build the Luzon.
But now, the hull construction of the Guangdong has been completed, and the outfitting is almost completed. It can be freed up to start the new Wandan, and the subsequent outfitting can be carried out directly on the dock.
According to the scheduled plan, the Banten will first start preparing for other work, such as the main hull materials, and will officially start construction in three months.
The Navy has high hopes for the Banten and believes that the design of the Banten is a perfect steel battleship design. As for the Guangdong and Luzon, they are both said to be half-baked.
However, compared to the navy's high hopes, although the Holy Emperor Li Xuan was also concerned, he was obviously not as concerned as the navy.
In the past two years, Li Xuan has paid more attention to the war on land.
As for the construction of the navy, its importance is actually very average. The current Tang Dynasty Navy can't even find a half-hearted enemy. The overall condition is the same as that of the American Navy in later generations. Its conventional military strength has exceeded the sum of the navies of other countries in the world.
No one is their opponent except aliens.
The same goes for today’s Tang Dynasty Navy!
In order to maintain its right to speak, the Navy itself will deliberately exaggerate certain threats, but Li Xuan knows very well that threats do not exist for the time being, so Li Xuan is too lazy to deal with whatever the Navy is willing to do now.
His focus is still on the Army, and military expenditures in recent years have also been tilted towards the Army.
In the past three years, Li Xuan has allocated several additional military expenditures to the Army for the war in Central Asia, mainly to expand the Army's cavalry strength.
In combat in Central Asia, cavalry is the main force, and infantry and artillery are only auxiliary forces.
The establishment of cavalry is very expensive. Relying on the army's own conventional military expenditures, it is already difficult to continue to expand the cavalry force on a large scale while maintaining the existing huge army size.
Therefore, Li Xuan also provided a lot of additional support.
The Army is also trying its best, fighting vigorously in Central Asia. After these two years of fighting, it has completely turned a large area of Central Asian grassland into a no-man's land!
In order to avoid the losses caused by the war, the Tatars organized local people to migrate to the eastern plains of Ukraine at the beginning of these years.
As for the vast plains of Kazakhstan, there are basically no civilians at all. There are only armies from both sides fighting back and forth here.
Moreover, the main force of the armies of both sides is mainly cavalry. At the same time, they avoid large-scale decisive battles and mainly focus on small and medium-sized battles.
However, in this small and medium-sized battle, it seems that there is no decisive battle between the two sides, and there is no large-scale battle with tens of thousands of casualties at one time. However, the losses caused to both sides are actually not small.
This is a very typical war of attrition. In a small-scale battle, there may only be dozens or hundreds of casualties, but if it is fought all year round, the accumulated casualties are very terrifying.
Although this kind of war of attrition is very beneficial to the Tang Empire, the army feels that it is not an option to continue this kind of attrition. This year, it is already preparing to launch a large-scale battle, and then completely fight to the Caspian Sea.
And controlled the entire Central Asian Plain.
To achieve this strategic goal, two points are indispensable.
One is a railway, and the other is a large cavalry force.
Needless to say, the cavalry unit. If you want to completely defeat the Tatars in this direction, a large-scale cavalry unit is indispensable. Otherwise, let alone defeat the enemy, you will not even be able to catch the enemy's tail.
As for the railway, it was the logistical lifeline of the Tang Army. It was also the most advantageous weapon for the Tang Dynasty to control the local area and move people there for colonization.
When the Tang Dynasty expanded abroad, it always occupied areas and refused to leave.
If the people cannot gain a foothold in the area, the Army would rather wait and delay the attack for a while.
Otherwise, if you defeat the enemy but cannot actually control the occupied area, and have to retreat in the end, it will undoubtedly be a loss-making business.
At present, the Northwest Railway extension line has bypassed the southern part of Balkhash Lake and reached the Tashkent area. Here, this Northwest Railway extension line has actually reached its end.
Here, Datang Railway Corporation is continuing to build a relatively short extension line to the south, but at the same time it is also building a new military railway to the west. This railway will go straight to the Caspian Sea and is called the Central Asia Railway.
When the Tang Dynasty can actually control the Central Asian Plains depends on when the Central Asian Railway can be built to the Caspian Sea.
The railway construction in this section is actually relatively simple, because it is located in a plain and is not in the northern ice sheet zone further north, so the construction difficulty is not high.
The only difficulty is probably that many construction materials such as rails need to be transported from China.
Datang's current Western Expedition strategy is, to some extent, more like a railway strategy.
Wherever the railway is built, we will conquer and control it!
In addition to transportation and supply issues, the Army also has another small worry, that is, the Tatars have now adopted flintlock guns on a large scale.
This also means that in terms of army weapons, the Tatars are actually no different from the Tang Army. Even if the Tang Army's various weapons have better performance and more quantity, it is still difficult to occupy anything.
Advantage.
For this reason, the Army has recently been tossing the three major arms companies every day to ask them to produce rifled rifles as soon as possible.
But I didn't expect that before rifled rifles were developed, rifled artillery appeared first, not the previous front-loading rifled guns, but breech-loading rifled guns.
When the Navy officially placed an order for breech-loading rifled guns, the Army did not go to the Shanghai Gun Factory. Everyone knew that the Shanghai Gun Factory was the godson of the Navy, and almost all of its output was supplied to the Navy.
of.
Even if the Army came to place an order, it probably wouldn't have enough production for them.
Besides, the Shanghai Gun Factory focuses on medium and large caliber artillery, and mainly naval guns. It pursues high range and power, but is not sensitive to weight.
What the Army wants is small and medium-caliber field artillery, but its weight requirements are extremely high.
The Navy has its own imperial factory, the Shanghai Gun Factory, and the Army also has its own imperial factory, the Tianjin Gun Factory.
Therefore, the Army found the Tianjin Gun Factory and asked them to immediately develop field guns of various calibers for the Army, especially medium-caliber field guns, which were in urgent need.
Although the Tianjin Gun Factory does not have sufficient technical reserves for breech-loading rifled guns, they have gained some experience in front-loading rifled guns in recent years. In addition, they have also developed breech-loading guns before.
Now that the gun bolt problem has been solved, the Tianjin Gun Factory obtained the technology patent and quickly designed an army field gun based on its technical requirements.
This is a 75 mm caliber breech-mounted rifled field gun, and in order to reduce weight while ensuring range, they boldly used an all-steel barrel.
This makes the barrel wall thinner and lighter.
The Army is quite satisfied with the design parameters of this 75mm field gun. It has given a formal research and development contract to produce prototype guns as soon as possible. Once the prototype guns pass the test, hundreds or even thousands of them will be produced immediately.
The planned artillery order came over.
However, although the Army has a biological son like the Tianjin Gun Factory, for the sake of safety, they also found the Foshan Gun Factory and also awarded a 75mm field gun research and development contract.
In addition to the 75mm field gun, the Army also asked these two companies to develop artillery of other calibers, such as 100mm field gun, 150mm siege artillery, etc.
There are even smaller caliber 50mm light howitzers.
At this time, it also meant that the army followed the navy and began to enter the era of breech-loaded rifled guns.
But what is embarrassing is that these artillery have entered the era of breech-loading rifled guns, but the rifles used by the Tang Army are still smoothbore guns!
The breech-loading rifled gun the Army wanted has never been available before.
For this reason, Hanyang Arsenal has provided an alternative, which is to use a front-loading rifled gun. According to Li Xuan, this is a Mini rifle.
After the Army tested it, they thought it was quite good. The accuracy and effective range were greatly improved, but loading was still troublesome.
Therefore, although it has begun small batch equipment, especially small batch equipment on the Central Asian battlefield, the Army is not satisfied with this front-loading rifled gun.
Because the Army wanted breech-loading rifled guns, not front-loading rifled guns.
Coupled with the fact that the performance of the breech-loaded rifled guns at this time was too powerful, many army generals have boldly imagined that the future combat distance of the army will soar from the current distance of 500 meters to 1,000 meters or even 2,000 meters.
above.
Moreover, this distance will be further improved as the technology of breech-loaded rifled guns matures and stabilizes. Perhaps within a few years, the distance of artillery battles will be extended to more than five thousand meters.
The effective range of the Army's artillery has always been higher than that of the Navy, because the Army's artillery is placed directly on the flat ground to fire, and it shoots at fixed targets. Compared with the Navy's dynamic combat mode,
And the more terrible bumps on the sea are different.
Therefore, as long as the effective range of the artillery can be reached, the army can fire as many guns as possible.
As for the Navy, if they are given a naval gun with an effective range of four to five thousand meters, they will not be able to hit enemy ships at such a long distance.
The substantial progress in artillery technology has led to the current rifle being in a very embarrassing state.