Major General Lu Yuze muttered as he spoke, without giving Colonel Ge Chengbin a chance to interrupt!
Watching him touch around, Ge Chengbin estimated that if the warship hadn't been moored at the dock, he would have tried to fire a cannon!
"Let's go, let's go and take a look at the 100mm cannon. I heard that it shoots metal fixed-loading bullets. Even the bullet casing is made of brass!"
At this time, Ge Chengbin finally had the opportunity to interject: "Yes, that new cannon uses metal fixed-loading ammunition, and the rate of fire is extremely fast!"
There was one more thing he didn’t say: It’s quite expensive!
Within a few minutes, they were looking at a breech-loaded gun that was 35 times one hundred millimeters. Major General Lu Yuze looked at it carefully and said: "The gun is a good gun, but the tube is a bit small!"
Ge Chengbin said: "Although the caliber is smaller, the firepower is still considerable, especially when dealing with unprotected targets!"
Lu Yuze looked around and saw the two main artillery pieces, as well as the 75mm secondary gun and the 40mm artillery piece. These two artillery pieces were used to perform close-range self-defense missions. They were not responsible for attacking ships.
task.
But Lu Yuze was obviously very interested in the 40mm artillery among them. While looking at it, he said that the people in the ordnance department were really lazy and just used a big gun as a close-in defense gun.
Because the design of this thing is so weird!
The 40mm cannon currently equipped by the Tang Dynasty Navy is not a traditional artillery in a strict sense, but more like a very large-caliber breech-loading rifled gun.
And it uses a bolt-action loading and magazine feeding method similar to that of an army breech-loading rifle. No matter how you look at it, it looks like a gun, not an artillery piece.
In order to resist the recoil, they adopted a simple method of eliminating violence, directly fixing the gun mount to the hull, and relying on the steel structure of the hull to resist the recoil.
Since the recoil force is resisted by the hull, there is naturally no problem of gun reset.
This thing is actually an enlargement of the bolt-action rifle under development by the Navy, but it uses metal fixed-loading ammunition and a magazine feeding structure.
It's not the same thing as the various small-caliber rapid-fire cannons in the original time and space.
However, this 40mm artillery can still fire more than ten rounds per minute, and what it fires are grenades. Although the accuracy is a bit worse, the rate of fire is fast, and the power of the grenades is pretty good.
For those small-tonnage unprotected targets, the lethality is quite impressive.
At least it's much stronger than 75mm or 100mm artillery.
The Navy of the Tang Dynasty also held the mentality that this kind of simple and crude artillery was cheap anyway, use it if it can be used, and treat it as a decoration if it is not used. It was basically equipped on many battleships.
The only pity for the navy is that only small-caliber artillery can do this. If the caliber is too large, even a steel hull will have difficulty resisting the recoil.
As for the gun mount resetting technology and even the gun barrel resetting technology that are being developed, that technology is still extremely immature. The navy would not dare to equip something that would fall apart after being hit once.
The naval guns on the Colombo were the focus of Major General Lu Yuze's visit. As for other things, he didn't bother to look at them because they were not very different from other warships.
When it comes to power, it's not that fast, just 16 knots. Although the endurance is good, in order to save coal during navigation, the Tang Dynasty Navy generally requires sail-powered warships to use low power during daily navigation.
Running the engine and sailing together with the sail, although the speed is only seven or eight knots, it is still enough.
The Colombo set off from the mainland to the island of Ceylon. Its sails produced a lot of power, but the coal consumption was not much.
After seeing the Colombo, he went to see two new frigates.
For these two frigates, Major General Lu Yuze focused more on the hull itself.
Because these two Xinnan-class frigates, in a sense, can be regarded as the second new type of warships in the Tang Dynasty navy, besides the Luzon, that were officially put into service and were designed from the beginning to install rear-mounted naval guns.
Its hull design draws heavily on the Luzon, and like the same new generation of armored cruisers, it has a large number of watertight compartments to improve reserve buoyancy, and begins to use coal bunkers as a means of protection. The deployment between ammunition compartments and naval guns is also
It's very reasonable, and it's much more perfect than the Colombo that was refitted halfway through.
Although its power is weak and its protection is worse, its hull design, cabin layout, and gun layout are all quite reasonable.
To be honest, these two Xinnan-class frigates, which are only 1,200 tons and are not expensive to build, can reflect the current huge industrial production capacity of the Tang Navy.
Because the navy plans to produce dozens of ships of this thing.
There is a call within the Navy to increase the number of ocean-going warships in the Navy to more than 200 to meet the need for global sea control.
The ocean-going battleships here refer to the four major types of ships: battleships, armored cruisers, cruisers, and frigates, because only these battleships in the Tang Dynasty navy could fight across the oceans.
The battleships among them are extremely expensive to build. With a cost of more than 2.5 million, it is destined to be impossible to build many.
Armored cruisers are cheaper than battleships, but one costs millions.
This also means that the Tang Navy cannot rely on battleships and armored cruisers to maintain its fleet size, but can only rely on a large number of cruisers and frigates.
In fact, even cruisers are not cheap. A cruiser of more than 2,000 tons costs about 400,000 yuan. Therefore, the Tang Navy has always used cruisers as the avant-garde fleet of the main fleet, or as the flagship of the frigate fleet. Therefore,
In fact, the number cannot be too large.
The only ocean-going warships that can support the huge scale of the Datang Navy are frigates, and they must be cheap frigates. This is the fundamental reason why the Datang Navy has successively developed, built and put into large-scale service Qinzhou-class frigates, Haizhou-class frigates, and Xinnan-class frigates.
reason.
For a frigate that can easily build dozens of ships, how to reduce costs as much as possible while maintaining a certain combat effectiveness and navigation performance is a huge challenge, and it will not be simpler than building a battleship.
The Xinnan-class frigates, to some extent, embody Datang’s most advanced industrial base.
Even though it has weak firepower and poor performance, it is a serious high-tech product.
As one of the senior generals in the navy, Rear Admiral Lu Yuze naturally knows the importance of frigates, so even though the two New South-class frigates are inferior to the Colombo cruiser in all aspects, he still finds Jingjing interesting.
Naturally, Ge Chenbin and the others didn't know what Lu Yuze was thinking. They were just accompanying Lu Yuze around, but Lu Yuze's visit was not the last one.
The next day, many naval generals who heard the news came to visit these three new warships. Even the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Ocean Fleet, Admiral Chang Zhilan, and the Commander of the Fourth Fleet, Lieutenant General Jiang Rongfa, came over to take a look.
.
After all, these three battleships are the first batch of cruisers and frigates equipped with rear-mounted guns in the Tang Dynasty Navy, in addition to battleships and armored cruisers, and they are not many in number. Apart from these three ships, the others are still in the mainland.
.
Nowadays, in the entire Indian Ocean, including the Atlantic Ocean, and even in all the overseas territories of the Tang Empire, there are only three warships equipped with breech-loading guns, so everyone is quite curious.
At the same time, I also want to get familiar with it in advance and accumulate experience for the large-scale acceptance and use of breech-mounted naval guns in the future.
This allowed Ge Chenbin to directly transform into a tour guide, explaining various equipment on the Colombo to the naval colleagues who came aboard to visit the ship, especially the breech-mounted cannon.
A large number of senior generals from the navy continued to visit the Colombo, which made the generals from the army look at them with contempt.
"A bunch of navy idiots who have never seen the world, they are just breech-loaded guns, that's all!"
Major General Gu Zhen, the commander of the 18th Division, did not hide his contempt for the navy at all.
On the side, the commander of the 53rd Division, Major General Ji Guicai, chuckled a few times but did not answer.
But this does not mean that he disagrees with Gu Zhen's statement. On the contrary, he quite agrees: These navy are just a bunch of country bumpkins who have never seen the world!
The reason why he didn't say it out loud is because his 53rd Division is a unit stationed on the island of Ceylon for a long time. It has to deal with the navy every day. It's not good to make the relationship too tense.
.
But the contempt in my heart still exists, I just don't say it out loud.
Major General Gu Zhen did not have this scruple. His 18th Division was mobilized from the mainland to support the Indian operations. They only stayed on the island of Ceylon for a while to rest, and they would go there together on a ship after a while.
Bomu Prefecture, make preparations, and then launch a large-scale military operation.
You don’t have to stay in Ceylon for long, and you don’t have to give face to the navy!
As for relying on the navy to maintain supplies, the army is really not afraid of the navy not cooperating.
I thought that the one responsible for transporting supplies to overseas territories and garrisons was not the Navy, but the Joint Logistics Command. The Army did not come here on the Navy's transport ships, but on the transport fleet of the Joint Logistics Command.
The navy, at best, is just protecting the ship.
However, Gu Zhen believed that naval escort was not necessary, because the armed force of the combined transport fleet itself was enough to crush any indigenous people.
There are also a small number of naval guns on these transport ships. This small number is small for naval battleships, but it is much larger for indigenous sampans.
Even if escort is really needed, the Army has its own maritime escort divisions, so there is no need for naval escort.
In addition to the First Maritime Transport Division, the Army has also established a so-called Second Maritime Escort Division in recent years. As the name suggests, this escort division is not a pure transport ship, but a battleship.
Of course, the Army doesn't call it a battleship. The Army calls it a 'sea tank'.