Chapter 1782 Battleships are not as good as small gunboats
At present, the new generation of warships of the Datang Navy are fully equipped with breech-loading rifled guns.
Compared with previous smoothbore guns or front-loading rifled guns, breech-loading rifled guns have the characteristics of high rate of fire, long range, and high accuracy.
At the same time, because the barrel is longer, it requires more deck space, and because of its fast rate of fire, it also requires more space for loading and ammunition supply.
This also leads to the fact that ship-borne breech-mounted rifled guns are very heavy, take up a lot of space, and are extremely expensive to build.
These have resulted in a relatively small number of breech-loading rifled guns, especially medium and large-caliber breech-loading rifled guns.
When the number of artillery is small, and all directions are taken care of, the requirements for the firing range are very high, and messy masts, ropes and other things are not allowed on the deck.
As a result, the sail will inevitably be sacrificed.
The role of sails is getting smaller and smaller, and when warships are sailing, they are often affected by the high-temperature airflow emitted by chimneys.
More importantly, operating a sail requires a large number of sailors, and every sailor on a battleship is valuable.
Even the sail system on the West India-class cruiser has been specially improved and designed, a large number of ropes have been reduced, and the mast has also been changed.
But in this way, the power that the sail can provide is very limited.
When relying on pure sails, the power is very limited, and there is also some conflict between the chimney and the sail.
Therefore, even during daily cruising, the West India-class cruisers use steam engines to operate at low speeds instead of using sails.
When sails were almost reduced to decoration or emergency power, the Tang Navy also planned to cancel sails on its main battleships.
First it was battleships, then armored cruisers, and now even cruisers have to cancel their sails.
Canceling sails is a general trend, which is very obvious on the Xiyin-class improved cruiser.
After reducing firepower, armor, and even sails, the tonnage of the West India-class improved cruiser remained unchanged, but the cost was much lower, and most importantly, the subsequent use costs were even lower.
Otherwise, the Navy wouldn't have gone to such great lengths to come up with such a mediocre thing.
Cruisers are all focusing on quantity, seaworthiness and living space for soldiers, not to mention frigates.
After the new Antarctic frigate was put into service by the Datang Navy, the ship was also improved in design, weakening the firepower and protection, and canceling the sails to reduce the cost of use and construction.
These two improved warships have low construction cost, low use cost, low maintenance cost and other conditions.
These characteristics were also the main factors for the Tang Dynasty Navy to build these two warships on a large scale.
At the same time, these two warships will become the key warships for the Tang Navy to control the sea in the next ten years or even longer.
As for the battleships and armored cruisers that people often talk about, there are only a few of them, and they can just stay on the coast of the country and serve as mascots.
In fact, even though the two types of warships, cruisers and frigates, could allow the Tang Navy to control sea power, they still could not completely control the global waters.
According to the plan of the Tang Navy, there will be about thirty cruisers and about seventy frigates, making a total of one hundred cruise frigates.
Plus the main fleet of about twenty battleships and armored cruisers.
These main battleships and cruise escort fleets will become the core force of the empire to control global sea power.
However, these battleships are still not enough to give the Imperial Navy complete control over the global seas, major rivers, and lakes.
This has nothing to do with the battleship's combat effectiveness, but with its quantity.
No matter how strong the combat effectiveness of the main fleet is, it is still limited in number. In fact, only about two-thirds of the more than one hundred warships can remain on duty, and the remaining one-third is either under maintenance or supply.
As for the warships that remain on duty, a considerable number of them are actually on their way to the sea area where they are on duty, or are staying in ports.
Therefore, even if there are more than a hundred main ocean-going battleships, they are actually not enough.
To this end, the Tang Navy's strategy was to build a very large number of offshore patrol ships and shallow water gunboats.
The number of these offshore patrol ships and shallow water gunboats is extremely large!
How should I put it? It is just a 350-ton Guangjiang-class patrol ship. The Imperial Navy has successively commissioned more than 40 ships in recent years, and there are still more than 100 ships on order!
The Navy plans to build two hundred of its ships at once and then dispatch them to serve in sea areas around the world.
The 76th Squadron, that is, the European fleet, has more than ten Guangjiang-class offshore patrol ships.
In addition, there is also the larger 550-ton Guanghai-class patrol ship. This thing is a bit bigger and the number is not so large, but more than ten ships have been in service, and it is estimated that there will be orders for dozens more ships in the future.
Woolen cloth.
Just these two types of offshore patrol ships, the total number now reaches more than 60, plus many previous models of offshore patrol ships, shallow water gunboats, etc., thus forming a very large inland river and offshore fleet in the Datang Navy.
The total number reached more than three hundred ships!
Our footprints are in every corner of the world, whether it is the Southeast Asian islands or the Ganges River Basin on the Indian continent, or the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea or even the Don River and Danube River Basin.
Or the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and all the way to outside London!
They all have Tang Dynasty's offshore and inland river warships.
These small warships have always been the strategic support force for Datang's diplomacy and military operations.
For example, when the imperial diplomats are doing trouble in London and need support, they need to wait until the source of the main fleet is unknown. At this time, it would be different if there was a small warship stationed in London. Anyway, it would be different.
Can directly bombard the city of London.
This is also the reason why the term gunboat diplomacy appeared in the Tang Empire instead of the term battleship diplomacy.
Because most of those performing diplomatic missions are inconspicuous offshore patrol ships and inland river gunboats.
In some areas, the deterrent effect of a shallow-water gunboat is greater than that of a battleship.
Because the battleships stayed in the mainland, they couldn't carry them for a year and a half, and they couldn't enter the many rivers and go deep into the interior.
Various factors have led to the current rather special development strategy of the Tang Dynasty Navy. This strategy has also led to the Datang Navy not being too sensitive to cutting military expenditures.
Anyway, they themselves plan to reduce the number of large-tonnage warships and build a large number of small-tonnage warships instead.
The differences between the army and the navy also led to their different attitudes towards the reduction of military expenditures in the 37th year of Xuanping.
However, even if there are different attitudes, no matter whether they are dissatisfied or satisfied, they cannot change the reality of budget allocation.
For this reason, a movement of hard work, self-reliance, and thrift is king has been launched within the Army.
As for the Navy, it has postponed the construction plan of new 20,000-ton battleships and used the funds to build more cruisers, frigates, offshore patrol ships and other auxiliary ships.
What's interesting is that when the military suspended the construction plan of the 20,000-ton battleship, private shipping companies ambitiously proposed plans for super-large-tonnage luxury passenger ships!