The opening of the Suez Canal will allow the Tang Empire's navy and merchant ships to greatly shorten the time it takes for the Mediterranean Sea and the Central and North Atlantic to reach the Indian Ocean.
This will directly shorten the maritime distance from East Asia to the Mediterranean coast, the Atlantic coast of Europe, and the British Isles.
This move is of great significance!
This means that trade between East Asia and Europe will be more convenient, sea transportation time will be shorter, and freight will be cheaper, which can further expand the total trade volume between East Asia and Europe.
At the same time, it can also significantly reduce the garrison and war costs of the Tang Army and Navy in Europe.
Whether it is the convenience of trade or the reduction of military garrison and war costs, it plays a great strategic role in the expansion of the empire in Europe.
In the past, the supply of the empire's garrison troops in Europe, whether in North Africa, the Mediterranean coast, or even the Black Sea coast, mainly relied on large-tonnage ships to reach Europe around South Africa, or directly through the Asia-Europe railway.
Ship supplies, although relatively cheap, take a long time.
Railway supplies are very expensive.
After all, the distance between Asia and Europe is very long. After rail transportation spans thousands of kilometers, the freight is extremely high.
The most important thing is that if you rely solely on the Asia-Europe Railway, your luck will be limited!
The Eastern European section, the Central Asian section, and the northwest section of the European railways are all single-track railways, and when they were built, construction speed was given priority, so the design standards were not very high, and the overall transportation capacity was limited.
These railways need to protect people's livelihood transportation as well as military needs. Once any large-scale military operations are launched in Europe, it may be unsustainable to rely solely on this railway.
After all, the army and navy of the Tang Dynasty have fully entered the breech-loading era. Among them, the United Type II rifle is a rifle with a magazine. While the bullet rate of fire is high, it also further increases the bullet consumption.
At the same time, they have been widely equipped with heavy machine guns, mortars and other rapid-fire weapons, leading to a further increase in ammunition consumption.
In recent years, the navy and the Guards fleet have begun to equip so-called small and medium-caliber rapid-fire naval guns on a large scale. This type of rapid-fire naval gun is actually still a frame-retracting gun, but it is still very different from the old frame-repelling cannon.
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In the early years, when Datang first introduced breech-mounted rifled guns, the recoil of small and medium-caliber artillery was generally resisted by the gun mount.
After the Army's artillery fires, the entire artillery will often retreat several meters. Therefore, in the Army's artillery positions, you can often see a mound of dirt behind the field artillery as a buffer. This mound is used to help retreat and nearby enemies.
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Large-caliber artillery, especially naval guns, will have some gun mounts, and there will be some gently sloped tracks on the gun mounts.
After the naval gun fires, the gun body retreats on the track on the gun mount, relying on the gentle slope to reduce part of the recoil force, and then relies on gravity and manpower to reset.
Regardless of whether the above-mentioned method is pure hard resistance or relies on the gun mount for hard resistance, there are great flaws. It is difficult to reset. After reset, it needs to be re-aimed, making it difficult to shoot accurately in a short time.
In response to this problem, many weapons experts in the Tang Empire have been trying to solve it for many years.
Many solutions have been proposed, including many advanced hydraulic pipe withdrawal solutions. However, just having a theory does not mean that it can be implemented.
Later, a spring-tube withdrawal plan was developed, but it was still very immature. The Guards had tried to equip this kind of spring-tube withdrawal naval gun several years ago. It seemed to have a very fast rate of fire, but the hydraulic device had problems every day.
How to put it, the design theory is good and the prospects are there, but with the current basic industry of Datang, it is difficult to produce a practical tube annealing gun.
Later, the Guards fleet couldn't bear it anymore and directly dismantled these so-called advanced tube-mounted guns and returned to the frame-mounted guns that the Navy had been insisting on researching and developing.
At this time, the development of the Navy's retractable guns has become relatively mature. The overall design of the Navy's retractable guns is that the gun mount is divided into upper and lower gun mounts. The gun barrel is still connected to the upper gun mount, and the upper gun mount and the lower gun mount are connected by rails.
, it also has a spring, hydraulic auxiliary braking, and reset device. After the gun is fired, the barrel drives the upper gun carriage backward and squeezes the spring, allowing the spring or hydraulic device to absorb part of the recoil force.
When resetting, spring or hydraulic pressure can be used to assist the resetting.
This is the new type of retractable artillery currently commonly used by the Tang Dynasty Navy, Guards Fleet and Army Dakou Bureau Coast Defense Artillery.
For large-caliber naval guns, the effect of this method is still limited, and it is difficult to reset even by manpower. It still needs to rely on gravity to reset. The 300-mm-caliber naval guns currently equipped on the Datang Navy are basically still
Gravity reset is required, hydraulic pressure, and spring reset have limited effects.
But for some medium-caliber naval guns, this kind of mounting and retreating method equipped with hydraulic pressure or spring, or simply two methods used together, is good. It can effectively help the artillery to reset, and improve the shooting accuracy and shooting accuracy.
Speed, which is why Datang's 150mm caliber artillery can fire at a rate of one shot per minute. If a 120mm caliber naval gun uses fixed ammunition, its rate of fire can even be increased to
Three to four rounds per minute.
The artillery currently used by the Datang Navy, the Guards Fleet, and the Army's Dakou Bureau artillery is still in the category of retracting the artillery, but the upper and lower gun mounts are separated, and hydraulics and springs are installed for retraction. After the reset device, the other
The rate of fire has been greatly improved compared to the early artillery more than ten years ago.
Not to mention, the Tang Dynasty military has not given up research on barrel annealing cannons in recent years. However, the technical difficulty of this thing is a bit high. Although several prototype cannons have been made, even the early Guards had experimental equipment.
It has been done, but the technology is limited and the failure rate is too high to be practical.
However, artillery technology is always in a state of progress. It may not take a few years for tube-fired artillery to be put into practical use.
With the advancement of technology, the rate of fire of the large-caliber artillery of the Tang Dynasty's navy and army continued to increase, and the amount of ammunition consumed also continued to increase, posing continuous challenges to the logistics supply capabilities.
In recent years, the military has increasingly felt that it would be difficult to maintain frontline supplies simply by relying on European railways.
Now that there is the Suez Canal, it is much more convenient. A cargo ship of tens of thousands of tons can transport tens of thousands of tons of materials.
The opening of Suez also directly promoted the empire's strategic actions in Europe to become faster. The most intuitive manifestation of this is that after the opening of the Suez Canal, the Tang military directly improved its military operations in the Black Sea Strait Military District and the Suez Cloud Canal.
The number of troops garrisoned in the three major European military bases: the administrative area and the Ceuta military base.
At the same time, it accelerated the takeover of the Eastern European areas handed over by the Tang Dynasty and the Jin Kingdom, including two important cities in Eastern Europe.
On August 14, the forty-sixth year of Xuanping, the Tang Empire officially took over the most important city in the Ukrainian plains from the Tang Dynasty: Kiev!
On September 8, the Tang Empire took over Moscow from the Tang Jin Kingdom.
Although these two cities were actually deserted, even the precious metal decorations or precious building materials in many buildings had been completely demolished by the evacuating Tatars.
However, taking over these two empty cities still has great strategic significance, which means that the Tang Empire began to fully take over the Ukrainian plains and central and northern Russia.
This was the largest territorial expansion of the Tang Empire in recent years.