To fight at such an ultra-long distance, if you want to cause effective damage to enemy capital ships, the power of naval guns is very large. Even the current 300 mm and 35 times caliber naval guns are powerful enough, let alone
Two hundred and fifty millimeters, thirty-five times caliber naval gun or forty times caliber naval gun.
The main gun of the new warship will inevitably be a 300 mm 40-caliber naval gun that will be developed next year. This naval gun uses an integrated turret and uses smokeless gunpowder. Its rate of fire is expected to reach 1.5 rounds per minute.
, compared with the previous generation's seven-year-old 300mm thirty-five times caliber naval gun, which was fired once every two minutes in the initial model, the Gaoqing's improved integrated turret's seven-year-old main gun's one round per minute is much higher.
Among the many large-caliber main guns currently in the empire, only this naval gun can barely meet the future requirements for ultra-long-distance combat of more than 10,000 meters.
But how many main guns are attached?
It is not impossible to directly build eight or ten doors, but the tonnage will be extremely huge, at least 17,800 or even 20,000 tons.
On the one hand, the empire still lacks some experience and knowledge in the construction of large-tonnage warships. At the same time, the empire's current force system technology is also slightly lacking. By then, the speed of this 20,000-ton ship will be very low, and the cost will be very high.
It is expensive, even exceeding tens of millions of dollars is possible.
Moreover, before the breakthrough of unified fire control technology, there is no way to conduct artillery fire from a long distance. If the battle is conducted within 10,000 meters, especially within 5,000 or 6,000 meters, the warship produced in this way may seem to have more main guns, but in fact, because the main guns fire rapidly
It is far inferior to rapid-fire artillery, and the amount of ammunition projected may not be enough.
In other words, until future upgrades and modifications to unified fire control, the actual effectiveness of a warship equipped with eight or ten main guns at the same time will not be as good as the Gaoqing or Jinghe.
The future needs to be considered, but the current situation needs to be considered even more!
Nowadays, the Imperial Navy is facing a lot of pressure. What it needs is immediate combat power, so that it can exert its maximum combat power when it is built!
Rather than a battleship that has to wait ten or eight years before it can be effective!
Therefore, after careful consideration, the Navy gave up the eight main gun and ten main gun plans, and instead chose the six main gun plan.
The overall main gun layout of the new battleship adopts a three-seat double-mounted layout along the front, center and rear axis.
Originally, the Navy wanted to develop a piggyback turret with two front and one rear turrets, but unfortunately the piggyback turret has not been successfully developed. Although the design already exists, it is not mature yet and the technical risk is too great, so it gave up and planned to
We will wait until the technology for backpack turrets is perfected.
Other available technologies are also used. At the same time, because the number of main guns is large, it takes up a lot of space. At the same time, considering that the nine-year-old 300 mm and 40 times the caliber naval gun adopts an integrated turret, the rate of fire has increased to
One point five rounds per minute, to a certain extent, has made up for the embarrassing lack of fire rate of large-caliber main guns with a caliber of more than 300 mm in the past.
What's more important is that the upgraded model of the 250mm naval gun, that is, the 250mm 40 times caliber naval gun, is behind the curve and is not expected to be available next year.
This class of battleship design will abandon the 250mm secondary main gun.
It also doesn’t use a two-stage main gun with a caliber of 200 mm and 40 times. This thing is a bit too high and too low.
Therefore, Yihuanxin directly adopted the new ten-year-old 150mm 45-caliber rapid-fire cannon, planning to pile up twelve of them at once, and increase the number of medium and short-range ammunition projections by increasing the number of secondary guns.
It still adopts the idea of comprehensive protection and uses nickel alloy hardened armor - Luo Jing armor.
The Nickel Alloy Research Group of Imperial College London has completed improvements to the production process of nickel alloy steel, greatly increasing production capacity and significantly reducing costs. It is currently upgrading and modifying the nickel steel production lines of many domestic steel companies. It is expected that Qian Sheng ten The technology upgrade can be completed and put into production within one year.
At the same time, Luohai Iron and Steel Company also successfully developed its own gas carburizing method.
By tomorrow, the empire's two major armor suppliers, Jingzhou Iron and Steel Company and Luohai Iron and Steel Company, will be able to provide nickel alloy hardened armor using the gaseous carburizing method, because the armor will be manufactured by Luohai Iron and Steel Company and Jingzhou Iron and Steel Company. The company mass-produced it at the same time, so this armor was also called Luo Jing armor.
This means that the nickel alloy hardened armor that was previously too expensive to be used in batches will barely be able to be used in batches next year.
The nickel-chromium alloy hardened armor using the gaseous carburizing method, also known as Luo Jing armor, is in line with the navy's concept of hardened armor, and its protective efficiency is much higher than the previous types of hardened armor.
The 150 mm Luo Jing armor can obtain the protective effect equivalent to the 170 mm Jingzhou armor. If it is Luo Hai armor, it is 190 mm, while the nickel steel is 240 mm. Millimeters, as for homogeneous ordinary mixed armor, it is 318 millimeters, and wrought iron is 406 millimeters.
In the past, when the Imperial Navy built Eirin-class battleships, in order to ensure protection capabilities, its wrought iron main armor belt reached an armor belt of more than 400 millimeters, which occupied a large amount of tonnage and forced the battleships to adopt focused protection.
Now if Luo Jing armor is used, only more than 150 millimeters are needed to achieve the same protection effect, enough to save a lot of tonnage to expand the protection area, or to enhance firepower and power.
Luo Jing Armor has successfully overcome the production capacity and cost of nickel steel and achieved mass production, which will further improve the protective effectiveness of imperial warships.
As for the power system, it is expected to adopt new technology such as oil-injection coal-fired boilers. This new boiler technology has been tested on many ships. In addition to new ones, one or two large lightning strike ships have also been modified and equipped with oil-injection boilers. The equipment is now considered a relatively mature and usable technology.
If nothing else goes wrong, it will be fully applied to all new battleships next year, and even old battleships can be upgraded to a certain extent and equipped with fuel injection systems to increase power.
This battleship design is a typical compromise.
Not only do you want to gain long-distance combat capabilities through six large-caliber main guns after upgrading fire control in the era of long-distance combat on all-heavy artillery battleships, but you also want to use the performance of rapid-fire cannons in the era of five- to six-kilometer combat distances. Advantages, while also wanting to control costs and reduce technical risks, we finally came up with a product that compromised all aspects.
But one thing is guaranteed, and that is speed. For this reason, the Imperial Navy does not hesitate to increase costs or even reduce protection to ensure that the ship's speed reaches twenty knots. This is also the speed of the Mirror River full-speed cannon-firing battleship.
Twenty knots of speed is already the speed requirement of the Daheng Empire Navy for the new generation of capital ships. Of course, this premise is because the Daheng Empire has a unique hardened armor technology that can save a lot of tonnage on armor, so that it can On the premise of ensuring protection and firepower, increase the speed to twenty knots.
At the same time, it is also to enable the ship to still be active on the front line in a few years.
The speed of the capital ships in service today is generally 18 knots, and the armored cruisers are all 20 knots and above. If the new warships want to be able to ensure combat effectiveness after upgrading and modification in the future, it will be difficult to achieve speeds without 20 knots.
In order to ensure firepower, protection, and speed, the final tonnage of the ship has once again made history. The standard displacement of the ship is expected to reach 17,000 tons.
This typical transitional product was eventually named the battleship Luohe. The name of the ship was inherited from the original second-class battleship Luohe. The ship was urgently sold to the Kingdom of Orr in the eighth year of Qian Sheng. The Imperial Navy was deregistered, freeing up the ship's name. After the original second-class battleship Luohe entered the Orr Kingdom Navy, it was renamed the battleship Kari, and was eventually sunk in the Second Battle of Ion.
Construction of the new Luohe battleship is expected to start in December of the 10th year of Qian Sheng.
This is also the second time that the empire has started construction of a large-tonnage capital ship after the construction of the Gaoqing was started in December of the ninth year of Qian Sheng and the Jinghe was started in January of the tenth year of Qian Sheng.
At the same time, the emergence of this ship also means that the Gaoqing's first- and second-level mixed main gun plan and the Jinghe full-speed gun plan, two ideas proposed last year, have been rejected.
Or rather, these two plans were finally merged together and eventually became the Luo Hai's six-main gun plan.
From the perspective of the outside world, the design concept of this six-main-gun battleship is somewhat similar to the six-main-gun battleships of the Orissa Empire Navy and the Kokel Empire. At least the artillery layout of the two is the same, and even the main guns and The secondary battery layout is similar.
However, the design concepts of battleships are completely different. The Orissa Empire and the Kokel Empire built six-main gun battleships purely because they have not yet discovered the huge power of rapid-fire cannons and the efficient protection capabilities of hardened armor. Their battleship design ideas Still stuck in the early years, the main gun has an extremely slow rate of fire, and whether there are rapid-fire secondary guns or not, it still uses key protection.
However, the six-main gun battleship concept of the Daheng Empire incorporates the most cutting-edge technology in the Daheng Empire, trying to be compatible with medium-range rapid-fire gun engagements and maintain modification potential to cope with future ultra-long-distance engagements, so as not to wait until After the introduction of full-heavy naval guns, battleships fell directly out of date and were unable to even participate in second-line battles...
At the same time, the other two major reasons why the Empire adopted the six-main gun plan were that the Imperial Navy adopted integrated turrets and omnidirectional loading technology, which greatly increased the rate of fire of large-caliber naval guns, reaching 1.5 rounds per minute. This rate of fire , faster than the traditional 150mm artillery fire rate of one round per minute.
In addition, the empire’s ammunition technology surpasses that of other navies!
The Empire's unique smokeless gunpowder propellant is currently not available in other countries.
The combination of these two greatly increases the power of the main gun!
This led the Imperial Navy to adopt a new battleship plan with six main guns!
The new battleships of the Imperial Navy are expected to use six main guns, but no one knows this news yet.
But at this time, the firepower layout of the battleship Gaoqing, which had been under construction for more than a year, was leaked. After all, this is just a firepower layout method. Too many people know about it, and it is not a technical detail. If you want It's not easy to maintain high confidentiality for more than a year.
The navies of various countries discovered that the firepower layout of the Daheng Empire's new generation battleship was very strange. In addition to the dual-mounted main guns at the front and rear, there were also four 250mm cannons at the four corners amidships.
This kind of firepower layout has never appeared before, and it does not conform to the current mainstream battleship design, which makes them very confused!
But just because ordinary countries are confused, it doesn’t mean that the Krul Kingdom Navy is also confused!
A technical rear admiral of the Krul Kingdom Navy, after learning about the strange main gun layout of the Daheng Empire, pondered for a long time, and finally hurried to the Admiralty!