This was the time traveler's first battle at sea. The captured pirate ship gave them a chance to see the specific equipment of the Chinese pirates who once roamed the southeast coast in the late Ming Dynasty and became famous in Southeast Asia. Not long after the ship was towed into the port,
An inspection team composed of multiple ministries including military, intelligence, industry, and agriculture took a car to Bopu to conduct an on-site inspection of the entire ship.
The intelligence team once again confirmed that the ship was indeed a type of "Guangzhou ship", which showed that the pirates should come from Guangdong, not Fujian, the main area of activity of Yiguan. Therefore, the suspicion of Liu Xiang's gang was high.
The hull inherits the consistent advantages of Guangzhou Shipbuilding and is made of very hard wood. At first, no one could recognize what kind of wood it was. Later, Fa Shilu from the agriculture team identified it as lychee wood because of the hardness of this wood.
Very high. In 1927, the Hainan Island Red Army used lychee wood to build a front-loading artillery piece with an all-wood structure. If it hadn’t been for the combination of SKS + M43 bullets that transcended time and space, it would have been difficult for small artillery and muskets to penetrate the common small artillery at sea in this era.
There are a total of 16 artillery pieces on the ship. It is difficult to identify the specific types of these artillery pieces. According to European standards, they can be regarded as 4-8 pound artillery pieces. The artillery pieces are roughly cast, and most of them are made of various types of pig iron and miscellaneous iron.
One of them even has an iron-bore wooden structure. It can be seen that the people who cast the cannons basically don’t understand the cannon-casting technology: the artillery casting is rough and the structure is simple. Not to mention the technology of boring the cannon bore, which is just countless parts on the cannon.
The air holes made the mechanical team stunned - there was a greater chance of killing yourself with this thing than killing the enemy.
The cannon was simply installed on a wooden frame, with a muzzle made on the bulwark and tied with a rope. There was no device to move and adjust the position of the cannon, and there was no aiming equipment. The only way to keep the cannon aimed at the target was to continuously
Move the hull and bring the ship close enough. This is why the ship is equipped with more than 8 oars - in addition to serving as additional power, it also plays a role in quickly adjusting the ship's position.
After field test launches, when using the fine-grained gunpowder modified by the traverser, the largest 8-pound gun can shoot iron bullets 500 meters away. If the elevation angle is increased, it should be able to go further, but this
The poor structure of the cannon prevented it from being loaded with too much gunpowder. In the battle, no shot was fired beyond 200 meters, which shows that the pirates were very aware of the quality of their artillery. The inferior ammunition further reduced the effective range: except for a small number of muskets on the ship,
In addition to the lead bullets used, the main shells turned out to be stones, and there were also some small iron bullets. When the Qing army's forts bombarded British warships at the Pearl River Estuary from 1840 to 1842, although "bullets rained down", no matter how many stones they
The shells did not cause much damage to the oak hull of the British battleship.
The quality of the gunpowder on the ship was even worse. It was completely powdered gunpowder with a high sulfur content. When this gunpowder was used for test firing, it emitted a lot of thick smoke and had very weak explosive power. In contrast, the first counter-encirclement and suppression battle
The gunpowder seized in the raid was of the best quality, obviously because it came from the official treasury. The gunpowder seized from Gou's house was of slightly lower quality. It seems that the gunpowder of this group of pirates was privately produced by the underground workshops. The lack of saltpeter probably explains this.
a little.
In addition to the artillery, there are also more than a dozen different matchlock guns, some obviously obtained from the Portuguese or the Dutch, others are local knockoffs, as well as bird guns and fire guns ranging from one eye to three eyes -
―They were probably obtained from the Ming army. These guns were rarely maintained and did not look very useful. Weapons enthusiasts from the mechanical group, which is always known for its fearlessness, did not dare to test fire it. According to his estimation
, the best quality original matchlock gun made in Portugal or the Netherlands, with good ammunition, the effective range will not exceed 50 meters.
The cold weapons seized on the ship were very rich and varied, and some of them had never been seen before. The intelligence and information department organized various historians to come to identify them and they were able to roughly distinguish what these complicated things were.
The most common ones are bamboo spears, with a bladed spear tip installed on the top of the bamboo pole, and the length is between 5 and 6 meters. There are many such spears, which greatly exceeds the number of corpses found on the ship. Later, it was found out through prisoner interrogation.
, in addition to being used for fighting, it is also used as a javelin.
Another kind of spear is made of wood, with spearheads at both ends, and is used for close combat. One of the most commonly used cold weapons by pirates is a short waist knife that looks like a hatchet. The total length is only 50cm, and the blade is very strong.
There were also a large number of pear-headed darts, small darts, hooks and sickles used to fix enemy ships, hooks... all kinds of things were found on the ship. Finally, a large number of fishing nets and rawhide were also found - used for
Mounted on the bulwarks, it can withstand the enemy's light projectile weapons and prevent the enemy from engaging in gang-hopping. This time, it was removed in order to disguise it as a fishing boat.
As common water weapons, two types of incendiary weapons have been discovered: a bamboo tube with a torch, a greased wooden block inserted into the top of the bamboo tube, which is lit and thrown like a wooden-handled grenade; and the other
They are clay pots of different sizes, containing pyrotechnics such as gunpowder and sulfur. The top of the pot is concave and used to hold charcoal fire. When in use, it is swung to the deck of the enemy ship with a rope from the mast and smashed.
.
"It's really too rich." Yu E Shui ignored the fact that the blood on his weapons was condensing and smelly, and he kept looking over and over in excitement, "I can write three or four papers on just these things, and I can get them all in the core."
It’s a piece of cake.”
"That's right, you can also interrogate real Chinese pirates from the 17th century. No historian can compare with you in this advantage!"
"Yes, yes." Yu Eshui didn't hear the ridicule, and kept taking pictures of the messy scrap metal and taking notes.
Wu De sent a group of commune members from the commune to clean up the corpses, and washed the deck with sea water and fine sand. By evening, the ship had been washed clean. Except for the side panels, the deck was densely covered with bullet holes and
The deck shed was beaten to pieces, and there were no traces of the battle.
Wu De looked at the ship and felt strange. He was also a navy soldier, and now he became the secretary of the commune! He had done this kind of task of driving a fishing boat to protect fisheries many times in the army, but he was given this to Chen Haiyang.
People from frigates took it away. Jealousy! Jealousy!
Jealousy was jealousy, and he had to do whatever he had to do. He looked at the things unloaded from the boat. They had basically been emptied out, and even the sails had been removed - they were completely smashed. The members were still squatting on the deck.
He was concentrating on picking out the lead bullet embedded in the wood with the iron pick.
"We are really poor." He couldn't help sighing. Lead is not very valuable anyway. Just look at the composition of the Ming Dynasty's inferior money and you will know that lead is a standard base metal. The stinginess of the industrial sector is also
Forced out. The ancient mining and metallurgical industry was too small compared to the huge appetite of the time travellers. Once the new army being planned is established, hundreds of muskets will have to use lead bullets...
"Commander Wu, the navy has handed over eighteen prisoners. Please tell me how to deal with them?" Fu Youdi reported to him respectfully.
Fu Youdi became a cadre again, and Wu De took a fancy to him because he liked to dominate and control his harsh style. As soon as the law and order crackdown at the Dongmen City Police Station ended, he was always anxious to get into a leadership position because he did not get it.
Huo Fu Youdi was approved by Wu De and was appointed as the captain of the labor camp.
"All of them will be assigned to the labor reform team. They must be under strict supervision!" Wu De ordered. "The heads of the security team will interrogate them at any time. Don't send them too far away when they are assigned to work."
"yes."
After a comprehensive inspection of the ship's structure, the joint survey team concluded that the ship was very well-made and it would be best if it could be repaired and used for our own purposes. It would be of great benefit as a fishing boat or a transport ship.
The damage to the ship was not serious, and the basic structure was intact. However, there were too many bullet holes in the ship's board, and water poured into it when the waves bumped. After on-site inspection, the ship was still of use value, and it could be repaired and continued to be used.
To repair a ship, it involves the upper pier of the ship. This is a very complicated matter, but it is inevitable for ship repair and shipbuilding. According to the Navy's idea, it is best to directly build a dry dock. The Navy Department
A plan was put forward to excavate a simple dock in a sheltered bay in Lingaojiao, dig out a 40-meter-long, 12-meter-wide, and 2.4-meter-deep water channel, build stone walls on all sides, and then drain the water, and the ship would
Repair it in this dock where there is no water. After the repair is completed, put the water in and the ship can sail away. Later, you can make and install a ship lock, so that you can build a new ship.
This plan was rejected by the Planning Commission, which estimated that the investment was too large. People from the construction engineering team proposed another simple plan to replace the huge and expensive dry dock - a simple slipway.
The simple slide uses a wooden slide and a large amount of grease to complete the upper and lower piers of the ship from the water surface to the slipway. The advantage is that the equipment is simple and easy to operate. There are no pressure resistance requirements for the shore and beach soil layers.
For ships with a height of less than 500 tons, when going up and down the pier, you only need to level the original ground, add appropriate gravel and ballast, and roll it flat. And because the structure is simple, it is easy to disassemble and assemble. If
It can be moved easily if it needs to be relocated. In the past, many small and medium-sized civilian shipyards in China used this equipment.