Bronze door through time and space

Chapter 439 Takeda Shingen wants to draw
Twelve hundred Koshu cavalrymen, riding on short Japanese horses, took advantage of the wind to inflate the hot air balloon-like things on their backs, and rushed towards the central army of the Moroboshi family with great momentum, catching everyone by surprise.

Two armies do not go to war the moment they meet. Generally speaking, the more armies there are on both sides, the more complicated the preparation work. Just the deployment of troops before the war takes a lot of time. After all, thousands of people need to change from a long snake formation to a horizontal formation to meet the enemy, which is not something that can be accomplished in a short period of time.

As for abandoning the formation and starting fighting directly, don't be ridiculous. With thousands and thousands of people mixed together, let alone commanding, you won't even know where to retreat. You can only wait until everyone is tired of fighting. During this period, the generals on both sides who have nothing to do are going to get together to play cards.

Therefore, in cold weapon combat, formation is very important.

In addition to considering the terrain when arranging a battle array, the troops cannot be crowded together. A certain distance must be maintained between the battle arrays so that they cannot interfere with each other while supporting each other. This way, if one battle array is broken, it will not affect other battle arrays and it will be convenient for the rear troops to come forward to support. Therefore, this is a very complicated subject.

Generally speaking, the two sides would tacitly maintain a certain distance, and then line up their respective formations. Whoever finishes first would attack first. However, Takeda Shingen boldly broke the rules and sent out cavalry to advance alone. This was something Yan Xu had not expected.

In this situation, the best way is to let one army take the initiative to meet the enemy and use their lives to buy time for the central army to regroup.

Of course, doing so would not only kill a lot of people, but also lower morale, just like being punched in the face and spat on right after the fight begins. If the enemy is strong and decisive enough and takes the opportunity to press forward all at once, it is possible that you will be completely defeated.

Unfortunately, times have changed. Yan Xu smiled and waved his hand. Dozens of wheelbarrows were pushed to the front of the battle. Then the supports under the vehicles were propped up. After they were stable, the tarpaulin was immediately lifted to reveal a strangely shaped machine gun with a hand crank inside.

Because of the widespread popularity of steam machinery, the Moroboshi family has entered the steam age. The development of firearms is actually not slow, but it is limited by the inability to use integrated bullets, which makes it difficult to manufacture more complex and sophisticated firearms.

However, Earth Spider developed a new type of machine gun based on some prototypes that Yan Xu brought out. After testing, the results were quite good. Today was the first time it was used in actual combat.

The structure of this machine gun is not complicated, because it is activated by hand cranking, which is equivalent to constantly fiddling with the hammer, so there is no need to consider too many issues, and the production and processing are also very simple. The only special thing is the thick spring plate.

Machine guns that use magazines for ammunition were almost eliminated during World War II, but Japan went the other way and still produced a lot of them.

But in the special little world of Japan, when integrated bullets cannot be used, the bullet plate becomes the key point of machine gun modification.

According to Tsuchigumo's design, a row of finger-long copper tubes were fixed between the two long copper plates. The ammunition was loaded into the copper tubes, which were equivalent to the barrel of the gun. The bullets were fired by activating the primer at the back of the gun.

This is equivalent to fixing the miniaturized sub-guns in series, then manually cranking the gears to send the bullet into the barrel to complete the firing, and then sending it out from the other side. In theory, the faster the hand cranks, the faster the firing rate.

In fact, it is impossible because there are too many problems to be solved.

Firstly, in order to prevent the magazine from being deformed due to collision, extrusion and other reasons on the battlefield, it cannot be designed to be too long. In addition, it is necessary to consider the internal loading of ammunition and the problem of chamber bursting due to repeated loading. The thick copper tube is specially made to be thicker than the bullet. Therefore, one magazine has only fifteen sub-guns, and the magazine needs to be replaced frequently for continuous shooting.

And the problems of failure and carbon deposits must also be considered, so the rate of fire is only about 120 to 150, and the barrel needs to be cleaned or replaced after 500 rounds of continuous shooting, and a comprehensive maintenance is required after 1,000 rounds, otherwise the failure rate will increase significantly.

Although it was troublesome, its lethality should not be underestimated, especially when targeting cold weapon armies. The powerful firepower was like the scythe of the god of death. As the shooter began to turn the handle, the seemingly extraordinarily wide and thick bullet plates were fed into the barrels and fired one by one, making dull bangs. The firing rate was not slow, and with a total of thirty machine guns, they formed a relatively dense firepower network, covering the Koshu cavalry, which the Takeda family was proud of, and immediately caused great chaos.

This shows the advantage of the short stature of Japanese horses. Because of their small size, almost the same as a donkey, they can almost touch the ground with their feet just by slightly turning sideways. In addition, their legs are short and they cannot run fast. Unless they are unlucky enough to fall headfirst to the ground or be repeatedly trampled by the horse, it is difficult for them to die from the fall. Therefore, even though there were a lot of people falling down, the number of deaths was not as high as one might imagine.

But Takeda Shingen didn't know that when he saw nearly half of the elite cavalry he had worked so hard to train fell down, he immediately covered his chest and began to gasp, looking like he was about to die.

It's no wonder that Takeda Shingen was like this. The island country was so poor that it couldn't even afford to raise livestock. People almost turned to a vegetarian diet, let alone raising horses on a large scale.

War horses are not wild horses. Wild horses do not need to carry riders for repeated training, nor do they need to charge desperately on the battlefield, so they can survive by eating grass alone. But this is not the case for war horses. Such a great physical exertion cannot be replenished by eating grass alone, so they need to add food, such as soybeans, refined salt, eggs, etc. Otherwise, they will be useless soon.

Even if a war horse mixes its food with grass, the amount of food it consumes is far more than that of one or two people.

More than a thousand cavalrymen, including men and horses, amounted to almost five or six thousand men, and they were elite troops, so Takeda Shingen looked like he was about to withdraw.

Even a strong clan like the Takeda clan could not easily recover from the loss of hundreds of cavalrymen in one go.

Since the other party made the first move, Yan Xu did not bother to be polite and directly handed over the command to his subordinates.

You'd better forget about asking him to fight against thousands of people alone or command tens of thousands of people to fight.

Under the command of the generals of the Moroboshi family, the army began to advance, forcing the Takeda family to respond passively.

However, in this situation, Takeda Shingen still sent out an elite force to try to bring back the surviving cavalrymen, at least to preserve some seeds. This shows how much he values ​​this cavalry. Unfortunately, he thought too much. Today, let alone the cavalry, whether he can go back alive depends on luck.

Because Takeda Shingen broke the rules, the two sides went to war directly. However, the Moroboshi family's iron cannon foot soldiers equipped with striker rifles were more flexible and did not need to use the popular line-up and shooting fighting method. They launched a charge in a squad mode and immediately began fire suppression after reaching the firing range.

The range advantage of the striker rifle is so huge that you don't even need to kneel on one knee to shoot, let alone prone shooting. You can just stand there and shoot, killing the target one by one, just like shooting at a target.

The Takeda family was also equipped with a lot of iron cannons, but they had never seen this kind of iron cannon before. They were simply crushed under their feet. The Takeda family's iron cannon foot soldiers lined up in the front were called out one after another, and died in a tragic way.

Especially when the bang bang machine gun was pushed up, the unique gunshot sound was like a wooden hammer hitting the chest. The larger caliber bullets made the bamboo rafts commonly used by the Japanese to block arrows useless, and the fragments flew everywhere, causing more damage.

(End of this chapter)