The sun never sets in the Ming Dynasty

Chapter 509
Liaodong was besieged by tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians. They couldn't just sit back and watch. Rescue was urgent. The imperial decree was issued. Shanhaiguan, Denglai, and Jizhen sent troops to aid Liaodong. For a while, there was a lot of noise in the customs and prices soared.

Sun Yuanhua, the honest man, urgently ordered General Kong Youde to lead [-] cavalry to Liaodong for reinforcements, and Zhang Chun, the Yongping military preparation road, rushed to Shanhaiguan with [-] cavalry and [-] chariot battalions.

Heihu, the general of Yongping, has 3000 soldiers, and of course he is in the ranks of troop deployment, so he had to personally lead [-] troops out of the customs.

Ma Xianglin and Qin Yiming wanted to bring [-] white soldiers to the battle, but Emperor Chongzhen rejected them. The emperor knew the combat effectiveness of the white soldiers and recognized their loyalty, so he left them to guard Shanhaiguan to prevent accidents.

In the battle of Dalinghe, Sun Chengzong could hardly be blamed. As the leader of the Ming army who was fighting against Hong, he did nothing, and sent reinforcements one after another, which really became a fueling tactic.

In the history of the Battle of Dalinghe, Sun Chengzong’s tower attack strategy was proved by iron facts to be inadvisable, and the construction of Dalinghe City was even more foolish. It seems that fortress encroachment can occupy some places, but what is the effect?
As big as a city is, the area it occupies is only so small. The Ming army's hard work in the farmland has no chance of harvesting, and it is in vain to produce food for Houjin.

The Ming army could not get food locally, and the supplies had to be transported thousands of miles from the pass, which consumed a lot of the already unsustainable national power of the Ming Dynasty.

The battle line was stretched too long, and the Hou Jin army could attack the Ming army's [-]-mile supply line from Shanhaiguan to Jinzhou at any time. The Ming army had no field combat capabilities and naturally ignored the other.

The purpose of building strong camps and fortresses is to spread out from one point to another, not just to occupy a small area as large as a city.

Instead, relying on a strong fortress, they should continuously attack the enemy within a hundred miles and gradually expand the occupied area. It is not to build a city or to hide in it and wait for the enemy to attack.

Huang Sheng is building nine border towns in Jiaozhi, and is preparing to station a thousand soldiers with a total of [-] soldiers and [-] auxiliary soldiers at the bastion of each border town.

The task of the garrison Qian Zong is to use the fort as a base to continuously attack the enemy country for a hundred miles. If the opponent has a strong force, he can join forces with several frontier soldiers and township braves to attack.

Only an army that keeps taking the initiative to attack will become stronger as it fights, and the Ming Dynasty frontier army that is always retreating and defending is naturally discouraged. Therefore, the strategy of adopting fortresses and cannibalism in Liaodong is not worth the loss. It is too wasteful and embarrassing for the court.

Hongxie besieged Jinzhou and Dalinghe to death, and the general artillery brought by the rear army also arrived at the Dalinghe battlefield, and the shelling began.

Zu Dashou also has cannons for defending the city. The power and range of the two cannons are similar, with an effective range of three or four hundred paces, which is over one mile.

The maximum elevation angle can shoot the shell a thousand steps, that is, 500 meters, which is equivalent to three miles away, but where did the shell fall in the end?God knows!
The gunners of the Ming army were even better skilled. The rate of fire could be as high as the gunners of the Jin army for three rounds, and the gunners of the Daling River could fire four rounds.

The Hongyi cannon is a type of receding front-loading smoothbore artillery. Every time it is fired, it will seriously deviate from the original shooting position.According to the normal operating procedure, it needs to go through the steps of resetting, reloading, and setting the azimuth and elevation angles again.

The most well-trained British naval gunners of this era can only guarantee to fire again within 3 minutes, which is 1 minute worse than the level of the Huang family gunners.

Because the steel artillery with a shock absorbing device produced by the Huang family can reduce the time for the artillery to reset, and save a precious minute by relying on the power of technology.

It is impossible to increase the rate of fire of front-mounted artillery in this era, because after firing once, a special push rod must be dipped into the gun chamber to extinguish the sparks, and then a push rod tied with a dry cloth should be inserted into the gun chamber to dry it, and then filled. Gunpowder, propellant, stuffed shells, then pierce the gunpowder bag from the fire door, insert the fuse and then light it.

These actions are rather slow and cumbersome, and do not include correcting gun positions.This is a common problem with front-mounted artillery. If you can fire every 3 minutes, you are a top expert. The gunners of the Ming army can shoot [-] times in half an hour, while the gunners of the later Jin army can only shoot [-] times in half an hour.

Then?Then no.The heat dissipation of cast iron cannons in this era is not ideal, and they can fire more than a dozen shots in a row at most.At this time, the temperature of the gun barrel is overheated due to continuous firing, and continuous shooting will cause accidents. Maybe the gunpowder bag will explode directly if it is pushed in.

Since the artillery equipped by the later Jin army and the Ming army could not meet the unified standard of Huang’s artillery, each artillery has its own personality, and the gunner can only be accurate if he is familiar with the artillery he often controls. Just deploy a group of gunners to complete the shooting of unfamiliar artillery.

Fighting can start, there are too many uncertainties.

Ba Xiao's commanding ability is top-notch, and he decided to use quantity to make up for the shortcomings of quality. He took a concentrated attack and chose to bombard the south gate with gentle terrain.

Both the offensive and defensive sides did not have the steel field guns produced by the Huang family. They were all cast iron artillery, and each of them was an extremely cumbersome guy. The recoil was terrible, and there was no shock absorber at all.

Although the artillery of the Houjin Army was not condescending and lost its location, but fortunately, it can move its position and choose the most suitable place to fire.

There is no fear of recoil when firing on the ground, but once you fire a cannon, you have to return the cannon that has jumped out of place and aim again.

This was not the case with the Hongyi cannon deployed by the Ming army. Their artillery must have a specially built solid fort before they can fire, and they can't be placed on the city wall casually.

The Hongyi Cannon is a front-mounted heavy-duty smoothbore gun widely used on warships in Europe between the [-]th and [-]th centuries. The so-called Hongyi actually refers to Westerners such as the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, etc. robot.

The Ming Dynasty called all front-mounted smoothbore cannons imported from the West Hongyi cannons. After being imitated in various places in the Ming Dynasty, there were as many as a hundred types, and their quality and use have been outstanding.

However, the Hongyi Cannon, which can fire twelve-pound shells, already weighs four to five thousand catties, and its recoil is astonishing.

The city wall looks majestic, but its strength is not worth mentioning. It is equivalent to a pile of rammed earth with a height of [-] meters and a width of [-] meters covered with a layer of bricks. The recoil of the cannon will cause the city wall to collapse.

The concentrated use of firepower by the later Jin army was very effective. The artillery at the head of the Ming army suffered a partial disadvantage in quantity. Army artillery attack.

Fortunately, the accuracy of artillery in this era mostly depends on luck. The Ming army fired three rounds of [-] large iron balls in the early [-] catties, but only two of them hit the general cannon of the Jin army.

There is no doubt that the two cannons of the Jin Army were declared scrapped and withdrawn from the battle sequence, but even so, the artillery of the Jin Army was still four or five times the number of artillery at the north wall of Dalinghe City.

When the artillery of the Hou Jin army began to roar, the officers and soldiers of the Ming army felt bad.

Later, the solid iron ball thrown by the Jin army hit the lucky one that landed on the city wall. A shell could not only bounce and cause damage to the Ming army, but also smashed up bricks and stones and caused splashes.

The flying stone flakes and bricks are enough to break armor at close range and cause a lot of casualties to the Ming army.

However, the artillery shells fired by the Ming army condescendingly were much less powerful. There was a wheat field there, and the red piled up a lot of mounds to deal with the Ming army's shelling.

When the shells of the Ming army fell, they would be exhausted after hitting the soft wheat field after a few jumps. If they were unlucky and hit the mound of soil and got in, it would be a waste of gunpowder and a waste of effort.

The Ming army defended the city tenaciously, and the artillerymen tried their best to load and fire one by one. In this way, you came and I fought for an hour and a half. The six Hongyi cannons arranged on the north wall of the Ming army were destroyed one by one by the Jin army.

Hong Zhe was overjoyed. To show off, he specially invited all Mongolian ministries and major generals to watch the battle.

(End of this chapter)