Master Yuan, start!

"The Austrians did this and won the Battle of Lissa. Russia can certainly do the same today!"

Alenov muttered to himself.

He decided to follow the successful example and let Alexander II and Pamitra take the lead, acting as the sharp apex of the V formation.

The ironclad ships Nicholas I and Ushakov provided fire support on the flanks.

"Aim at the enemy flagship and fire!"

"boom!"

"Boom!"

Just as Alexander II fired back, Naniwa and Hegie also opened fire, and the two fleets engaged in a bombardment.

The blue sea was filled with splashing water columns and smoke rising from the gun barrels.

Without waiting for the Russian warships to form a V-shaped formation, several warships were quickly separated from behind the three leading ships, Zhiyuan, Naniwa and Haiji.

Hailong and Haifeng 30 headed north, while Yoshino, Takachiho and Akitsuzu 30 headed south.

After separating from the main formation, the two waves of warships increased their speed and rushed towards the flank of the Russian 6th Fleet. 3%"

The Zhiyuan, Naniwa and Haiji ships in the center pressed forward along the shortest center line.

In just a few minutes, the Sino-Japanese joint fleet, which was originally in a V-shaped formation, quickly changed to a straight line formation.

"Seize the T-head!"

When the Russian Major General Alenov on the opposite side saw this scene, his heart skipped a beat.

Our V-shaped formation has not yet been formed, but the other side has already formed a straight line formation. Doesn't this mean that we will have to endure more than a dozen rounds of artillery fire in vain?

Sure enough, before he could notify the other ships, the artillery shells from the Sino-Japanese joint fleet rained down.

Rapid-fire gun, rapid-fire gun, and rapid-fire gun!

Just a dozen seconds later, Nicholas I was hit first, with a 150mm shell from Zhiyuan hitting the front deck at a 45-degree angle.

The shell kept sliding on the deck and finally stopped after hitting the turret on the other side, and then embedded deeply into the hull.

The 150mm shells of the Zhiyuan failed to penetrate the 200mm thick turret edge armor of Nicholas I, but it brought a scene of hell on earth to the sailors on it.

The cannonballs blew away several sailors who were running back and forth on the deck, leaving a long trail of blood on the deck.

"Vassily, Vasily!"

Ivanov had just loaded a shell and fired it while covering his ears.

However, when he looked back, he saw that only half of his beloved brother Vasily was left.

Seeing this scene, he ran to Vasily, who could no longer be called a "human", like a madman, hugged him and cried bitterly.

"Captain, think of a solution quickly! We can't keep getting bombarded!"

When the first mate on Nicholas I saw this scene, he wailed and looked at Captain Oleg beside him.

"Continue the V-formation movement!"

Oleg glanced coldly at Ivanov, who was holding Vasily's body in pain, and turned his gaze to the damaged deck.

He didn't care about the casualties of just one or two sailors; he was more concerned about the extent of the damage to Nicholas II.

"The Chinese shells couldn't even penetrate the thin deck armor?" Oleg breathed a sigh of relief as he looked at the shell embedded in the hull.

"Go at full speed, don't worry about the enemy's shells, fire back!"

...

"The time is too short, it's not enough!"

The time for pretense brought by flying the French flag is over.

However, no Russian warship has been seriously damaged yet!

Seeing the shells from the Zhiyuan, Naniwa, and Haiji hitting the Alexander II and Nicholas I, they only dented their armor and were unable to cause any effective damage.

Deng Shichang was extremely anxious.

However, now that things have come to this, is it possible to turn around and run away?

"Fire, keep firing!"

Deng Shichang was standing in the command tower, but his voice was so loud that it reached the ears of everyone on the Zhiyuan ship.

As soon as the words fell, there was a "boom"

The entire Zhiyuan ship shook violently, and a column of water rose from the starboard side.

"Hit, Lord Deng, hit on the starboard side!"

The Russian counterattack finally arrived, and the 150mm secondary gun on Alexander II hit the leading Zhiyuan.

Although it did not break the armor, it still caused a violent collision to the Zhiyuan.

The violent vibration caused the sailors in the turret to fall all over the place, and some were even knocked unconscious by the huge impact.

"Alexander, Alexander, why isn't it sinking?"

On the Zhiyuan ship, Yang Lun, the second gunnery mate, wiped his face which was blackened by gunpowder.

He held the shell and looked at the Alexander II in the distance, which had been hit more than a dozen times but still stood firm, and let out a desperate wail.

Chapter 326: To Jiu Bar^四彡linW肿…Transfer: Yuanhao, charge!

西历1896年6月15号上午7点，被后世称作19世纪末东亚最后一场海战的“鲸海海战”，正式拉开帷幕。

As both sides came into each other's firing range, large clouds of gunfire smoke gradually emerged from a small sea area in the middle of the Whale Sea.

The Beiyang Fleet and the Japanese Fleet successively seized advantageous positions by virtue of their high speed, and the artillery density of the Sino-Japanese Joint Fleet was also increased to another level.

However, the Russian fleet sent Alexander II and Nicholas I to the front, and with their advantage of thick skin and strong flesh, they withstood the bombardment of artillery shells.

In the naval battles of the late 19th century, there were two main types of artillery shells used by the navies of various countries.

One is armor-piercing bullet and the other is grenade.

In the late Qing Dynasty, the former was generally called steel bombs, and the latter were called flowering seeds or flowering bombs.

Armor-piercing bullets have sharp warheads, thick walls, and a fuse at the bottom. They rely on friction from internal gunpowder to explode, so they are generally used to penetrate the armor of warships and cause damage to the ship's structure.

The grenade has thin walls, is filled with explosives, and has a fuse in the warhead, so it will explode the moment it comes into contact with the target, trying to achieve maximum damage.

However, this characteristic also means that it poses less threat to hull armor and can only be used against personnel on the deck or unprotected warships.

In short, armor-piercing shells are effective against ships, while grenades are effective against people.

The Beiyang Fleet of the original time and space used Krupp armor-piercing shells, which had many cavities inside the shells and unreliable tail fuses, and were often detonated prematurely or even failed to explode.

Therefore, the Beiyang Fleet simply replaced the gunpowder in the original armor-piercing shells with sand, and used sand as weight to avoid accidental explosions.

It completely relies on the kinetic energy of the armor-piercing projectile itself to penetrate the enemy's armor, and it does not explode even after hitting the target, just like an iron lump shell in the era of sailing battleships.

Therefore, this type of shell is also called a solid shell.

This is the origin of the famous saying "mixing sand in the shells" in later generations.

To be honest, mixing sand into artillery shells is really a last resort, and sand shells are not completely without lethality.

But compared with the Japanese fleet, which was equipped with all new equipment, Li Hongzhang was still too perfunctory.

6. He no longer paid attention to the Beiyang Fleet after it was established, and was unwilling to purchase the British's mature and expensive armor-piercing bullets, forcing the Beiyang Fleet to use solid bullets to make up the numbers.

3 After the warship was launched from the German Vulcan Shipyard, Yuan Shikai turned to the British. He ordered people to purchase Armstrong armor-piercing shells and asked the Incheon Machinery Bureau to imitate them.

At the same time, the Germans were not neglected and continued to be purchased from Krupp, Germany, but they were used as training shells.

Therefore, during this voyage, the Beiyang Fleet did not have a single solid bullet in its fleet; all of them were replaced with armor-piercing shells and grenades.

However, even though shells continued to hit the two Russian warships, they were still blocked by their surface armor that was more than 300mm thick.

Even if a few grenades hit the turret on the deck, they were blocked by the 150-200mm protective armor due to the poor angle and could not cause effective explosion damage.

Instead, the yellow smoke that filled the turret after the yellow gunpowder inside exploded choked the Russian soldiers in the turret so much that they could not open their eyes, and they had to leave the turret briefly to breathe fresh air.

The Sino-Japanese joint fleet launched an offensive, firing one shell after another through the 150mm and 120mm rapid-fire gun barrels.

The Russian fleet slowly fired back one shot, and the Sino-Japanese joint fleet had to fire five shots.

In addition, the Russian ships moved at a relatively fast speed, so far the 305mm cannons on these two Russian ships have not hit the Sino-Japanese combined fleet once.

The small-caliber shells also had no effect on the 100mm surface armor of Zhiyuan and Yoshino.

For a time, the shadow of being unable to penetrate the armor of Alexander II and Nicholas I was gradually selectively forgotten by everyone.

As long as they keep bombarding, there will always be a shell that will hit the Russian command tower and make them lose their combat effectiveness.

Almost everyone in the Sino-Japanese Combined Fleet thought so.

However, it takes ten years for the army and a hundred years for the navy.

The Chinese and Japanese fleets, which had not experienced large-scale actual combat and sedimentation, suffered their first lesson because they were too young.

The frequency of rapid-fire guns in the Chinese and Japanese fleets was much faster than that of the Russian fleet's recoil guns, which meant that more gunpowder was ignited per unit time.

The more gunpowder that is ignited, the more smoke will diffuse from the barrel, and the more smoke there is, the more it obstructs the vision.

Once the line of sight is blocked, the gunner cannot aim at the target and has to stop reloading and wait for the ship to leave the smoke area before firing again.

This means that the turret is caught in the awkward situation of "the faster it fires, the slower it fires."

After all three parties in the Sino-Japanese joint fleet realized this, the Chinese flagship Hailong raised a flag signal, requesting the Zhiyuan and Haiji, which were in the vanguard position, to maneuver quickly and leave the smoky sea area.

At this time, the Japanese flagship Yoshino behind also sent out flag signals, asking the Naniwa in front to get rid of the influence of the smoke.

"Captain, the Japanese think the same as we do!" Hailong's first mate Tan Yingjie said, holding the telescope and pointing at the Yoshino in the distance.

"Is it Ito V. Heng who is in command, or Tsuboi Kozo?" Liu Bohong took out his pocket watch, looked at the time on it, and thought silently in his heart.

After receiving the news that the Russian ship had left the port, Ito V Heng led the second guerrilla team in search of the enemy and rushed to North Korea from the west coast of Japan at the agreed time and set off with the main force.

Vice Admiral Ito V. Toru, the fleet commander-in-chief, naturally replaced Major General Tsuboi Kozo and became the supreme commander.

"Captain, the Matsushima is on fire!"

Just as Liu Bohong was thinking, a scream brought him back to reality.

"what?"