The reason why Xiao Ruxun sat firmly in Diaoyutai was not blind confidence and arrogance, this stability was exchanged for millions of taels of silver.

His sailors were refreshed, and he was sure that his ships were no weaker than the Spanish ones, and even better than the Russians in terms of artillery firepower.

First of all, don't say anything else, the telescope, Xiao Ruxun has not hyped it up since he tossed it out in North Korea with craftsmen, basically only his own hands and his generals have it, and other places have one in Ma Gui's hands, Liu Wei and Deng Zilong each have one in their hands, these three are pure military generals, and they have no scientific and technological minds.

The rest is that the army under his command is equipped with clairvoyants, and when dealing with pirates before, he repeatedly used the clairvoyance to get the first opportunity, and now it is the same.

And Xiao Ruxun specially instructed that this clairvoyant mirror is an important weapon of the country, and every general who has a clairvoyant mirror must report the whereabouts of the clairvoyant mirror every time he comes back from a battle, and it is absolutely not allowed to lose it for no reason, let alone trade, once it is found, he will not be spared.

Therefore, Xiao Ruxun is very sure that the Spaniards do not have a telescope in their hands and can only observe with the naked eye, and he is expected to have a telescope, Jiang Dahai will find the enemy army one step earlier, and make arrangements and combat preparations one step earlier, which is an advantage in itself.

And then there's artillery.

Xiao Ruxun has basically eliminated the Franc machine in the regular army and the naval division, especially in the naval division, some heavier large Franc machines are still in use in the army, but the arsenal no longer produces Franc machines.

Now the main battle artillery in Xiao Ruxun's army is a cannon, in other words, it is the Hongyi cannon in people's mouths, but this is not very accurate.

Because the Hongyi cannon is a broad concept, basically all Western-style breech cannons are called Hongyi cannons by the Chinese, and the gap between the cannons themselves is directly ignored.

Compared with the rapid change of muskets, the change of artillery from the appearance of cannons to the mid-nineteenth century when breech-loading rifled guns replaced front-loading guns, and the cannon, which began to become mainstream in the seventeenth century, was still the mainstream.

At most, some improvements were added to the length, thickness and rifling, and some improvements were added to gunpowder and shells, and the artillery itself did not usher in a major development.

And most importantly, unlike the muskets, which were constantly increasing in range and power, the range of artillery has not developed significantly.

At the end of the eighteenth century, when the French army and the Prussian army were fighting, the two sides used hundreds of artillery pieces and tens of thousands of shells to fight a bloody battle, but the casualties were very minor, because the range of the artillery was too short to reach.

At that time, the effective range of the best artillery in the West was less than 1,500 yards, that is, a distance of about 1,300 meters, and such a distance could be reached by the early cannon Hongyi cannon.

There is no way to update the technology, so you can only increase the number and power, research gunpowder, make more cannons, and improve the performance of cannons in all aspects, such as increasing accuracy, etc., which is actually tinkering, not major innovations.

Before the rifled gun became the mainstream, the maximum range was just to say it to fool the general public, and everyone knew that if the maximum range was the effective range, why add a much closer effective range?

Smoothbore guns, like firearms, do not know where the shells fly after a certain distance, and the so-called maximum range is only told as a joke, and by the way it is used as a future expectation.

And can the effective range of the actual Franc machine be longer than the effective range of the Hongyi cannon? There are many exaggerated techniques in the history books, and even the firing range has been increased to ten miles and twenty miles, according to the Ming system, one mile is 559 meters, that is to say, the Franc machine gun can hit more than 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters away?

The effective range of the most powerful Franc machine is about one mile, not higher, twice as long as the Hongyi cannon, about a thousand meters, and the fluctuation up and down will not exceed 100 meters, which is almost the effective range, and this range has not jumped up until the middle of the nineteenth century, and it has risen by one or two hundred meters, which is the farthest effective range.

During this period, the Western artillery was better than the Ming Dynasty artillery in terms of the crosshairs and artillery training, the casting technology was not very high, the generation difference did not exist, and the technical barriers did not exist.

The Ming army got the Hongyi cannon from the Portuguese in Macao to deal with Houjin, and it was soon able to produce it on its own, and later Houjin was able to produce it on its own.

Soon after Xiao Ruxun arrived in Burma, he established contact with the Portuguese in Macao, and then obtained two Hongyi cannons, one iron and one bronze, from their Bugarao cannon foundry, and also used the means of digging to get ten experienced Chinese workers, and successfully cast the first bronze cannon a month later, which was amazingly powerful.

To be precise, the gap between the copper cannon and the iron cannon lies in the sixteenth century, when the cast iron technology was not up to par, the iron cannon was easier to blow up, and the copper cannon was not easy to blow up because of its better ductility.

In fact, if the cast iron technology passes, the iron can reach the level of steel, the steel cannon is definitely better than the copper cannon, and then the steel cannon replaced the copper cannon, the copper cannon is expensive, and China's copper ore is not abundant, from ancient times to the present, copper is used as coins, and copper is not much, in this case, how can the copper cannon be produced on a large scale?

In desperation, the ultimate wisdom of human beings played an important role, and the iron-core copper cannon came into being, but in the final analysis, it still cannot be compared with the pure copper cannon.

Daming lacks copper, but Xiao Ruxun is not short of copper now, he found a large copper mine, Myanmar has a small population, the demand for copper is not large, and doing business with foreigners is basically settled in silver, and the amount of copper used by the people is very small.

He will not be stupid enough to tell the court that he has a lot of copper, the 100,000 catties of copper given to the court every year are ore, and he doesn't know how much copper he can really get, the court knows at most that Xiao Ruxun has got a small copper mine, and it is very difficult to supply it to the court, and it is difficult to leave a little for his own use, that's all.

Since there is no shortage of copper, cast iron technology can not be mentioned for a while, then it is good to use copper, he introduced Western-style aiming methods in all directions to train artillery, and used Chinese methods to increase the mobility of artillery, and equipped the sailors with a large number of Hongyi cannons, eliminated the Fran machine guns and some other weapons, the ferocity of the sailors' firepower is staggering.

Since it was impossible to improve the firing range, Xiao Ruxun used all kinds of shells to increase the combat effectiveness of the sailors, further processed the gunpowder into sesame-sized particles for filling, increased the explosive power of the flowering shells, increased the weight of the solid shells, and equipped the sailors with naval combat equipment such as grapeshot shells and chain bombs, specifically to scare their sailors and masts.

All in all, Xiao Ruxun can provide his sailors with weapons and equipment that are not weaker than those of Spain, and even provide a preemptive telescope, so the next thing depends on the performance of the officers and soldiers of the sailors, and he absolutely trusts that Jiang Dahai can give him enough surprises.