When the Ming fleet arrived at the city of Jiangning, it was already November of the fifth year of Kangxi. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 infoIn the eleventh month of the lunar calendar, the climate in Nanjing is already very cold, and the cold in the south is damp and cold, and no matter how thick the clothes are worn, they can't withstand the biting cold.

The fluttering sun and moon flags of the Ming army fleet densely spread the river, standing at the head of Qingliangmen City and looking at the river, only to see the huge ships like mountains, masts like forests, and the entire river was crowded with the huge fleet of the Ming army. Malegi picked up the binoculars and looked at the river, and was so frightened by those battleships as tall as mountains that he gasped: "What a big ship! How many people can fit on this ship? ”

Liang Huafeng pointed to a battleship with all the gun doors open and said: "The warship of the Puppet Ming Haikou is bigger than Zheng Rebellious's back then!" With such a big ship, I'm afraid that one ship can carry more than 1,000 people. ”

While he was talking, the battleships on the river suddenly spewed out a ball of fireball, the white smoke curled up on the river, and the roar of rolling thunder came, and the Ming warships on the river opened their artillery bombardment on Jiangning City, and the rows of battleships spit out tongues of fire from the holes in the gun doors, and the overwhelming shells fell into rows of mountains and seas, and smashed towards the city walls to the west and north of Jiangning.

"How many cannons does the thief fleet have?" Malegi was so shocked that he almost sat on the ground.

Liang Huafeng said: "Don't worry about the people who make Taiwan! The cool door is still safe! The thieves' cannons can't hit here! Look at the posture of the thief fleet, there are at least more than 2,000 cannons! ”

Qingliangmen is located on Qingliang Mountain, outside the range of the Ming fleet, and is a relatively safe area.

The Ming fleet continued to swim upstream from the downstream, and after a row of shells was fired from the port side gun door, the fleet turned again, went down the river, and replaced it with a column of fire from the starboard gun door. The fleet then turned downstream, went upstream, and bombarded again with the port side guns, then turned down the river again, and the starboard guns opened heavy fire.

Two full hours passed, and the Ming fleet did not land, but only bombarded the city wall with more than 2,000 naval guns in turn. The overwhelming cannonballs smashed the walls of the city into potholes, and the 32-pounder cannon shells smashed into the city walls, smashing the bricks and stones on the outside and exposing the rammed earth inside.

In addition to the smoothbore guns, four hexagonal rifled gun cruisers of the Ming army also joined the shelling. Hexagonal rifled guns are generally reluctant to use because of the high cost of artillery and the short service life of the barrel. But in order to shock the Qing army in Jiangning, and in order to give Geng Jingzhong a dismount, Zhang Yukun ordered the hexagonal rifled cannon to open fire and bombard the Jinchuan Gate in the north of the city, and used expensive rifled guns to bloom the cannonballs!

The price of each shell is sky-high for a conical flowering shell weighing up to ninety pounds, and the processing technology of this shell is extremely complex, and the fuse alone is particularly expensive.

Because it is a rifled artillery shell that rotates at high speed, it is impossible to use a cork tube fuse like a smoothbore howitzer or a smoothbore cannon, and use the gunpowder gas in the gun chamber to ignite the fuse; Second, it is impossible to use a mortar cannon to ignite the fuse directly at the muzzle of the cannonball. This shell can only be reliably detonated using a new type of bump fuse.

Don't underestimate a bump fuse, but the technology is very complicated, because the speed of a high-speed discharged shell has exceeded the speed of sound. When the velocity of the shell exceeds the speed of sound, the air becomes as hard as cement, which is known as the sound barrier. In this case, the bump fuse is detonated at the moment of discharge.

In order to solve this problem, a hood must be installed in front of the fuse to protect the fuse from being directly detonated by the air that becomes hard due to breaking the sound barrier.

The hardness of the hood is also exquisite, the hood is too soft to protect the fuse, and the shell still explodes as soon as it is discharged. The hood is too stiff to trigger the fuse to work after impact, and the shell will not explode. The impact firing pin in the fuze is also high-tech, and the firing pin needs to be made of good steel, so as not to detonate the lei tube after the collision, but let the firing pin break first.

In addition, since the flowering shells were used either to penetrate the planks of battleships or to bombard buildings, the fuse had to have a certain delay effect. When the shell hits the target, the firing pin hits the fire cap, igniting a fuse, burning for one second, and then detonating the thunder, and finally detonating the new explosive inside.

On the hexagonal gun cruiser Xingdao, Zhang Jian gave an order: "Open the gun!" ”

The gunner picked up the torch and stabbed it at the fire door. The fuse was quickly shortened into the fire door, and the heavy hexagonal cannon suddenly spewed out a tongue of fire more than ten meters long, and then the hexagonal cannon shook violently, the gun mount retreated on the slide rail, and the entire 500-ton battleship tilted to the right under the action of recoil.

With a piercing screeching sound, the shells swooped down in the direction of Jinchuan Gate at a high speed twice the speed of sound.

The Qing soldiers standing on the north wall only heard an unusually harsh whistling sound, and the first feeling of these Qing soldiers was that it was very bad, because such a sound was really terrible! Some experienced Qing soldiers judged that if a cannonball could make such a loud sound when it was flying, it must be a giant cannon of more than 200 pounds!

Two hundred pounds, what is the concept? A shell is heavier than a general's cannon.

In fact, the shells of the hexagonal cannon are not 200 pounds, only 90 pounds, but 90 pounds is not light, and the weight of one shell is equal to the weight of two Tiger squat guns, or equivalent to the weight of a light Franc machine!

Before the Qing soldiers could understand, a ninety-pound flowering cannonball had already hit the Jinchuan Gate Tower. The high-speed rotating cannonball drilled through the city bricks outside, smashed the stones, plunged headlong into the rammed earth, the fuse worked, ignited the thunder inside the cannonball, only to hear a landslide-like explosion, the new explosives in the cannonball exploded violently, and a huge fireball rose from under the city gate tower.

Immediately afterward, a second ninety-pound flowering shell also hit the Jinchuan Gate, and the shell pierced into the city walls, causing a violent explosion in the rammed earth.

The black and red flames rose into the sky, and the Jinchuan Gate Tower was shattered in the smoke and flames, and with the smoke and dust, the Jinchuan Gate collapsed and became a pile of ruins.

The Qing soldiers standing on the city wall near the Jinchuan Gate stood unsteadily, and they were shocked to the head of the city, unable to stand up for half a day. When they stood up, they found that the entire Jinchuan Gate had disappeared!

"It's horrible!" A Qing soldier general said with trepidation, "What kind of shell was that just now?" It's too powerful! The explosion of shells, as if thousands of cannons were fired at the same time! There are still such powerful flowering cannonballs in the world? It's horrible! It's horrible! ”