The battle of Naiman Banner was not surprisingly won by the revolutionary army with a slight loss, and for a time the grassland was full of rumors of the mighty and invincible guerrillas, coupled with the help of the Mongols to propagandize, the news soon came out of the Mongols who admired the Mongols, and Xiang Xiang soon had another Mongolian cavalry under his hand. After gaining a foothold on the grassland, in view of the fact that the reclamation of the Linxi area had not been completed, and in view of the reduction of the contradictions between Mongolia and Han, the Liaoxi guerrillas did not immediately go to Linxi, but went directly north to the vicinity of the Horqin Right Banner, and only returned to Linxi at the end of the year.

On the side of the Qing court, after Zhang Zuolin and Feng Linge turned back to Fengtian, although there was a head of the 'Meng bandit', they were still reprimanded by Zhirui, but the defeat of the patrol battalion was a major event after all, although Zhirui secretly protected Beijing Guangxu, but he did not dare to make a big deal about it, Zhang Zuolin and Feng Linge were still the leaders of the front road and the left road, and the missing men and horses under his hands also drew a battalion from the middle patrol battalion to supplement it. In the context of turning major matters into small things and small things into small things, a new round of purging is being planned, the fourth town in Zhejiang will be moved to the northeast to suppress bandits, and the sixth town that has been cleared in the area of Hangjiahu will be transferred to Yanzhou to take over the fourth town.

Under the premise of a central government, it is far more difficult to establish a large-scale base area than during the Republic of China, after all, the background of the Republic of China is that the people's hearts are scattered and the provinces are autonomous, and no warlord will be determined to exterminate the base areas. And now, although Yanzhou has a revolutionary army that has withstood the test of war, but the ammunition is insufficient, and the Qing army is constantly taking turns to clear and suppress the area, so that the scope of the base area is constantly shrinking, if it were not for the Beiyang Yuan Shikai and the Qing court centrifugation, giving the revolutionary army a chance to breathe, this base strategy is estimated to have failed.

Yanzhou Military Government. Lin Wenqian read the secret report of the Battle of Naiman forwarded by the General Staff and was silent for a long time. Although the western part of Liaoning is still in the preparatory period for the base area, it will also face the brutal encirclement and suppression and strict blockade of the Manchu Qing Dynasty after the base area is established in the future. But the logistical situation of the Liaoxi guerrillas is much better than their own, at least they have enough ammunition and 80 mortars, what do they have here? Black powder grenades may not be usable, although they secretly smuggled a few black powder compressors while they were on good terms with the fourth town, but the materials for making zuò leads are limited, once these potassium chlorate, barium nitrate, and glass powder are used up, then the grenades can only be ignited with open flames. Think of every soldier having to carry tinder like an arquebusier. Lin Wenqian just shook his head. I wonder when the supplies promised by the General Staff will arrive? Thinking of Lin Wenqian, he said to the adjutant, "Prepare the horse, I'm going to watch the construction progress of the land field." ”

The lighthouse at the Chunan landing site is located at the Golden Purple Tip. This is the highest mountain in Chun'an, and lighting a fire here at night will be an obvious coordinate. However, the landing field could not be on the Golden Purple Tip, but in a valley depression in the nearby Zitong Township. After receiving the report of the General Staff. Construction of the landing site began after the snow melted. This time, instead of using the militia, the troops directly under it were used, and the external version was to build a training camp.

When Lin Wenqian ran to the landing site, this side was basically completed. The trees everywhere have been cut clean, the landmarks that were originally ravines and ravines have also been filled, and on a square piece of forty acres of flat land, a huge wooden mooring tower has been built, and not far from the mooring tower, a computer room has also been roughly built. Workers are putting the finishing touches. In fact, there is no way to build an airship storehouse with wood, so the airship from Ma'anshan can only be parked naked outside. A rectangular gap 180 meters long and more than 20 meters wide was cut in the dense woods at the edge of the landing field, so that the airship had at least a three-sided shield.

"Is it done?" Lin Wenqian, who had gone around for a while, asked Zhou Yawei, who was in charge of this place, he was a student of Zhejiang Wubei Academy, a native of Shengxian County, and he blew up the Wulin Gate in the north when he attacked Hangzhou. After the defeat of Hangzhou, the students of the Wubei Academy sacrificed a lot, but he had a big life, and he was killed from the encirclement of the Qing army.

"Report to the governor, it will be completed tomorrow, and everything is normal!" Zhou Yawei saluted. He was not told the reason for guarding the place, but out of obedience to his superiors and loyalty to the revolution, he obeyed the dispatch and withdrew his company from the Huizhou battlefield on the Western Front, which was in full swing.

"Good!" Lin Wenqian nodded, and then his gaze swept over his hideous face, his expression softened, and asked, "Transferring you from the west, is there anything that comrades can't think of?" ”

"Report to the governor, we are all revolutionary fighters, and we will go wherever the organization tells us to go." Even though Lin Wenqian's tone was soft, Zhou Yawei still replied seriously, after the purge, his heart and organization were one step closer.

"Good!" Feeling Zhou Yawei's revolutionary spirit, Lin Wenqian was a little happy and a little helpless, this was bought by dozens of lives, he only hoped that the troops would not do any more rectification, and they would not toss their own people.

"Come, sit down, sit down. Don't be so inhibited. Lin Wenqian's expression was even more kind, and he also gave a cigarette to Zhou Yawei, and then said in a homely manner: "Is the eighth town good?" You are the Heroic Company of the Western Front, tell me what you think of Eighth Town. ”

"Yes, Governor." Zhou Yawei still had a standard military posture when he heard this, and only when the cigarette was lit did he relax a little. "The eighth town is the elite army of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, equipped with Mauser 1888 rifles, a lot of mountain artillery and machine guns, and at the same time, the department is well trained, and the departments cooperate tacitly, which is better than the Anhui New Army. However, like the rest of the Manchu Qing army, they did not have special training in mountain warfare, except for the lack of resoluteness in white-knuckle warfare, and they did not know much about the common combat operations common in mountain warfare, such as intersperse-counter-penetration, ambush-counter-ambush, detour-counter-detour, and infiltration-anti-infiltration. Their usual tactics are suppression of mountain artillery and machine gun fire, and infantry collective charge, which is effective and ineffective for us, effective because they can occupy and hold key communication points with firepower, and it is ineffective because even if key communication points are occupied, we can still avoid these points with detailed maps and strike at the enemy's weak points. ”

Zhou Yawei is no longer a student soldier, he has gone through hardships and battles for a long time, and he analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the enemy and our armies from the different understandings of the enemy and our armies on mountain warfare. In fact, it is not that he wants to say everything he has learned and understood. So that Lin Wenqian attaches importance to himself, but guarding this training ground in this rear really puzzles him, he is afraid that he will always be forgotten by Lin Wenqian here. It is necessary to have a table xiàn once.

"What about ourselves, what are the shortcomings?" Lin Wenqian looked at the young man and smiled in his heart, and asked the next question.

"We mainly ran out of ammunition, and the rifles used did not match the caliber of ammunition from the Manchus. In the past, the soldiers began to limit the ammunition for each battle, and after the grenades were delivered, everyone stopped shooting or rarely fired, and basically started to fight after throwing the grenades. The eighth town began to get out of shape. Later, when I saw us send a single order, I slowly got used to it. ”

"It's not that we send out the singles, it's that we don't have the conditions to carry out other sends." Lin Wenqian completely knew what the young man was thinking. I just want to enlighten him. "In the end, it's the enemy's blockade. Now, this place you're guarding is the supply depot where we get our ammunition supplies from outside. The reason why you are connected. It's just that everyone else is guarding here, and we don't feel at ease. ”

"Here it is... Depot? Zhou Yawei looked at this mountain nest, full of doubts.

"Don't ask so much, the only thing that the revolutionary soldiers have to think about is that the revolution will be successful, and at the same time, they must be 10% loyal to the organization." Political Commissar Zhang Chengyue's words came out of Lin Wenqian's mouth rarely, he actually couldn't think of any other words to motivate the young officer in front of him.

"Yes, Dudu!" Zhou Yawei stood up and saluted. Lin Wenqian looked at his solemn appearance, and solemnly returned the salute to him, and then rode away on horseback.

The airship landing site in Yanzhou is ready. Ma'anshan is also ready. In the same recess, there is the same huge landing field and mooring tower. However, what is more than Yanzhou is an incomparably huge airship hangar. Compared with the height of more than ten meters in the garage, the gate at the door, which is more than two meters high, is unusually short. This is an airship depot built with bridge technology, and the steel greenhouse is 180 meters long, 16 meters high, and 18 meters wide, and the German engineers who built it were surprised why these stupid Chinese wanted to build such a large ore storage, but for Mark's sake, he still did things beautifully.

As for the airship garage with the door closed, a huge airship is quietly docked in the warehouse like an incomparably huge dinosaur in prehistory, and a group of workers are carefully loading goods into the pod under the airship. Because it was the first flight, it was loaded with less than five tons of cargo, and in addition to the 7mm bullets urgently needed by Yanzhou, there were 24 60 mortars and a sufficient number of shell propellants, fuses and molds. As for the shells themselves, they can only be produced by Yanzhou themselves, in fact, this is not complicated, the workers sent by the Tonghua Arsenal have already arrived in Yanzhou, what they lack is these molds, propellants, and fuses, as long as these things are sent to Yanzhou, it is a sure thing that the shells will fall on the heads of the Qing army.

Colonel Hong Huangnan, who was sent by the General Headquarters, was looking at the pod under the airship thoughtfully, and only after the adjutant next to him told him that the supplies had been loaded, he came back to his senses. "All loaded?" He asked a nonsense.

"It's loaded." The adjutant replied, and he repeated the contents of the load, which he had taken the trouble to load, again: "There are 150,000 rounds of 7mm bullets, 8,000 instantaneous fuses, 5,000 propellants, 30 shell molds, and 5 radio stations, all of which have been loaded." ”

The average bullet plus packaging is 27.5 grams per shot, and 150,000 rounds are 4,125 kilograms; The average weight of the instantaneous fuse plus the packaging is 39 grams, and 8,000 is 312 kilograms; 12 grams of propellant per portion, 5,000 copies is 60 kilograms, and 22 kilograms of shell molds are each, a total of 660 kilograms; There are also five radio stations...... Colonel Hong Huangnan silently calculated the weight of these goods, and said after a while: "It's more than eighty-five kilograms, you go and ask Captain Pan to see if this is okay?" ”

The adjutant also felt overweight here, and now when he heard the colonel's order, he went directly to Captain Pan. At this time, Captain Pan was not in the airship storehouse, but in the series of towers outside to observe the sky during the day, in this era without navigation, although the general rear has sent someone to light the fire along the airship passing by, but he is still not at ease with these landmark fires, although the height of the airship is not high, but if the fog is heavy at night, or the wind comes, the airship will be blown away. Then the fireland landmarks every ten kilometers are not enough to bring the airship to Yanzhou.

"Mr. Dickson, the weather seems to be better tonight than yesterday." Pan Shizhong stood beside an old man holding a sextant and asked cautiously.

"It's better than yesterday. But don't get it at night. Mr. Dickson, who was asked, was Huo Rongye, and he shook his head, as if he was very worried about Pan Shizhong.

"It's not a big deal, I've flown it earlier. As long as there are no accidents. Pan Shizhong was an international student who came back from Germany with a boat, and because he loved flying, he was elected as the first captain. He had been training at Lake Constance for a while and was not worried about flying at night.

"Then you have to be careful." Huo Rongye admonished. He is a native of Sanlin, Pudong. Earlier, he taught astronomy at the Shanghai Canton Dialect School, and the year before last, the Jiangnan Bureau was taken down by Tianzihao, and the school was naturally merged into Tongji University. He was not a revival member. It's just that because of his friendship with Xu Huafeng, he is very sympathetic to the revolution. At the same time, the airship involved navigation problems, and he specially rushed from Shanghai.

"It's okay, Mr. Dickson, don't worry." For tonight's flight, Pan Shizhong is very optimistic. He just finished speaking. Hong Huangnan's adjutant was found. Ask him about the airship overload. When he heard that it was only eighty kilograms overloaded, he said it didn't matter, and the adjutant sent it away. Seeing that the sun was about to set, he accompanied Huo Rongye down the mooring tower and entered the airship hangar.

"Ready, huh?" Pan Shizhong asked his co-captain, and when he saw him nodding, he smiled and said, "It's time, let's gather." ”

Except for Pan Shizhong, who is an international student, the other crew members are all military cadets who have been transferred from the South African Military Academy. Although they were puzzled by their sudden transfer from the military school, after arriving in Germany. But I was shocked by the huge airship, especially since such a thing could fly. A brief shock was followed by a grueling practice flight, and the No. 3 airship that Zeppelin had built before was a training boat. The principle, structure, safety, maintenance, lifting, propulsion, flight and navigation of the airship are all training contents. In order to sort out the various matters of the airship, finally the headquarters sent a group of trainees of the management training course to Germany, sorted out all the things, and divided the entire flight into three departments: flight safety, flight, and ground support, and the flight was divided into several posts of level, lifting, power, and navigation, and the responsibilities of each department and each post were formulated into strict standard procedures, which made the airship flight busy and orderly.

As soon as Pan Shizhong said gathering, the eight crew members waiting on the side intuitively stood in a row, and after reporting according to the rules of the army, Pan Shizhong looked at the group members who had been with each other for nearly half a year day and night and said: "Comrades, the money spent on us is really a lot, and those people who don't fly logistics will be mad again......" In the scene of Yan Sù, Pan Shizhong's words were relaxed, and everyone only laughed, "Although I have flown a lot in Germany before, but this is the first time I have flown in my own home, everyone must cheer up, don't embarrass our airship troops." Yanzhou is waiting for us to deliver the things, so that the Qing soldiers can be defeated, and we must not let them down. ”

Everyone knows what the airship troops are doing, but when Pan Shizhong finished speaking, everyone's faces were no longer relaxed, but very solemn, Pan Shizhong felt this solemnity, and finally nodded to everyone and said: "Okay, move the library and dissolve it in thirty minutes." ”

The horizontal flight power of the airship comes from the piston engine in the pod, and its lifting control depends on the auxiliary airbag and counterweight inside the airship, especially the auxiliary airbag, which accounts for about one-fifth to one-quarter of the volume of the main airbag, and when the main airbag is filled with hydrogen, the auxiliary airbag is filled with air, and it and the counterweight make the airship still docked on the ground instead of floating in the air. Generally, the net weight of the airship at the time of landing exceeds its lift force by 100 to 300 kilograms, that is, if the entire airship is loaded, its weight will not exceed 300 kilograms. Of course, such a weight requires calculation and careful adjustment, which is the first step in the flight of an airship.

After adjusting the net weight, the airship of no more than 300 kilograms is moved outdoors with solid tires under the guò pod, and after determining the weather conditions and the direction of take-off, the airship can take off. At this time, the air of the auxiliary airbag is calculated, the appropriate amount of [exhaust air, while the horizontal engine is fully open, the ground crew will hold the airship gondola into the air with all their strength according to a certain elevation angle, and the airship can take off at this time.

The take-off and landing of the airship is the most dangerous, especially when the balance and direction of the airship rely entirely on the extremely slow reaction of the cable, which requires careful handling. When the entire airship crew was trying their best to control the balance of the airship, the captain Pan Shizhong saluted the people who saw them off outside the pod. And the general rear personnel and ground crew outside the landing field also solemnly saluted him.

With the roar of the internal combustion engine, the airship climbed slowly south, even though it was so slow. But it still shocked the hearts of people who had long been accustomed to its huge body. This unprecedented huge flying object could not have appeared in a dream, but now it is slowly climbing in front of people's eyes, flying higher and higher, as if to cover the entire sky.

With the air of the auxiliary airbag being discharged one after another, the airship has climbed to more than 400 meters after flying two thousand meters from the landing site. At this time, it was already dark, and Pan Shizhong in the pod could vaguely see the lights of the people in the distance, and he looked at his watch through the shelter light in the warehouse. At 7:03 a.m., at a cruising speed of 50 kilometers, it was no surprise that we could reach Chun'an in six hours. However, this requires the ground navigation system to be able to effectively guide the airship, otherwise it is easy to make mistakes with the sextant, although this will not lead to any accidents, but it is not good to be seen by the people.

Pan Shizhong, who operated according to the program, finished writing the flight diary. At this time, the deputy captain came to report: "I see the navigation." Accurate. ”

"Okay, make sure you go in the right direction, don't go too far." As he answered, he used his binoculars to look for the navigation fire in front of him, and sure enough, a lamp the size of a grain of rice was lit in front of him, and if he could not see the cross-shaped fire, it would definitely make people mistake it for the light of a farmer's house. I hope you don't get lost, Pan Shizhong thought of this and said to the navigator outside who was responsible for recording the reference object and measuring the angle of the stars: "First flight." Be sure to memorize a qiē reference. ”

The news of the take-off of the Ma'anshan airship not only reached Yanzhou, but also spread to Shanghai. This is what Yang Rui carefully explained. Because in his impression, the accident rate of the hydrogen airship is extremely high, and the airbag above the pod is a large explosive package, once there is a small spark, the consequences will be catastrophic, so the safety measures of the entire airship are extremely comprehensive, in addition to the prohibition of fireworks, even the crew's clothes are all pure cotton fabrics to prevent static electricity.

However, Yang Rui's impression is not entirely correct, and in history, the German air transport company in Zeppelin, which carried 34,000 passengers, did not have a single accident. It was only the Hindenburg accident in 1937 that was filmed by 22 cinematocography cameras and many photographers – people who were preparing to see the spectacular landing of the airship but did not want to capture the terrifying tragedy that caused a terrible repercussion, and thus the hydrogen airship was launched into the stage of history.

It's just that these historical details are not familiar to a traverser, before using the airship, Yang Rui also asked about the possibility of filling helium, but the answer of the real room is that it is not possible, that is, helium cannot be manufactured, it can only be separated, but it is not certain that helium can be separated from there, and finally Xu Huafeng can go to the tail gas of synthetic ammonia to find out whether there is helium in zài, if there is, it can be separated from those exhaust gases through guò technical means, but this requires a huge cooling system, Only when the low temperature of more than minus 200 degrees Celsius can the separation be feasible, and such conditions are a huge challenge for practical operation and cost, and the final result can only be filled with hydrogen.

In addition to the safety of hydrogen, the navigation problem is also an extremely headache, especially because of the need for concealment, the airship can only sail at night, and the fire on the guò route may be an effective indication, but this is only a range of 300 kilometers, and every 10 kilometers of the fire requires 30 ground navigation groups, but what if it is thousands of kilometers, or thousands of kilometers?

The solution that came up with this was radio navigation, that is, making a radio compass, and then setting up indicator towers, i.e., radio beacons, in some higher terrain and unobstructed places, and changing the distance between the airship and multiple radio beacons to determine the position and distance of the airship. In fact, this technology was invented by the Germans in 1908, and it was only for the navigation of ships at sea in the early days, and it was only after the rise of aircraft transportation that it was applied to the positioning and navigation of aircraft in 1926, which was the most reliable air navigation system before the advent of GPS. With the traditional investment in the radio room regardless of the cost, the technicians estimate that in half a year, or at most a year, a practical navigation system will be developed. (To be continued......)