Chapter 212: Killing the King (IX)

The two fleets that had been sailing toward each other on the sea suddenly saw one side change course: the Fuchuan fleet, moving from north to south, began a collective right turn.

To the right was the mainland.

"They're running, they're really running!" Aboard the flagship of the Special Task Fleet — hull number 301, temporarily named "Taijiang" within the Navy — a crowd of onlookers holding binoculars let out exclamations in unison.

Liu Zhe, the fleet's actual commander, had no time to bother with these jokers right now. He quickly issued new orders based on the opponent's movements: "Stoke the engine room with coal, two-thirds speed."

"Yes! Three-quarters speed!" A short young attendant standing beside Liu Zhe — under 1.6 meters tall, with a crew cut, named Mao Wu — snapped his heels together, loudly repeated the order, then turned around and walked with measured steps to the voice tube, picked up the handset, and began speaking with the engine room.

Three-quarters speed meant 18 knots: full speed was 24 knots.

This new destroyer model produced by the Crossing Faction could reach 13 knots under favorable wind and water conditions. But once the engine room at the stern started working and the propeller began to spin, the fleet's speed would quickly surge from 13 knots to around 18 knots.

In fact, the empty ship's full speed was 24 knots. However, experience had proven that once a wooden ship exceeded 18 knots, the fleet broke past the "three-quarters speed" safety line, and the drawbacks began to outweigh the benefits.

Historically, the famous clipper ship "Short Shirt," at 64.6 meters long, 11 meters wide, and with a displacement of 2,100 tons, had a speed of only 17.5 knots.

The "Taijiang," an all-wood sailing warship, was born with a kind of osteoporosis and could not compare to the 19th-century iron-ribbed, wood-hulled clippers. It could not endure prolonged high-speed sailing: at 18 knots, the sea waves became as hard as brick walls. Without steel ribs as a skeleton, the ship would develop cracks and leaks over time.

Moreover, high speed itself was trouble. Just like pushing a Poussin to 100 mph, once the speed reached a certain point, the maneuverability and stability of a sailing ship like the Taijiang would both drop sharply.

To some extent, the benefits the propeller brought to the destroyer were more about raising the ship's lower limits: increasing speed against the wind, improving maneuverability in complex sea conditions, assisting the ship in entering port, and so on.

As for raising the ship's upper speed limit... 18 knots was already the warning line; going higher was meaningless. Besides, with everyone sailing downwind, the Fuchuan fleet's current speed was a mere six knots, utterly incapable of escaping the fleet's pursuit.

So, like a Poussin chasing a scooter, the Special Task Fleet quickly caught up with the Fuchuan fleet.

From the moment both sides spotted each other head-on, to their nearly simultaneous turns toward the mainland, to the slow Fuchuan fleet being overtaken by the fleet, less than 20 minutes had passed in total. The fleeing Fuchuan fleet hadn't even passed Luci before being caught up.

A slender ribbonfish caught up to a fat carp from behind... the metaphor isn't perfect, but that was the reality: only a fleet with broadside firing capability would form a line of battle. These 17th-century pirate crews, who fought with cold weapons and boarding actions, had no concept of a line of battle. The five Sand Ships were currently arrayed in a traditional sawtooth formation.

As for the cannon fire from the Fuchuan ships, it was effectively useless right now.

In the Zheng Family Fleet, the bow of every ship was fitted with naval cannons that the Portuguese had sold to the Zheng Clan. These five cannons were secured to the bows using various improvised lashing methods — the pirates had neither the capability nor the necessity to master technologies like gun slides.

Stand a model of a Fuchuan with its V-shaped hull on a tabletop, then blow a breath of air at it from the side, and the model will topple over.

The Fuchuan, designed for nimble cargo handling and catching wind from all eight directions, was never meant to fire broadside cannons. These Fuchuan ships didn't even have ribs; even if enough ribs were added, the moment a broadside was fired, the V-shaped Fuchuan would capsize on the spot. In the best-case scenario, it would turn into an amusement-park "pirate ship," hurling the crewmen into the sea with violent rolling.

Historically, in the battle 20 years later when the National Lord retook the Dayuan Trading Post, the only ships capable of firing broadside salvos were still the U-bottomed European-style ships the Zheng Clan had purchased from abroad.

The ships the Zheng Clan built themselves, even the so-called "Great Qing Head" with its reinforced hull structure, were still fundamentally sharp-bottomed boarding ships: they could mount only a single cannon at the bow, using the longitudinal keel to absorb the cannon's recoil. When firing, the cannon could not swivel left or right, much less fire to the broadside; it could only fire with the bow aimed directly at the enemy.

That was exactly the situation now.

The line formation, racing up from behind at high speed, was nearly parallel with the Fuchuan formation, and the Fuchuan fleet was helpless... they could not collectively turn around just to fire a single iron ball, and even if they did, they wouldn't hit anything: the parallel distance between the two sides was now 1,000 meters, and the side with the speed advantage was freely adjusting the gap.

Five minutes later, the nimble line of battle had adjusted the parallel distance to 500 meters. The fleet then began to lower its sails and reduce the coal-gas feed — too much speed was detrimental to firing; advancing at the same speed was fine.

... Seeing the opponent actually lower sails during a naval battle, Zheng Zhilong no longer harbored any illusions: he now understood perfectly the speed difference between a tiger and a sheep. And having worked for both the Dutch and Portuguese Companies, he knew exactly what the opponent was about to do next.

So he could only painfully issue an order that bordered on abandoning hope: turn and charge.

At the same moment, iron balls fired from the 12 naval-type Napoleon Cannons aboard the three destroyers, amid white smoke and roaring, flew in unison toward the Fuchuan fleet.

The bombardment was, of course, ineffective.

Even at a distance of only 500 meters, the iron balls fired by gunners experiencing actual combat for the first time from a pitching deck all missed without exception. Some iron balls deviated from their targets by over a hundred meters, kicking up useless columns of water.

"Is their accuracy really this abysmal? Wasn't the Type 28 supposed to be more precise?" The onlookers once again began expressing shock. The person who said this didn't know the trade, but those from the Army and Marine Corps who did know were equally astonished, as if they had suddenly discovered that the Navy Faction were parasites of the people and a disgrace to the Crossing.

Liu Zhe no longer had the energy to argue with these bastards. He was now holding the Walkie-Talkie, issuing orders to the entire fleet: "Left rudder three, maintain speed, steady firing."

Following Liu Zhe's command, the Zheng Clan pirates, who had just turned their bows around and were laboriously making a charge, were astonished to witness a beautiful tactical maneuver: the three warships flying White Sails, as if fitted with springs, shifted the entire line of battle outward by 200 meters in perfect unison.

The psychological blow of this synchronized tactical maneuver to the pirates was immense, because at that very moment, they fired their own bow cannons.

The five bow cannons of the Zheng Family Fleet had varying calibers: everything from 12-pounder to 16-pounder guns was present. As for accuracy... this method of firing — adding powder by gut estimate, ranging by naked-eye radar, and aiming by adjusting the entire ship perpendicular to the opponent — was pure guesswork at a distance of 700 meters, utterly useless.

The Special Task Fleet's second round of cannonballs and the Fuchuan fleet's first round were fired simultaneously. The iron balls shot from both sides' cannons crossed paths in the air, and aside from smashing up a patch of spray, neither side scored a hit.

Then the fleet's third round of cannonballs came smashing over.

During the American Civil War, a skilled Napoleon Cannon crew could fire four rounds per minute. On a 17th-century sailing warship, the Navy's basic requirement for a gun crew was one round per minute. This figure would be adjusted promptly based on sea conditions: in high sea states, one round every three minutes was also permitted.

Today's sea conditions were normal — the wind was slightly strong, but everything else was decent — so the fleet's 12 gun crews were firing salvos at the standard training speed of one round per minute.

Yet this speed, in the eyes of the pirates opposite them, was somewhat fantastical.

One must understand that after they fired their first shot, the immense recoil sent all the ropes and chocks lashing the cannon flying in every direction. While the poor bastards swarmed over to reset the cannon, the other side had already fired five more salvos... There was no helping it; the backward get beaten. Who told the pirates they lacked three-axis CNC machines and bearings, and couldn't manufacture a custom slide rail system to quickly reset their cannons...

In fact, by the time the Napoleon Cannons fired their fourth salvo, they had already opened their account.

A 12-pound iron ball skimmed across the deck of a Fuchuan, carving a bloody alley through the pirates packed densely on the deck, still dreaming of close-quarters slaughter.

With that first cannonball's success, iron balls continued to strike the Fuchuan ships — now smashing a hole in the hull planks, now killing a swath of the crowd on deck. The scene began to turn gruesome.

Meanwhile, the five Fuchuan ships, charging slowly in their sawtooth formation, had the three leading vessels slow down under the sustained pounding. A strange tableau now appeared on the sea: five orderly Chinese-style Ships were advancing side by side southward, while three Western-style ships had already carved an arc, swiftly rounding the Fuchuan ships from the front.

"Big Brother, things look bad. Let's split up and run." The moment they saw the opposing ships ignore the wind direction and freely execute high-speed turns on the sea, even the dullest pirate understood the essence of the problem: the sheep were being toyed with by the tiger.

This bizarre mode of combat left the pirates, accustomed to boarding actions, completely at a loss. It must be remembered that even the recently arrogant Dutch, faced with the pirates' ant-swarm tactics, had discarded their armor and fled in disarray.

But today was different. Today, the ant swarm had effectively become sheep. Before the opponent's insurmountable speed and dense cannon fire, the pirate ships suddenly found they could do nothing at all. Even their speed in turning on the inside line couldn't match the opponent's speed in rounding the outer circle — it was purely a combat posture of lying down and taking a beating...

Hearing his brother's words, Zheng Zhilong, who had been constantly watching from the ship's tower, gave a bitter laugh: "I never imagined that besides their sharp firearms and cannons, these Kun People's seamanship would be so formidable as well. Today's defeat is not unjust. Ah, give the order — split up and go."