Chapter 485 On the voyage
Chapter 485: Voyage
Regional movement is a very boring thing. The time of fighting can only account for less than 1% of the time the army is on the battlefield. Constant movement and transfer is the norm for an army.
Move, then act, and use 99% of the time to prepare for the 1% of victory.
The cruise fleet slowly sailed in the clouds, avoiding the dark gray, large cumulonimbus clouds in the distance that seemed to be able to swallow life.
The sea of fog was rolling.
Of course, everyone liked this kind of boredom, and no one wanted to encounter some small surprises when moving from one area to another.
It was still a long cruise transfer stage.
This was not the first time they came to the airspace where Pangu Sky Island was located. With the previous experience, the round-trip speed would be faster than before...
The theory is like this.
If there is no bad weather.
Small-sized fast fleets need to avoid cumulonimbus clouds/thunderstorm clouds and air turbulence in advance according to meteorological measurements. These common weather conditions will have a serious impact on the movement of air units... a very serious impact.
There is still a certain degree of danger.
This is the price of mobility.
Only when you reach the first level of skyship can you lead your members through small-scale cumulonimbus/thunderstorm clouds relatively smoothly. When facing large-scale thunderstorm clouds... even a 100-meter giant ship can only choose another way.
It is these constantly appearing bad environments that block the normal routes between various airspaces, causing delays in the two routes that should have been directly connected.
The journey is planned to take two days, but in fact it may take more than ten days to avoid bad weather conditions.
More than five times the delay.
Now the returning cruise fleet is avoiding the thunderstorm clouds that appear on the route, making the originally short return journey a long journey counted in days.
It is not easy for a small body of 30 meters to rush directly into the thunderstorm cloud.
They can choose to fly high in the sky, pass through the danger zone from the clouds and then descend, and also turn to quickly avoid the cumulonimbus clouds.
The fifth day of the cruise.
Ji Lin tapped the table lightly, flipping through the technical reports submitted by the engineers during this time.
From time to time, he looked up at the cumulonimbus clouds that blocked the airspace like a curtain wall not far from the window... While the cumulonimbus clouds interfered with the advance of his troops, they also allowed the troops of the Ring Island Alliance to launch an attack before the cumulonimbus clouds ended or floated away.
It was not a bad thing.
There was also a hard red shadow like a volcanic rock flashing in the sea of clouds outside the window from time to time.
It was a female dragon.
Unlike Fang Ai who sat quietly in the assigned cabin reading technical books, and unlike the elf battle mages who chose to live directly on the top of the cruiser.
Ji Xia originally thought that it would be boring to follow his fleet and accompany his cruise fleet.
Unexpectedly, this red dragon often disappears from the fleet's field of vision, and rejoins the fleet after dozens of minutes or hours.
She would penetrate the sea of clouds and descend to the surface to find food, drink water, and then rejoin the fleet.
Occasionally, she would hold some local "specialties" in her mouth.
By the time they were sent to Ji Lin, most of them were only left with their own arthropods, whether they were furry or had shells...
Only part of their bodies was left.
Then Fang Ai explained to it that the kitchen on the airship could not process food that it could eat... The food that humans could eat for a full meal was not even enough to fill the gap in the dragon's mouth.
The elf battle mages were not used to being with humans, and Ji Lin could understand... After boarding the ship, taking a bath became a luxury.
Even if the officers have become low-level spellcasters, they can still release the water-making spell that extracts water from the air.
A floating ship is thirty meters, but there are only three officers, and if they are lucky, there are six spellcasters... They need to use water-making spells to meet the daily consumption of thirty meters.
You ask about the ship's water tank? Ji Lin has been very moral not to let the soldiers use secondary purified water, and the empty mass left by the floating ship can't allow them to carry more water.
The spellcaster officer took the position of the water tank, saving a lot of life-sustaining supply space for the cruise ship.
The carrying mass of water needs to give way to more valuable things, such as the wreckage obtained and the recovered technical assets.
If the floating ship can open the portholes for ventilation at any time, so that the fresh air at high altitude can take away the stagnant smell in the cabin...
Otherwise, I really have to issue temporary gas masks to each soldier to fight the smell in the cabin.
So Ji Lin could understand why the Elf Battle Mage chose to rest on the top of the airship.
Their physical fitness was also enough for them to turn over smoothly on the top of the airship and rest at the sea of clouds at an altitude of one thousand meters... an aerial platform with a length of 30 meters and an average keel width of about 3 meters.
Ji Lin flipped through the technical evaluation report and thought about his needs for future airships written in the notebook on his right hand.
He needed a large airship that could serve as a fulcrum for long-distance travel.
After installing the steam-driven engine, his large ship would not be as slow as the skyship built by the Ring Island Alliance that only relied on the repulsion of air... it could be faster.
Let the powerful steam turbine blades replace the inefficient air repulsion propulsion system.
The force ship is the core of the fleet, and needs to provide supplies and support for the entire field fleet... The loading capacity limit of the small airship was very obvious during these two deployments.
It can only carry ammunition/supplies for one battle, and retreat directly after the battle.
Retreat to the second-line node hundreds of kilometers away to resupply and launch another attack.
If the country has such a route to carry a large number of small airships to the front line, and these small airships provide repairs and supplies, the country's regional deterrence and suppression capabilities will be a step higher.
At the same time, it is better to have some long-range artillery to provide fire support to the front line-damn, the country has not yet developed heavy artillery.
The manufacturing of close-range artillery with a range of kilometers is not as good as guns, rockets, and mortars.
High-strength gun barrels, impact-resistant mechanical parts, airtight design...
If any one of them is not up to standard, complaints will come like snowflakes...If it's a little worse, it's not complaints but casualty reports.
The range of heavy-barreled artillery is longer than that of arcane weapons, and it is true that it is more powerful-but the pre-technical technology is also more complicated. This is the artillery technology of the sixth era.
Until now, heavy-barreled artillery is still the most direct and powerful support on the front line.
It can react quickly and apply firepower within 3-5 minutes, and can pour thousands of explosives at the enemy's head, crushing steel and flesh with overwhelming force.
It's just that the leader doesn't have it now.
Ji Lin coughed lightly and pulled himself out of the conception.
Heavy-barreled artillery is far away...
But the leader is not short of small-caliber artillery.
Based on the original ship-borne 75mm support naval gun.
Using high-quality steel produced by the Fifth Forging Furnace, and using the rubber-like material produced by Li Yan to deal with the airtight defects... a barely usable 75mm improved support ship gun was born.
He looked at the rectangular blueprint drawn on the paper.
But... why does my design look more and more like... a mobile dock ship?
There was a knock on the door.
The leader put down the paper and pen, rubbed his temples, and said to the soldier outside the door to come in.
"Sir, we found an island ahead, do you need to stop temporarily?"
