69novels Chapter 305
Chapter 305
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“In Eastern Europe, our cooperation with Russia does not need to be so urgent!”
Mainz said to Foreign Minister Ribbentrop:”We gave up a lot of interests in the previous negotiations with Russia, but now it seems that there is no need to compromise so much!”
In order to obtain Russia’s oil in the Caucasus, Mainz had thought about obtaining the mining rights of Russia’s oil fields in the Caucasus through technology transfer and support.
However, now he feels that there is no need to be so urgent.
“After all, the Russians are not on the same page as us. Although we have a good relationship now, this relationship may not last long. Moreover, after Starling came to power, the Russians’ foreign policy has been extremely tough. If we sign an agreement with them now, I am afraid that they will tear up the agreement. In history, the Russians have gone back on their words more than once or twice!”
The credibility of the Russians has never been very good. In order to fight against Hans, the Gauls spent a lot of money to contact and support the Russians. As a result, the Russians used Gaul’s funds to issue a large number of bonds in Gaul. However, when these bonds matured, the Russians defaulted on their debts under various pretexts, causing the Gauls to suffer great losses and lose a lot of money!
Logically speaking, the Gauls have done their best for the Russians. After the end of the Russo-Japanese War, when the domestic situation of the Russians was so critical, the Gauls did not give up this ally and almost emptied their own funds to help them. But who knew that they were actually ungrateful and slandered the Gauls.
“I see. The guy named Motolov who was recently appointed by Starling is really a bit difficult to deal with. I don’t want to have anything to do with him anymore!”
Europeans look down on the Russians and think that they are barbarians. Hans is actually the same. Although the Germans and Slavs are called the three major barbarians in Europe, those are all old news from the ancient Roman Empire.
The Germans have long taken off the hat of barbarians, and the Slavs are still carrying forward the spirit of barbarians…
After finishing the topic of the Russians, Mainz’s attention shifted to Hans’s new generation of battlecruisers.
“The Six-Nation Naval Arms Control Committee has officially sent an inspection team to conduct an on-site inspection here to review whether our warships violate the provisions of the naval treaty. They will probably arrive this Friday!”
Ribbentrop knew what Mainz was thinking, so he handed him a formal diplomatic letter.
Mainz glanced at it and nodded:”They are quite decent. They didn’t come to join in the fun when our warships were about to be launched!”
Hans’s battleships are still under rapid construction, and only about half of them have been built. If they come to inspect and review at this time, even if they find that Hans’ specifications exceed the standards, Hans will have time to make adjustments.
But if they wait until Hans’s battleships are built and ready to be launched and come to interfere, it will be difficult for Hans to deal with them. By then, the battleships will have been completed. If they are found to exceed the standards, Hans will have no choice but to dismantle them!
The first batch of Scharnhorst battlecruisers had a total of 4, costing about 200 million marks, with an average cost of 20 million marks per battleship, which is about 2 million pounds.
This price is relatively low. The cost of the 10,000-ton battleships built by the British during World War I was generally 3 million. In the UK, that was the price 10 years ago. The current price is much higher than that time.
The Scharnhorst-class battlecruisers are mainly used as sword-bearing escorts for the carrier battle group, so their weapons and equipment and their own performance are not built in accordance with the top battleships of this era.
In Mainz’s vision, the main task of this battleship is to protect aircraft carriers, escort aircraft carriers, intercept enemy warships and defend against possible attacks from enemy bomber groups in the air.
Therefore, their combat performance is particularly important, and these two points are: speed and firepower.
Speed is easy to understand. When battlecruisers were first designed, it was emphasized that their speed could reach or even exceed the level of cruisers, so the speed must be more than 30 knots or even more than 32 knots.
The Scharnhorst-class battlecruisers perfectly meet In order to meet this requirement, her design speed reached 34, which exceeded the speed of most battleships of this era and was even comparable to the speed of some small destroyers.
This speed gives them a strong maneuverability advantage when facing the enemy’s main battleships.
Even if they cannot defeat them, they can bypass the enemy and run away directly, which makes the combat options of this battleship very flexible.
The second requirement is firepower.
This firepower is not worthy of Scharnhorst to have super-large caliber main guns and extremely strong anti-ship firepower like the Bismarck-class battleships; instead, it requires them to have powerful anti-aircraft firepower!
If the First World War was the stage for battleships, then the protagonists of the Second World War were aircraft carriers!
Aircraft carriers themselves are very fragile, and the aircraft carriers of various countries are Aircraft carriers basically have little defense. Most of their space is used to install aircraft carrier decks and hangars. There is not much space for them to install various artillery. Therefore, whether facing the threat of enemy warships at sea or the threat of enemy fighters in the air, aircraft carriers are extremely vulnerable!
In this case, there must be a strong fleet around the aircraft carrier to protect her safety.
In later generations, an aircraft carrier fleet is often equipped with one or two cruisers, two to three destroyers and two to four frigates, and one or two nuclear-powered attack submarines are needed underwater to protect the safety of the aircraft carrier.
If there are not so many warships to protect the aircraft carrier, relying on the aircraft carrier alone, it is a little girl who can be bullied by anyone, and anyone can easily hurt her!
The organization of the aircraft carrier fleet during World War II was not very perfect, but based on the battles of Eagle Sauce and Foot Basin in the Pacific battlefield, it can be concluded that the main enemy of the aircraft carrier is actually the enemy’s aircraft carrier.
In this way, the main threat to the aircraft carrier comes from the air!
In the Battle of Midway, the aircraft carriers of the Foot Basin were very unlucky to be found and hit by the torpedo planes and dive bombers of the Eagle Sauce. As a result, four aircraft carriers were lost in one battle, and then the dominance of the war was completely lost!
In this naval battle, the Foot Basin fleet did not even see the shadow of the enemy. The battles between the two sides were separated by hundreds of kilometers. They sent air groups to attack the enemy, and there was no direct exchange of fire between the surface fleets.
In order to protect Hans’s navy and avoid a Midway-style defeat in future battles, Mainz had already thought about how to equip its own aircraft carriers with a protection fleet when building an aircraft carrier battle group.
This protection fleet must have a certain naval combat strength, so that when facing the enemy’s assault on the sea fleet composed of battleships, they have the ability to resist and will not be beaten without any ability to fight back.
Therefore, cruisers like Admiral Hipper and Prince Eugen are definitely not acceptable. Their armor is too thin and the caliber of their artillery is too small. They can serve as deputy fighters of the fleet, but not as the main force.
The number of Bismarck and Tirpitz is limited, and the cost is extremely expensive. It always feels a bit too wasteful to let these two powerful battleships serve as guards.
So a compromise was made, choosing a battleship that was more vigorous than Prinz Eugen but weaker than Bismarck, with combat effectiveness reaching the level of a battleship, but with a relatively cheaper cost, became Mainz’s only choice!
This is the basis for the birth of the Scharnhorst-class battlecruiser. However, unlike the situation faced by the navy of the Third Reich in history, Mainz did not completely copy the design of Scharnhorst, but made targeted modifications.
After the modification, the standard displacement of the Scharnhorst-class battlecruiser is 5,000 tons, which just hits the red line of the Fog City Naval Treaty.
The maximum speed is 34, and the endurance is 14 knots at 10,200 kilometers and 21 knots at 5,600 kilometers.
Equipped with three triple-mounted 35mm caliber naval guns and four twin-mounted 150mm secondary guns.
12 twin 88mm anti-aircraft guns, 24 twin 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns and 48 single 20mm anti-aircraft guns. The torpedo tubes were cancelled, the main armor thickness was 350mm high-carbon steel titanium alloy armor, and it had good defense.
Compared with the original Scharnhorst, the caliber of the main gun was increased, the number of secondary guns was reduced, and the number of anti-aircraft guns was greatly increased. The air defense capability was improved to a higher level, becoming a veritable���Guard with a knife!
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