In the vehicle formation north of the village, on a side chariot, two soldiers were fiddling with a complex crossbow.

The crossbow structure is supported by a triangular bracket. There is a mechanical box on top of the bracket. Large and small copper gears are exposed in the box. At the top of the box, there is a tray for fixing the crossbow. A large yellow crossbow is currently tied to it.

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According to the method of using the crossbow, when stringing the crossbow, the crossbow frame must be kept stable and there must be no shaking, let alone the crossbow frame shifting after the crossbow is stringed.

In order to avoid damaging the fixed angle of the crossbow during the stringing process, one of the two crossbowmen presses the crossbow body, and the other pulls the tendon string and slowly pulls the string and hangs it up.

The crossbow machine once again entered the ready-to-fire state. Before starting to shoot, the crossbowmen gently turned the protruding gears below and on the right side of the mechanical box. The gears below were flat. By turning this gear, the crossbow frame moved horizontally.

The gear on the side controls the up and down lifting.

The crossbowman turns the gear, and the gear set in the receiver squeaks. Most crossbowmen don't like this kind of crossbow frame. They think the crossbow frame is strong and hard. The gears turn several times, and the crossbow

The frame only moved a little bit, and it was so slow that it could kill someone.

It rotates slowly. This is the core of the crossbow frame. The core of the crossbow frame is the gear set. When manipulating the crossbow, the precision of human fingers is not enough. If the person moves a little, the crossbow machine can deflect several degrees. So, how to make it go

Can a human hand that moves a few degrees with a slight movement control a degree of one and a half degrees, or even a tenth of a degree? Use gears.

Gears have an important property. Gears of different sizes mesh and rotate with each other. The linear speed of the edges of the two gears is the same, but the angular speed is different. In other words, if the two gears are put together and the pinion is turned hard, the pinion will brush.

After turning round and round, the big gear turned a little.

This method is used on crossbow racks. The gear exposed outside the receiver is a small gear. The gear inside the receiver that is responsible for rotating is much larger. This makes the crossbowmen turn the small gear half a turn.

A half turn of the gear, after decreasing, becomes a few hundredth of the size of the largest gear. The small gear travels 180 degrees in half a turn, and the large gear travels less than half a degree.

Using this method, you can achieve artificially precise fine-tuning of tenths of a degree, hundredths of a degree, and thousandths of a degree. You only need to advance the gear set a few more times.

——

The crossbowman in charge of operating the crossbow turned the upper and lower small gears several times each, and the height was slightly adjusted upward by about two-thirds of a degree, and the left and right directions were slightly adjusted by about one-fifth of a degree to the right.

This is the thirty-second adjustment.

This group of crossbowmen focused on a high-value target. Behind the enemy's crossbow formation, there was a leader walking around with a flag in his helmet and armor. This man must be one of the enemy generals. He even adjusted the crossbows.

More than thirty times, just to kill this person.

The crossbow stand is different from the ordinary shooting method. The ordinary shooting method relies on the feel of the hand. In other words, with the ordinary shooting method, you can take a rough shot by lifting the crossbow and taking aim. With the crossbow stand, the crossbow is placed on the stand and is separated from the control of the hand.

, without hands, there is no feel, so the crossbow shooting will deviate far, far away at the beginning, and the accuracy is much lower than the accuracy of ordinary shooting methods.

However, no matter how bad the initial shooting accuracy of the crossbow is or how far it misses, its shooting accuracy is gradually corrected and its accuracy is gradually improved.

For example, now, after thirty-two firings and thirty adjustments, the crossbow's shooting height and shooting angle can ensure that almost every crossbow arrow lands accurately in the enemy array.

At this point, every subsequent crossbow shot is as accurate as a hundred steps.

In the carriage, the crossbowman fired the crossbow machine again against the small hole in the carriage board. Amidst the sound of the crossbow string vibrating, the arrow escaped from the crossbow frame and flew out with a whoosh.

The Julu soldier who stood out to observe saw the crossbow arrows he fired flash past and land accurately in the enemy's formation. Then he saw an enemy soldier staggering down as if he had been hit by an arrow.

Injuring an enemy soldier was something that should have been cause for celebration, but the crossbowman who observed where the arrow fell was a little disappointed because he still failed to hit the enemy general.

The accuracy of the Rhubarb Crossbow is not enough to accurately kill the enemy at a distance of 150 steps. However, it is not enough to kill the enemy. It does not mean that it cannot kill the enemy with probability. As long as the arrow misses, it can fall among the enemy's ranks.

If you hit the target, the killing is left to probability.

There were thousands of enemy troops fighting against the Julu Army, but the Julu Army's crossbowmen who relied on the chariot array to shoot at the enemy under the cover of the chariot array were less than 400. Among these 400, Gears

There are only over 20 crossbow racks. However, if we count the battle results, the battle results of these 20 geared crossbows are almost five times that of other crossbows.

If you want to increase the number of kills when shooting with a crossbow at a long distance, you can either send more people to make the arrow rain denser. If the accuracy remains unchanged, the denser the arrow rain, the greater the possibility of hitting the target. If not

The same goes for increasing the density of arrow rain and improving accuracy. Increasing the accuracy by five times will have the same effect as increasing the density of arrow rain by five times.

The current situation is like this. The enemy uses thousands of crossbowmen to suppress the Julu Army with numbers, but the Julu Army counterattacks with only a few hundred crossbowmen. Thousands versus hundreds. Who has the advantage?

There is no doubt that the Julu Army has the advantage. One of the Julu Army's geared crossbows is worth the killing efficiency of five crossbows. Although the ordinary crossbowmen do not use crossbow racks, their shooting methods have a great advantage.

, they put the crossbow on the cart board and used it to support it to shoot. There is no doubt that the crossbow has some leverage, the crossbow is more stable, the hand does not shake, and the shooting accuracy must be higher.

Also, when fighting on a chariot, the Julu Army's crossbowmen have a height advantage. They are half a step higher from the ground. Half a step higher means that the arrow loses half a step more gravity acceleration distance, which means the arrow loses faster.

, shoot farther.

The Julu soldiers hid in the chariot and fired safely. The enemy troops were arrayed in the open space, and they had to move around from time to time to avoid the rain of arrows. Movement interfered with the frequency of shooting, also interfered with the consistency of shooting, and affected accuracy.

In the exchange of arrows with the enemy's crossbow array, the soldiers of the Julu Army continued to score kills. Although the enemy's arrows rained down like rain, there were few soldiers in the Julu Army who were killed or wounded by arrows.

One tactic has been verified, and it turns out that concentrated fire attacks kill faster.

There are two shooting methods for the Julu Army's counterattack. One is for the soldiers guarding the car formation to fire freely based on the car formation. The other is for the eight-hundred-shield crossbowmen to launch long-range projectiles and concentrated fire to cover the fire. You must know that through the barriers of houses,

There is no line of sight at all, and the accuracy of a completely blind shooting method is much lower than that of direct shooting. The accuracy and efficiency of eight hundred shield crossbowmen who focus fire are only equivalent to the direct shooting efficiency of three hundred ordinary crossbowmen.

There were more than 400 crossbowmen of the Julu Army who relied on the chariot formation to counterattack, and they should have an advantage in killing efficiency. However, this advantage of more than 400 people did not destroy any enemy troops. On the contrary, they blindly fired at the shields across the houses.

The crossbowmen have almost defeated the enemy in the northwest corner.

In the northwest corner of the village, the enemy's crossbow array, which was originally large and densely arrayed, was almost defeated. Compared to the beginning, the enemy's array of bows and crossbows retreated much further, more than thirty steps back.

In this position, the ground was densely covered with crossbow arrows. Among the crossbow arrows, dead bodies were scattered everywhere. There were no less than a hundred corpses.

From the perspective of the enemy soldiers, it was really weird. The crossbow arrows of the officers and soldiers moved forward bit by bit, as if they had eyes. They had retreated twice in a row, and as they kept shooting, the crossbow arrows of the officers and soldiers caught up with them again.

Seeing another black shadow flying far away from the village, the enemy's crossbowmen scrambled to retreat. Not to mention discipline, even the formation was in chaos.

The enemy commander saw that his soldiers were in a state of embarrassment after being shot. He frowned slightly and looked up at the village. He saw that the gun formations behind the army's vehicle formation were staggering in pieces after being shot at. Seeing that the victory had been achieved, the enemy

The commander-in-chief of the army summoned the troops to prepare to withdraw the crossbowmen.

At this time, in the village, on a roof somewhere, thousands of people laid Xu Gouwa and another centurion on the roof and looked towards the northwest corner. The wave of crossbow arrows just shot over, and the enemy troops ran back directly. One person

None of them were shot.

Not only this wave, but also the previous wave, and the wave after that, the enemy troops stopped moving forward and kept retreating.

Xu Gouwa told the centurion that instead of shooting at people, he could hang the crossbow arrows backwards and shoot them behind them. In this way, the enemy troops would run back and miss the arrows as they ran.

The centurion laughed and said, "What if they run forward?"

Xu Gouwa also laughed, "Then we won't shoot him from the front and back? He will be shot wherever he goes!"

Xu Gouwa and the centurion were just talking casually. What they didn't know was that this was called a straddle-shooting tactic. In the later era of sailing battleships, battles between warships would use straddle-shooting methods to adjust the shooting angle.

Straddle firing means using a row of artillery, with a few guns set high to fire farther, a few set lower, and a few set lower still.

In this way, multiple groups of artillery shells with different ranges can be fired at the same time. The so-called straddle firing means to look at the impact point of the artillery shells and find the row of artillery pieces closest to the enemy warship, and the row of artillery shells that are slightly farther across the battlefield.

Then, based on these two landing points, find the shooting angles corresponding to the two groups of guns, and start fine-tuning based on the shooting angles of these two groups of guns.

In the era of sailing battleships, straddle-fire tactics were the most efficient tactics for adjusting the firing range. In this context, once a ship was straddle-fired by the opponent, it would take less than two rounds for the opponent's shells to accurately hit the hull.

What Xu Gouwa and the others casually discussed involved cross-shooting tactics and an extremely efficient method of anchoring the shooting boundary.

The Julu Army's current method of anchoring the shooting range is to shoot at will, regardless of whether the shooting is close or far away. When the shooting is close, adjust it to the far side.

The most efficient adjustment strategy is this. The crossbow array is divided into two, one group is raised high and thrown very far away, one group is lowered slightly, and another group is lowered again. In this way, the arrays fire at the same time, and the first round is

Multiple groups of arrows raining from different distances were shot.

It only takes one round, and there must be a "cross-shooting". Then, according to the shooting height of the two groups of crossbowmen forming a straddle shot, the shooting range is directly greatly shortened. In the actual battlefield where crossbows are used, the accuracy and accuracy of crossbows are

The depth of the array actually only requires one round. After determining the two shooting angle heights of the straddle shot, you can randomly select a value in the middle. This value will most likely meet the needs of coverage shooting.

With the Julu Army's current shooting method, to adjust the shooting range, you have to try multiple rounds or even a dozen rounds. For straddle-shooting tactics, two rounds are enough, and up to three rounds. The difference in efficiency between the two is huge.

The reason why cross-fire tactics are the most efficient is a mathematical problem.

There is such a problem. In the hand of A is the number 521. A tells B that the number in my hand is an integer greater than zero and less than one thousand. What is this number?

B can use many methods to find out this number, but the most efficient method is the halving method.

B first asks, is this number greater or smaller than five hundred?

A: It's bigger than five hundred.

B asked again, whether this number is larger or smaller than seven hundred and twenty-five.

A: Small.

In just two steps, the answer was narrowed down to between 500 and 725.

Then, ask again, compare this number with five hundred and sixty-two.

Then, five hundred and thirty-one.

Then, five hundred and fifteen.

A replied, the number is greater than five hundred and fifteen.

Then, the number was narrowed down to between 515 and 531.

Cut it in half again and reduce it to 515 to 523.

Cut again, 519 to 523.

Again, five hundred and twenty-one.

It only took seven steps to get the correct number, while any other method would definitely take more than seven steps.
To be continued...