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Chapter 288: Artillery Ranging 2
The surveying team, composed of students from Weiss Academy, followed the first and third battalions southward, arriving at Bayland Castle on June 10th to set up camp.
To exert pressure on the Kent family as quickly as possible, Alda’s artillery began shelling soon after their arrival.
Twenty-plus cannons, belonging to the two battalions and an independent artillery company, were aligned in a row and unleashed their firepower directly at Bayland Castle.
Sir Valentin, a knight of the Kent family, was in charge of commanding the defense of Bayland Castle. He had received early news of Alda’s troops moving south from the north and immediately dispatched a messenger to Center on horseback. Before receiving a response from his duke, his duty was to hold Bayland Castle at all costs.
After the first Battle of Fort Bidou, the Alda army, far from disbanding, swiftly occupied the northern part of Emden, catching the upper echelons of the Kent ducal faction off guard.
Fortunately, the high ramparts and deep moats of Bayland Castle thwarted their attempt to conquer the entire Emden, much to the relief of the duke. Losing their ancestral home would have been a severe blow to the Kent family’s prestige, as they had already lost half of their territory.
Later, despite the riots in Alda, the Alda troops stationed in Emden did not retreat. The Center City elite reassessed Alda’s strength: aside from the thousand men in Emden, Grayman retained a considerable reserve force within his territory.
In May, when the “Anti-Usurper Alliance” regrouped, the Grayman family was noticeably absent. The lords in Center deduced that Grayman’s reserve forces, due to the previous riots, did not dare to move lightly. Therefore, the thousand-plus men in Emden remained stationary.
The Kent family’s spies had only incited one riot, which was quickly quelled. How could this restrain the entire Alda reserve force?
In reality, the spies didn’t need to risk organizing continuous real riots. They only needed to exploit the impact of the first riot.
Casually spreading slightly altered but fact-based rumors in streets, taverns, and tea houses would escalate fears.
With Lakeheart Town’s principle of ‘nipping dangers in the bud,’ the town would immediately investigate and organize troops for martial law. Without clear evidence, how could one distinguish truth from falsehood?
After observing for over half a month and confirming no significant movement from Alda’s troops, the duke’s court devised a plan: once the mercenaries from the south arrived, they would defeat Count Parker and other lords before Grayman could intervene.
However, to the duke’s astonishment, Grayman had more cards up his sleeve than anticipated. After being held back for only a month, he managed to stab them in the back by landing at the upstream town of Fish Tail on the Weiss River.
Of course, Sir Valentin had no time to worry about Fish Tail Town at the moment. His current responsibility was to defend Bayland Castle.
It was the ancestral residence of the duke’s family; losing it to the enemy would be a disgrace. Even if the duke did not blame him, Sir Valentin would have no face left to meet others and would have to atone with his life.
Sir Valentin had participated in the first Battle of Fort Bidou, where the Alda army had left a profound impression on him.
Initially appointed as the guardian of Bayland Castle, he tried to organize forces to take back northern Emden but was quickly repelled by the power of thunder hammers and fire crossbows.
Sir Valentin always believed that he was defeated by the overwhelming power of the thunder hammers and fire crossbows, although Alda’s troops only fired a volley before charging with bayonets.
Since then, he resolved that as long as Alda’s troops did not provoke him, he would stay put in Bayland Castle. With less than two thousand men under his command, this was the only viable strategy — seek no glory, but avoid faults.
However, Sir Valentin was confident in defending Bayland Castle. As the residence of generations of Kent family heads, its defensive capabilities were among the best in the entire Northwest Bay.
After expansions by successive family heads, the outer walls of the castle stood 12 meters high, with a width of 10 meters at the top. Unlike other walls that were merely covered with a layer of brick and filled with soil inside, Bayland Castle’s walls were entirely made of giant stones.
A wide moat surrounded the castle, with several deep ditches dug outside the moat.
Alda’s army had once attempted to attack Bayland Castle, but the moat and ditches prevented their mortars from approaching for deployment. They resorted to using 6-pound and 12-pound cannons for bombardment, which had limited effect. Now, they had returned.
…
Nick and his classmates had developed a kind of rangefinding instrument, which they were now testing together with the artillerymen at their position.
The device consisted of a horizontal beam, supported on the ground with adjustable height. Each end of the beam extended a thin ‘arm’ horizontally forward. From a top view, one ‘arm’ was fixed perpendicular to the beam, while the other could rotate left and right with the end of the beam as the pivot point.
“Line up two points, line up two points…”
The artilleryman first used the fixed arm on the left side of the beam to aim at the distant gates of Bayland Castle. Once the front and back ends of the fixed arm aligned with the castle gates, it was considered aimed.
“Line up two points…”
Muttering to himself, the artilleryman moved to the right side of the beam and gently manipulated the rotating arm, attempting to align its front and back ends with the castle gates.
The beam’s length was one meter, known as the ‘baseline.’ Theoretically, measuring the angle between the movable arm and the baseline should reveal the straight-line distance to the target.
However, reality deviated slightly from theory.
Targets nearby were relatively easy to measure, but as the distance increased, moving one meter to the left or right along the baseline made it nearly impossible to discern any change in angle with the naked eye.
“Forgive my bluntness, sir, but this device of yours…”
One of the artillerymen participating in the test hesitated with a wry smile.
Scratching his head, Nick also smiled awkwardly. He had calculated that at a 89-degree angle, the tangent value was approximately 57.28996. With a baseline of one meter, this could measure up to around 57 meters. However, the angle corresponding to a tangent value of 1000 was 89 degrees, 56 minutes, and 34 seconds. The change in angle from 57 meters to 1000 meters was too… too subtle to be observed with the naked eye and the crude rotating arm.
It was a case of ‘missing by a millimeter, off by a thousand miles,’ as Count Grayman used to say in his lectures.
Joyce, standing behind Nick, patted his shoulder: “Don’t be discouraged. This method of ranging is theoretically feasible, and I believe it can be perfected with certain techniques.”
He had brushed up on his knowledge of trigonometric functions during the march and had full faith in Nick’s method.
Nick turned around and said, “Thank you, Mr. Joyce. I think at this stage, we can increase the accuracy by extending the baseline. One meter is too short. If we increase it to 15 meters, I believe it should be sufficient for the current effective range of our artillery.”
Joyce shook his head: “15 meters, are you sure? It would be too inconvenient to make a beam that long.”
“We can split the rangefinder into two parts, left and right, ensuring they line up using the same two-point method.”
“Oh? Let’s give it a try!”
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