Chapter 925 (1/2)

Chapter 925: The Air Defense System

Translator: TransN Editor: TransN

Roland had mentioned several problems that needed to be solved. The lack of an air defense network was as big of an issue as the transportation problem.

The importance of achieving air supremacy stuck in his head. He had learned this lesson from the history of the wars in his previous world. An army who had the aerial advantage was always able to launch an attack from any point at any time, and before the invention of the radar, no one on the ground was able to detect enemies coming from the vast sky, let alone defeat them. Bearing that in mind, he planned to enhance his army’s air defense capabilities as soon as possible. Otherwise, he would never be able to build an artillery position near the Taquila ruins.

He guessed that after Lorgar’s escape from their pursuit, the demons had probably had flown to the border of the Western Region several times to investigate, and they would have likely concluded that most of the residents of Neverwinter were common people. That was why they thought they could repeat the old trick that they had used in the first Battle of Divine Will.

The demons’ investigation teams had somehow managed to avoid the sentry posts in the Impassable Mountain Range as well as the God’s Punishment Witches who had gone deep into the Barbarian Land. If Sylvie had not taken over the scouting job, the frontier guards would not have been able to detect the approaching demons until they came near the city wall.

The battle on the city wall had highlighted what was lacking in the current technology, and proven that the sky had already become the biggest vulnerability in Neverwinter’s defensive line.

After all, the people in this era could hardly imagine aerial forces, let alone countermeasures for aerial attacks.

Roland had been pondering over the air defense problem ever since the moment he had seen the demons with their flying Devilbeasts, but he had never expected them to come to the city so early. He had not started the development of air defense weapons yet, or even finished building the Impassable Mountain ground defense line and the telephone network.

The fact that the frontier guards had not been able to shoot down any demon or Devilbeast during the earlier incident did not surprise him at all. It had been his decision to use revolving rifles to fill up the blind zones of the machine guns and the cannons for now, and they had proven to be quite effective in suppressing enemies on the ground. However, resulting from the low pressure in the bore, a revolving rifle had a relatively short range and a low accuracy, which became a very serious defect against airborne enemies. Furthermore, its hit rate was low and its firepower was limited, since each of its cartridges could only contain five bullets. Last but not least, it had no suitable tripod or aiming tool for targets in the sky. With these defects, it could hardly serve as an ideal ground-to-air weapon.

He felt that he had better begin to replace all the revolving rifles with bolt rifles.

It was already part of his plan, but Anna was unable to mass-produce that many parts that were necessary for the large-scale production of the bolt rifles. Given that, he had only equipped the sniper team with bolt rifles for now. Fortunately, the workers had started to get familiar with the operation of the new machine tool which was put into use recently, and they were already able to assemble rifles on their own. Once they could improve their work efficiency and guarantee the quality of the products, the output of bolt rifles would be substantially increased.

Though bolt rifles could shoot farther and more precisely than revolving rifles, they could hardly serve as ground-to-air weapons. Their rate of fire was even lower than the revolving rifles, and their tracer ammunition, which had a complex structure, was not easy to manufacture, especially when the ammunition production line was already working at its full capacity. Even if he began to focus on tackling the key problems for the mass production of bolt rifles now, he would need several months to achieve this goal. By the time he succeeded, the Months of Demons would already be over.

Under these circumstances, he decided to create new ground-to-air firearms as the primary air defense weapons and use the bolt rifles to assist these new weapons in a fight.

Based on the existing technologies, he was not able to equip his army with any kind of high-tech fire control system, so his only choice was to create a hail of bullets to stop the enemies in the sky.

The easiest way of achieving this effect was to convert some of the Mark I type heavy machine guns into anti-aircraft machine guns, which had been a tried and tested solution in the modern world’s history and would not increase the burden on the manufacturing and logistics sectors. A Mark I type HMG equipped with an aiming tool and an adjustable tripod would be able to shoot low-flying enemies out of the sky.