The commander of the fort, Lieutenant Colonel Antoine de Villefort, was a tall man in his forties. He looked pleased at Joseph's visit.
"Ah, Mr. Bonaparte, I thought it would be a few days before you could come over." Commander Wilford said, "I didn't expect you to come so quickly. Um, do you need a break?"
"Thank you, but no." Joseph said, "I actually arrived last night. It was just that it was late when I arrived, so I spent the night resting at the hotel. So I don't really need any more rest."
"Youth is enviable." Commander Wilford laughed, "When I was your age, I also didn't feel tired no matter how busy I was. Since you don't need to rest, we can start the work related to expanding the battery. Well, Captain Cisse, you will first take Mr. Bonaparte to get settled, then take him to the library to consult the relevant information and take him on a field trip. Ah, Mr. Bonaparte, you can also speak directly to Cisse if you need anything."
"Thank you for your care." Joseph replied.
When he came out of the small building, Cisse asked, "Mr. Bonaparte, where did you put your luggage?"
"It's still in the hotel." Joseph replied.
"Which hotel?" Cisse said, "I can send two men to bring your luggage. Well, we'll put you in the officers' quarters over there. The conditions here can't be compared to Paris, so we'll just have to oblige you."
"It's a small hotel called 'Hotel Claude'." Joseph replied, "Also, you can just call me Joseph."
"Ah, 'Claude's Inn'?" Cisse smiled, "Joseph, you must have stayed there because it's close to the harbor and it looks nice and affordable on the outside, right? Well, you must not have slept well last night. They're notorious for getting bedbugs in their hotel beds!" As if he was afraid that Joseph would think he was mocking him, Cisse added, "Well, I've fallen for them before. That owner, Claude, is a capable guy, it's just that his mind is not focused on how to run the inn at all. Well, let me first take you to the officers' quarters to take a look ..."
To say that the officer's dormitory in Calais Fortress was actually in slightly better condition than the teacher's dormitory in the Paris officer's school, after all, the price of the land and other things here were quite a bit cheaper than in Paris.
After settling in, it was already noon. Cisse took Joseph to the officers' mess hall to have lunch. Calais was by the sea, and all kinds of fish were much more plentiful and cheaper than in Paris.
"If you ask me, your life is much better than in Paris. The money we get in Paris isn't much different from yours, but the prices in Paris are so much more expensive." Joseph said vaguely as he stuffed a piece of fish into his mouth.
"But Paris is Paris, after all." Cisse, however, said, "It's true that Paris is more expensive, but most people here still prefer to go to Paris. Well, these places in the provinces are actually more suitable for retirement, but not particularly for young people, who should still go to Paris if they want to make something of themselves. If I could go to Paris, I'd rather put up with higher prices. If it's just about money, there's more money to be made overseas. It's just that it's not easy to get to Paris for people like us who don't have much access."
Indeed, Paris had more opportunities for the ambitious, and it was unrivaled by any provincial city.
"Perhaps, uh, Cisse, you're a captain of artillery, aren't you?" Joseph said suddenly.
"Yes? What's wrong?" Cisse asked.
"I'll have to ask you for some advice about the battery, after all, I'm just a math student, and there are a lot of things about artillery that I don't really know." Joseph explained.
"Oh, I thought you knew some kind of door to help me get to Paris." Cisse joked.
"Well, as far as I know, the Paris Officer's School has actually been lacking a marine expert. If you're up to the task ...," Joseph said with a sense of humor as well.
"Hell, I get seasick!" Cisse said, "Isn't there anywhere else that's short of people?"
"Not that I've heard of for a while." Joseph shook his head, "Aren't you in the Navy? How can you get seasick?"
Cisse's face slightly red, "The Navy ... Navy is not all about boats, the ones guarding the harbor batteries are also the Navy. It's not like I have to get on a ship when I'm serving in a harbor battery. My gunnery skills are very good, you can not find a few better gunners than me in the entire navy. If it wasn't for seasickness ... words, wouldn't your school need a gunnery instructor?"
"That's really unheard of for now." Joseph said, "And as you know, even if there was a need, an Army officer would most likely be selected for the position."
Unlike England across the sea, France had always been what was known as a land power country. In the French military, the status and influence of the Army was superior to that of the Navy.
"That's so." Cisse was a bit disappointed, but he still said, "Joseph, you are in Paris and know a lot of information, if you know any doorways, I still hope you can remember me."
"I'm sure I'll remember." Joseph said.
Joseph's reply wasn't all polite, he needed to pull a few strings in the Navy as well. In the next few years, the harvest in the north of France had not been very good, but the south of France was actually not short of food, just because at this point in time, France was still a feudal state, with many domestic barriers, artificially causing the cost of transportation of goods to rise. If you can go through the relationship of the Navy, directly from the south to get food, and then use the Navy's warships to the northern ports, there can be a lot of revenue. If it was smuggled directly from England across the sea, the gains would be even higher.
"Actually, Calais is also a good place, it's one of the most important ports in the north now. There would be a lot of opportunities economically as well." Joseph added, "You'll actually have a lot of opportunities here, too. Maybe there are things I need your help with as well. Anyway, we are friends, so if we have the opportunity in the future, we must help each other, don't you think so?"
"You're right. Then it's a deal." Cisse said.
In the days that followed, Joseph had another discussion with Michel, the designer, about the plan to renovate the battery. As the commander of the artillery on the battery, Cisse was also involved.
"The first requirement of a battery is to be able to control the shipping lanes for ships entering and leaving the harbor. This battery we have today is not enough to control the entire channel. That's why we plan to build a new battery at this location, so that with the two batteries working together, the shipping lanes in and out of the harbor can all be controlled...." Michel pointed to the drawings and introduced them.
"This location should be good." Joseph looked at the drawings and said, "Is there anything I need to calculate?"
"Mainly some data on the artillery ballistics. There's also quite a bit on the specific design of the entire fortress that needs your input." Michelle replied.
"Unfortunately the existing artillery and the lack of suitable high ground in this vicinity has resulted in our cannons being too close in range, barely covering the shipping lanes but nowhere near enough to cover the fleet out of the harbor in formation. In case the fleet is right blocked in the harbor, there's still no way to get out and fight." Joseph added.
Naval combat was something that needed to be done in formation first. This would make it easier to exert firepower for maneuvering without one moment having one's own people blocking one's shooting boundary, and the next moment having one's own warships crashing into each other while maneuvering. The space in the military harbor was limited, and the fleet was definitely unable to complete the formation within the harbor. To complete the formation, the ships would have to first move out into the wide waters outside the harbor. And once the enemy fleet preempted and blocked the entrance to the harbor, they naturally wouldn't allow the warships in the harbor to sail out of the harbor and then form up in formation. Surely they would attack the fleet out of the harbor before they had time to form up. If the guns of the harbor batteries had a sufficiently long range, it would be possible to provide protection for the fleet out of the harbor in formation.
There were generally two ways of doing this. One is to mount huge guns on the batteries. One of the great advantages of batteries over warships was their carrying capacity. Batteries were built on solid ground without fear of being sunk by the cannons, so it was perfectly possible to place on them huge cannons much larger than those on warships. And bigger cannons were always more likely to have greater range.
But there were problems with this approach. The first was that giant cannons were too expensive to produce. And the second was that the rate of fire of the giant cannons was too low; the Turks' Urbane cannons, for example, could only fire a maximum of seven shots a day. Of course, that was in the fifteenth century, but nowadays, the improvement in the rate of fire of giant cannons is still quite limited. Such a slow rate of fire was not enough to fulfill the task of covering the unfolding of the fleet.
The second method was to mount the guns as high as possible. This would significantly increase the range of the guns. Considering again that the position of the cannons on the battery was stable, unlike those on the ship that would sway around with the ship, (naval guns, because of the swaying, would not know where the shells would go if the target was just a little bit farther away) the effective range would naturally be greater. This would have given the warships in the harbor a space to spread out in formation.
But there is no natural high ground in just the right position near the harbor in Calais. If such an effect was to be achieved, it would be necessary to rely on the manual piling up of earth to raise a high ground by hand. This would require more labor and material resources, or to put it more bluntly: more money would have to be spent.
"The Navy didn't think there would be any fleet in Calais harbor that would need to line up a battle line. So the batteries just need to be able to ensure that they block the shipping lanes and stop the enemy from attacking the harbor." Designer Michel replied, "After all, Calais isn't Toulon. There will only be one or two cruisers here at most. Calais is still mainly a commercial port, with merchant ships and all, there's no need to line up battle lines. Look at Dover across the street, it's naturally got high ground and it's much easier to build batteries than over here, but even so, the British didn't put a few warships there."
Because of the limited size of the new batteries, the difficulty of the whole project was relatively low. This was actually not a bad thing for Joseph, who was involved in such things for the first time.