I want to be emperor

In human history, a series of shipbuilding technologies, like many other industries, are in constant development.

This kind of improvement and development depends on the luck of the entire human race...but it is difficult to continue to develop along a certain development path.

The same is true in the shipbuilding industry. Ships have appeared in human history for at least ten thousand years. This is only the time when there is clear evidence after archaeology. In fact, ships must have appeared in human history for a longer time...

Just because you haven't dug up ship relics from an earlier era doesn't mean there were no ships longer ago.

And in the tens of thousands of years of ship development, from canoes all the way to today's sailing ships, the overall progress is not too much, at least there has been no change in shipbuilding materials... it has always been wood.

However, after entering the era of sailing warships, especially after the era of lines, people have deployed more and larger artillery in order to pursue more powerful firepower, thereby continuously pushing up the tonnage of ships.

The increase in the tonnage of ships also puts forward higher requirements for shipbuilding materials.

Especially for warships, the huge weight of the ship itself, coupled with the huge weight of large-caliber naval guns, all pose new challenges to the load-bearing materials of the ship.

Especially the main load-bearing structures such as the beams of the load-bearing deck, corbels, and support columns.

At the same time, you can't blindly pile up materials, because this will lead to an increase in weight.

In this way, in the early stage of controlling a certain weight, strengthening the load-bearing structure and the strength of the ship's ribs as much as possible is the problem that contemporary shipbuilding technicians need to consider.

The idea of ​​the Shipbuilding Department under the Naval Department of the Great Chu Empire is to use soft steel (wrought iron, low carbon steel) stronger than wood to make these load-bearing structures.

This is inspired by the Army's gun mounts!
In the early days of the Unification War, in fact, the artillery mounts used by the various field artillery of the Great Chu Empire Army were all wooden, and they were gradually replaced with iron artillery mounts later.

Although iron is heavier than wood, the better strength brought by steel can also reduce the size of the parts of the gun mount, and then achieve the effect of weight reduction.

Up to now, all the gun mounts of the Great Chu Empire Army, including the wheels, are all made of iron, and the wooden gun mounts are no longer visible, and the iron gun mounts used in the new artillery are basically made of wrought iron. Made.

With the continuous development of material technology, especially Daye Iron and Steel Company's continuous research and development in iron-carbon alloys, it has been able to produce wrought iron of quite good quality and can be forged, and this wrought iron is also used to produce large-scale iron castings.

The key here is to mass-produce all kinds of wrought iron, that is, steel with a very low carbon content, which is relatively soft and can be used for forging and processing various iron products
However, before the Daye Iron and Steel Company achieved technological breakthroughs, the major iron and steel companies or other machinery factories in the Great Chu Empire basically did not have the ability to produce wrought iron on a large scale.

It is not impossible to produce, but the output is very limited, and it is difficult to obtain a large amount of raw materials at one time and process them into large iron castings.

The output is very low and the cost is high, so wrought iron was basically only used for cold weapons, armor and small iron products before this. …

Large wrought-iron castings are difficult to obtain in this way, even regardless of cost and yield.

Until the first half of this year, Daye Iron and Steel Company achieved a technological breakthrough. After more than ten years of continuous research and development, especially after receiving great assistance from the Institute of Technology and other related research and development institutions, they successfully developed a new steelmaking method. (Pudlin's method)

That is, the stirring method. This method is actually a further research and development in the traditional steel frying process, but it introduces a modern scientific and chemical system. When a certain breakthrough is made in chemistry, it clarifies the iron content After various impurity elements and their proportions are determined, various production processes can be designed in a targeted manner to solve problems in a targeted manner.

This is the case with the Daye stirring method. The principle is very simple, that is, the flame is directly blown into the furnace, and then the pig iron is heated after reflection, and at the same time, the bottom of the furnace is piled up with iron oxides.

In this case, the oxides contained in the pig iron, such as carbon, can directly contact and burn with oxygen, thereby achieving the effect of reducing the carbon content, and by the way, phosphorus can also be removed. up to [-] degrees Celsius.

Although this temperature is still unable to melt pure iron, it still has a qualitative improvement compared to the previous one thousand two.

At [-] strokes, the carbon of the pig iron is greatly reduced, and then becomes a slurry lake. At this time, it is necessary to carry out stirring operations to further reduce the carbon and remove impurities.

Finally, wrought iron with very low carbon content can be obtained, and then after forging and processing to remove oxide impurities, it can be used as raw materials and processed into various wrought iron products.

Moreover, because of the mastery of modern chemical knowledge, we know that the strength of steel is closely related to the carbon content. Therefore, when wrought iron is subsequently processed, a certain proportion of carbon can be added accordingly to increase the hardness of the material.

For example, when forging armor, it is forging with wrought iron, and then adding carbon elements during the forging process, so that the hardness of the armor becomes higher when it is formed, so that the Chu army can obtain better defensive capabilities and lighter weight. Steel armor.

The industrial mass production of wrought iron is the biggest technological breakthrough in the smelting industry of the Great Chu Empire, and even the entire industrial system of the empire in the past ten years. For this reason, Luo Zhixue specially summoned and rewarded relevant technicians.

When there was a large amount of wrought iron, the wrought iron products of the Great Chu Empire began to appear in large numbers, not only for use in cold weapons and armor, but more importantly, they began to be widely used in various machinery industries.

The machinery industry is the industry that most urgently needs all kinds of steel products, especially plastic and machinable wrought iron products. In the past, the output of wrought iron was too low to meet the demand. Therefore, many mechanical equipment still use wood. Or simply cast iron.

When the industry took the lead in using wrought iron on a large scale, the navy naturally began to think about using wrought iron to build the load-bearing structure of the ship.

For this reason, he sent a report to Luo Zhixue, saying that he wanted to build some test ships!

However, the test ship costs money. Why did the Navy submit this report to Luo Zhixue? It was not because it wanted to get some special funds from Luo Zhixue...

If it is not for the purpose of applying for funding, such technical details do not need to be brought to Luo Zhixue's side at all, and even the navy boss will not be too concerned. Usually, the Navy's Ship Administration Department and the Navy Ordnance Department will decide on their own. up.

But, many people in the Navy know that His Majesty compares some technical issues, especially those related to new materials and new processing methods.

Many naval generals are well aware that His Majesty rarely goes out for inspections, but half of the inspections are to various scientific research institutions to inspect various technological innovations and breakthroughs.

Steam engine, iron and steel study these things, my majesty is the most, because Luo Zhi has learned a lot, and many of the officials involved, whether they want to or not, will understand and remove these things, and then do what they like...

This time, the navy's idea is to use the name of new technology research to attract Luo Zhixue's attention. Once Luo Zhixue is in a good mood, just say a word, and the navy may be able to spend hundreds of thousands of Chu Yuan's shipbuilding funds. .

In fact, as the admirals had guessed, Luo Zhixue was very interested in seeing the navy's report, and called several relevant personnel to discuss relevant technical issues that day.

Three days later, Luo Zhixue summoned relevant personnel from the Ministry of Industry and the Navy, mainly to listen to professional technical officials about the technological development of the industry and the feasibility of using a large amount of steel as a material on ships.

Luo Zhixue knew that iron-ribbed wood-hull ships were a feasible development path, but the problem was that he was worried about whether they could be produced with the current industrial technology capabilities of the Great Chu Empire.

The meeting of these personnel was called to understand the technical level.

According to the results learned at the meeting, it is quite optimistic.

The technical officials of the Ministry of Industry believe that the wrought iron produced by Daye Iron and Steel Company on a large scale has excellent performance, and after subsequent forging processing can ensure sufficient strength, it can completely replace wood as the load-bearing parts of ships.

In fact, there is no need to discuss this, because before the shipbuilding industry, the industry had already begun to use wrought iron as raw material to produce various iron products in the machinery industry on a large scale.

The iron parts required by some large equipment are also very large, such as the parts required in large hoisting equipment, which can be very large.

In short, with the current technological capabilities of the Great Chu Empire, it is sufficient to provide various types of iron parts for the shipbuilding industry.

It’s just that the output will be a problem, because some wrought iron parts used in shipbuilding are often very large, and the production and processing of such large iron products are very troublesome. Mass production capacity of large parts.

It can only be small-scale production of some parts for specific industries, mainly large-scale machinery and equipment.

This low output means that the quantity is insufficient, and it will also drive up the price.

But the price is a very important advantage of iron over wood.

The large quantities of wood used in the construction of warships, especially those used in major load-bearing components, can be very expensive.

To build a battleship, you need to use the wood of thousands of trees. These thousands of trees are not ordinary trees, but some specific types of trees, and they have requirements for thickness and height. …

And the wood used in some key parts needs some top-quality wood. When anything reaches a certain limit, it is often very expensive...

In the era of wooden warships, the cost of wood was also the main cost of a warship. For a preliminary industrialized country like the Great Chu Empire, wood was the bulk of the construction cost of warships, while artillery was relatively small.

After all, as far as the Great Chu Empire is concerned, as long as there are no restrictions on raw materials and things that can be mass-produced with mechanical equipment, the production cost is basically not that expensive.

But unfortunately, the processing of wood is not a problem... The problem is that the wood itself is expensive!

In order to build all kinds of warships, the Great Chu Empire fell all over the world and purchased all kinds of suitable wood. Fine wood.

Even so, there are actually many problems, because it is difficult to obtain high-quality wood such as oak, and the Great Chu Empire can only use other inferior trees, which will affect the performance of the warships built.

Secondly, even if you get a large amount of top-quality wood, it will take a long time to wait. For example, after oak is felled, it must be placed in a ventilated and dry place for more than ten years before it can become qualified wood for building warships. .

And the Great Chu Empire has only been established for a total of more than ten years. As for the pre-Ming period, people didn't play with the navy at all, but they didn't have the habit of storing large amounts of wood.

Therefore, when the Great Chu Empire built large-scale ships, the first challenge it encountered was the lack of a large amount of qualified wood, to be precise, the dried wood... and the extreme lack of Galen ship rib wood, this stuff Natural curved wood is required, but there are so many natural curved woods that are suitable and old enough in nature, and the tree species are also suitable for shipbuilding...

In the Age of Discovery, in order to obtain suitable ship rib timber, some countries used artificial intervention when planting shipbuilding timber, so that the timber was produced with a certain bending angle.

Relying on nature alone, so many natural bent woods!

Historically, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Westernization Movement launched by the Qing Dynasty encountered this problem in the process of building Western-style ships, because in the past tens of hundreds of years, this kind of shipbuilding wood has not been specially cultivated, so that there is not much ship rib wood in China. , and imports are also difficult to import.

How did you solve this problem in the end?
In the late Qing Dynasty, the Fujian Shipping Bureau directly skipped the stage of wooden ship ribs, and learned from the western powers to build iron-ribbed wooden-hull ships, so that the "Weiyuan Iron-ribbed wooden-hull ship" was built in 1877.

The direct reason why this ship can appear is because of the serious lack of ship rib wood in the Qing Dynasty at that time!

I don’t have it myself, and I can’t import it, what should I do?Do you want to die, plant a large piece of shipbuilding timber yourself, and wait decades before building a ship?This is naturally impossible. Since there is no ship rib wood, then use iron ribs.

Detour if this road fails!

As for the contemporary Great Chu Empire, it is also facing the same problem. In the land of Huaxia, which has no tradition of building western ships, it is impossible to find so many suitable ship ribs. People were sent to search and cut down various deep mountains and old forests, but as time passed, there were still insufficient situations. …

But the construction of warships and many merchant ships cannot be delayed, so the Great Chu Empire used some tricky methods.

For example, if there is no oak and not enough teak, then use pine, fir and other unsightly woods.

If there is no large amount of wood to dry naturally, then artificial drying is used for fast drying to shorten the drying process.

Without natural ship ribs, strong artificial interventions were carried out on the trees that had already taken shape, in order to make the trees form a certain bending angle in just a few years.

However, these solutions all have some sequelae, and these sequelae have caused the ships built by the Great Chu Empire in recent years, especially the warships with very high material requirements to have more or less problems.

For example, the earliest batch of Daye-class frigates were basically decommissioned after five or six years of use... because the wood that was not dried enough was used when they were built, and the ship ribs were not good enough, resulting in insufficient service life. Five or six years later, he was riddled with holes, and finally had to retire.

In any case, wood has actually limited the large-scale construction of ships in the Great Chu Empire, especially the scale of warships.

This is also the main reason why the Ministry of Ship Administration put doctrine on Gangte.

As far as the current iron and steel industry of the Great Chu Empire is concerned, I dare not say how much iron is needed, but it is definitely enough for the navy, especially after the large-scale application of the Daye mixing method, a large amount of wrought iron was produced, It also means that the price of wrought iron has dropped significantly, and the cost can be controlled... In addition, after all, the navy only plans to use part of the steel for shipbuilding, mainly for load-bearing structures, and it is impossible to say that all steel is used.

As for the subsequent processing, especially the processing of large wrought iron parts is very troublesome, but it can also be solved by adding large equipment and building a new factory.

But factories, this thing is very simple for the Great Chu Empire.

As long as they are willing to spend money, the industrial part can build several factories specializing in the production of these large parts in minutes. After all, the equipment and technology are ready-made, and the only thing they need is money.

And the Great Chu Empire is not short of money!
So after discussion, Luo Zhixue did not refuse the navy's application for special funds, but approved it, but the amount was not large, only 30 Chu yuan, and asked them to build a test ship that used a lot of wrought iron.

Of course, the 30 Chu Yuan is not all the funds used to build the test ship, because the test ship is not a large-tonnage capital ship, even if you build a small ship with a few hundred tons for a test or two, the shipbuilding cost will not be high. .

More money is actually used for early technology research and development.

After the Navy gets the money, it will sign relevant research and development contracts with relevant domestic manufacturers, so that the manufacturers have funds for technology research and development, equipment updates, and so on.

Although the R & D and construction tasks are all enterprises directly under the Ministry of Industry, the family has to settle accounts clearly. The navy has to pay for the iron-ribbed wood-hull ship, right...

After the navy started the research and development project of iron-ribbed wood-hulled ships, the navy was ready to make persistent efforts. Taking advantage of the emperor's interest in wrought iron, he hastily reported a new project: the wrought iron artillery project.

The navy wants to use wrought iron as raw material, and then use the same processing and casting method as bronze artillery to manufacture it. …

The cannons in the Great Chu Empire include iron cast cannons and bronze cannons, and the production techniques of the two are completely different.

Iron cast artillery still adopts a relatively primitive casting method, that is, it is directly poured into molten iron with a relatively high carbon content, which is what many people call pig iron, and the barrel is directly poured out of this pig iron with a relatively high carbon content. .

This kind of pig iron barrel cannot be finished at all later... because the carbon content of the pig iron material is too high and the hardness is very high, and the quality of pig iron these days is not good, and it is relatively brittle.

Therefore, it is very difficult to carry out subsequent finishing machining on the pig iron cast artillery.

At present, the mainstream method of iron casting artillery, including that of the Great Chu Empire, is to use molds for one-time casting.

This is why the army of the Great Chu Empire is very repulsed by pig iron artillery, and even the navy is very disgusted with this thing...

Because it cannot be finished, the strength and smoothness of the gun barrel are difficult to guarantee. In order to ensure the strength of the gun barrel and avoid bombing, the gun barrel can only be made very thick, which greatly increases the weight. For details, please refer to The various iron cannons cast in the late Qing Dynasty are very typical cannons and small bullets...

Bronze artillery can be poured into a solid barrel because copper is relatively soft, and a large hydraulic forging machine can even be used to further forge the solid barrel.

Finally, a large hydraulic boring machine was used to drill holes in the solid bronze gun barrel, and finally a gun barrel was created.

It seems that the latter is more complicated than the former, and there are many more processing steps, which seems to be very difficult, but in fact, for the Great Chu Empire, which uses a large number of hydraulic mechanical equipment, the production and processing of bronze artillery is more convenient and faster... …and produce faster.

The Great Chu Empire began to adopt this method to produce bronze artillery on a large scale in the early days of the Unification War.

In the period of the era of front-mounted artillery, bronze artillery has no disadvantages except that it is expensive.

But the problem is that the shortcoming of being expensive is nothing in the Great Chu Empire...a 115mm bronze artillery is only a few hundred Chu Yuan...this is for an empire whose central fiscal revenue exceeds 2000 million Chu Yuan .

It means that you can buy tens of thousands of doors if you leak it from your fingers...

Therefore, the military of the Great Chu Empire would rather choose the more expensive bronze cannons than iron cast cannons, even if the price difference between the two is several times... not only the army is all Qingtong cannons, even the navy is widely using bronze artillery.

The artillery used by the navy is large in caliber and numerous in number, such as the Jinling-class third-class battleship and subsequent improvements.

The configuration of the artillery is the same, with 26 170mm naval guns on the lower deck and 28 130mm naval guns on the upper deck.

In addition, a total of [-] [-]mm naval guns were deployed at the bow, stern and side positions, but these places are not considered full decks, which is why the Jinling-class battleships of the Great Chu Empire Navy were classified as The class is the reason for the third-class battleship.

Because this thing has only two full decks.

In the classification of the Great Chu Empire Navy, first-class battleships and second-class battleships are the main battleships with three fully accessible decks. …

It's just that the strong combat power displayed by the Jinling-class battleships makes this kind of battleships that seem to have only two decks gain the combat effectiveness comparable to that of three-deck battleships.

And the price is not expensive...

This kind of warship has reached a very good balance in terms of performance, cost and even daily use cost, and the price/performance ratio is extremely high.

As for the first-class battleships, they are too expensive, and the Great Chu Empire only plans to build a small amount of them. As for the second-class battleships, this thing is either high or low, and the price/performance ratio is still low. The Great Chu Empire gave up this level of battleships during the design stage. , was never built.

Regardless of whether it is a third-class battleship or a first-class battleship, or even those cruisers, there are many artillery needed, and most of them are large-caliber long-barreled naval guns.

If all bronze cannons are used, the cost of the cannons alone will increase several times.

But... the Great Chu Empire Navy still firmly chose to use bronze artillery on a large scale!

Although the early cast iron cannons were cheap, and the Chu army has always had experimental equipment and improvements, but the overall number is not large, and the main body is still bronze cannons, even for big guys like 170mm naval guns.

As for the cost of the copper cannon... Although it is high, it is not unacceptable.

After all, the Great Chu Empire has a relatively complete preliminary industrialization system, and the price of bronze artillery is more expensive, which is more reflected in the relatively expensive materials.

As for the processing cost, it is cheaper than the iron cannon.

Calculated in this way, although the price of copper materials is more than ten times that of pig iron, the purchase cost of the final bronze cannon is only five or six times that of iron cannons.

After comprehensively considering the cost of the whole life, the cost of the bronze cannon should be reduced a little more. The cast iron cannon can fire three or four hundred rounds, which is basically the same, but the bronze cannon can easily achieve a service life of eight hundred or even one thousand rounds.

Basically, two cast iron cannons can support one bronze cannon.

In the end, even if the bronze cannon is scrapped, it can be pulled back and melted to continue making bronze cannons. After the cast iron cannon is scrapped, it is not easy to even buy scrap iron... Bronze cannons can save a fortune in resource recycling.

In the end, the bronze cannons used by the Great Chu Empire actually cost more than twice that of cast iron cannons.

But it has brought more superior combat performance, both in accuracy and power have been greatly improved.

Therefore, the army and navy of the Great Chu Empire would rather use seemingly expensive bronze artillery than cast iron artillery.

However, if the performance of iron-cast artillery can keep up, even if it is not comparable to bronze artillery, as long as it can have [-]% to [-]% performance, then the navy can make up its mind to adopt iron-cast artillery on a large scale.

It was impossible for pig iron artillery in the past, but wrought iron artillery has this hope.

The navy thought about using wrought iron cast artillery to reduce the cost of artillery. After all, the navy needs too many artillery, and they are all medium and large caliber artillery. If it can save a lot of cost by using wrought iron artillery, the navy is still very happy .

Of course, the premise is that the artillery made of wrought iron can't be too stretched in performance!

Regarding this, Luo Zhixue has nothing to say, I support it... Using wrought iron to produce cannons is a major trend in the development of cannons. Now it just happens that the steelmaking process has made a breakthrough, and the processing capacity of large equipment has also improved, which is just right. give it a try.

Even if the craft technology can't solve it for a while, it will always succeed after a few more attempts.

Besides, if you try it, you won't get pregnant. The worst thing is that you don't succeed. If you lose some experimental funds, there won't be any big loss.

And Luo Zhixue is also looking forward to it. Now it is making wrought iron cannons, but after the further development of steel technology and processing technology, it may be possible to produce real steel cannons later.