Daming 1805

Chapter 310 Blank bombs and oil lakes

Zhu Jingyuan called a Royal Agricultural Machinery craftsman to take him to see the sample tractors.

The overall structure of these machines was designed by Zhu Jingyuan, and the appearance is of course very similar to the tractors in his previous life.

The most distinctive feature is the tire with a height of one person and the large pattern several centimeters deep on it.

This design makes it easier for the tractor to grab soft ground.

There is a hydraulic suspension at the rear of the body, and there are horizontal screw ports in front of the chassis, which can be connected to various combined agricultural equipment.

The six four-wheel tractors in front of us use different numbers of cylinders to match different weights and powers.

The lightest is a single-cylinder sixteen horsepower, and the heaviest is a four-cylinder 64 horsepower.

This power is not low in the tractors of this era.

Among them, the four-cylinder tractor was tentatively installed with a blank bomb starter.

Blank starters are a by-product of Turbo Labs.

A blank shell is a shell without a warhead, only the shell and primer and the propellant inside.

When the blank bomb is excited, the internal propellant burns at a high speed, and a large amount of gas generated will burst out instantly.

Originally, this gas pressure was to push the warhead to fly out.

In the absence of a warhead, the venting of the gas is an instantaneous thrust, which can be used to do other things.

The turbine is equivalent to a fan, blowing the turbine with the thrust of the gas can make the turbine rotate rapidly.

The Turbine Laboratory has designed a small and simple turbine whose main shaft is connected with the main shaft of the engine through gears.

The turbine is driven by the gas of the empty bomb, and the turbine drives the main shaft of the internal combustion engine to rotate.

While the main shaft is driven by the gas of the blank bomb, the throttle of the internal combustion engine is controlled to supply oil, and the internal combustion engine can be started accordingly.

This kind of starter has simple structure, low failure rate and fast starting speed, which is very suitable for use in emergency situations.

This starting method was actually very common in Zhu Jingyuan's previous life. It is an emergency starting method for many military equipment, from F4F to B52 to J-20.

After this method was invented in this world, it has been quickly promoted on various military machinery, and it is also planned to be used on some large agricultural machinery in the future.

Zhu Jingyuan also drove a tractor in his previous life, but he had never played with a blank bomb.

Now I have confirmed the condition of the machine with the craftsman, and then operated the blank bomb start by myself.

Take out a blank bomb of the corresponding model and stuff it into the blank magazine slot of the starter of the four-cylinder tractor.

Use the corresponding special nut to tighten on the outside, and finally pick up the hammer head and knock on the back of the nut. This process is equivalent to firing the primer of the shell, and the effect is similar to pulling the trigger.

Accompanied by a violent smoke, the diesel engine on the tractor began to tremble violently.

"Suddenly..."

Zhu Jingyuan immediately stretched out his hand to pull the accelerator, the speed of the diesel engine immediately accelerated again, and thick smoke came out of the chimney.

This tractor starts.

Zhu Jingyuan sat in the driver's seat, stepped on the clutch and shifted into gear, and began to slowly circle around the test site.

Zhu Jingyuan drove the tractor all morning and became familiar with the simple essentials of tractor driving.

In the afternoon, Zhu Jingyuan followed Lin Zexu to see the temporary site of the textile factory.

According to Zhu Zhongliang's original idea, it was suggested that textile factories and petrochemical factories should be located in oil mining areas.

That is, the northernmost part of Nanyinzhou, the Maracaibo Lake area in the west of Venezuela in later generations.

But then the two looked at the map and studied the situation in Xintianfu, and finally decided to separate temporarily.

The oil producing area is full of raw land, and the composition of the surrounding residents is very complicated.

The petrochemical and textile industries are currently highly monopolized profiteering industries and must be placed in as safe a place as possible.

Therefore, personnel and equipment from textile-related industries came to Xintianfu together.

For the time being, only oil exploration bases will be built in the Maracaibo area.

There are a large number of houses waiting to be allocated in Xintianfu City, and there are also some workshops outside the city waiting to be used.

The Royal Construction Company allocated the two remaining factories closest to the city gate to the Dashi Textile Factory and the Garment Factory.

Hao Zhongyi, as the future director of the factory, is directing the workers to transport the machinery and equipment in preparation for installation and commissioning.

Zhu Jingyuan also specially went to chat with Hao Zhongyi:

"How do you feel now? Are there any difficulties?"

Hao Zhongyi said very sincerely:
"I don't think there is anything difficult about it, they are all old workers, they are all used equipment, and they are all done jobs.

"As long as this machine is installed, everyone can start production immediately, and start recruiting new people immediately.

"It's much simpler than when I first went to Mengxian County and was tossing about all kinds of new products there."

Zhu Jingyuan smiled and nodded:

"How does that person live? Are the family still used to this place?"

Hao Zhongyi immediately said:

"It's good here, it really is Xintianfu, it's much cooler than Meng County, I haven't felt autumn in two years.

"I heard people here say that the hottest in summer is usually [-] degrees, and the coldest in winter is usually seven or eight degrees.

"The four seasons are distinct and the winter is warm and the summer is cool. This is really heaven, that is, the sun and seasons are reversed from those in my hometown.

"Although the house allocated now is not as good as the big manor in Meng County, only my family lives in it.

"Two floors, eight rooms, two large living rooms, most of the places are empty, and the wife and children are satisfied."

Zhu Jingyuan nodded with a smile and said:
"It's good if you are satisfied, but this is not a house that will be officially distributed to you in the future. Our factory will build a residential area by itself in the future.

"They are all built outside the city and built together with the school in the factory area, so that everyone's yard can be bigger and more convenient."

Hao Zhongyi said cheerfully:

"Okay, okay, great..."

Zhu Jingyuan went to each warehouse in turn, went to each factory where the equipment was installed and debugged, and greeted the craftsmen and workers, and the afternoon passed quickly.

On the second day, Zhu Jingyuan went to the agricultural machinery factory again to learn how to install and replace various supporting equipment for tractors.

At present, they are mainly corn harvesters, conventional plows, harrows, seeders, and trailers.

…………

Zhu Jingyuan's team heading to Yinzhou was actually divided into two groups.

Zhu Jingyuan himself, as well as the personnel and supplies going to Xintianfu, all took a boat around the Western Cape and went directly to Xintianfu.

The oil drilling personnel and equipment led by Zheng Fuguang entered the Red Sea from Quicksand City.

The West Sea Canal, which connects the Great Qin Sea and the Red Sea, was only seven meters deep when it was first opened, and it could only pass ships of six or seven thousand tons, and capital ships could not pass through it.

Before the World War, Ming always wanted to expand the canal, but under the resistance of the Thai and Western countries, it has not been done.

At that time, Ming Dynasty even promised to only deploy cruisers in the Daqin Sea.

After the end of the world war, this promise also became invalid.

Daming took it for granted, and began to deepen and widen the canal without any scruples.

In order to control the canal area more firmly and stably, Ming Dynasty set up directly-administered chief envoys around the Xihai Canal.

And continue to immigrate to the local area, responsible for opening the river and maintaining the canal.

Although the Xihai chief envoy is a chief envoy, his management model is actually similar to that of Huangzhuang, or a canal operating company.

Migrant workers are not high-intensity one-time workers, but regular employees of the operating company.

The salary of the employees is good, the work intensity is not very high, and they can continue to work normally for a long time.

While they continued to dredge to deepen the existing canal, they dug a new canal not far away.

Zhu Jingyuan's preliminary plan is to reach a water depth of 16 meters, allowing two-way passage of [-]-ton ships without interfering with each other.

After more than two years of dredging, the original canal has been deepened from seven meters to 12 meters.

Passenger ships of [-] tons and all cargo ships of [-] tons can already pass.

Zheng Fuguang's fleet entered the Daqin Sea through the Xihai Canal, and then entered the Atlantic Ocean through Gibraltar from the Daqin Sea.

The fleet crossed the Atlantic Ocean and entered the Caribbean Sea. After repairing on the island of Haiti, they set sail for the Gulf of Venezuela.

The fleet sailed to the deepest part of the Gulf of Venezuela and anchored more than ten kilometers from the coast.

The workers and equipment led by Zheng Fuguang transferred to small flat-bottomed inland riverboats towed over, and continued to sail toward the "shore"

At the southernmost tip of the Gulf of Venezuela, there is a semi-open lagoon called Lake Hinamaika.

The natural waterway between the bay and the lagoon is just under a kilometer wide.

The depth of the water in the channel is six to seven meters, but on both sides of the channel, behind the sand bar of the lagoon, the surrounding water is very shallow.

In many places, it is less than one meter, and the ebb tide directly turns into land.

Above these dives, there are sparsely scattered houses on stilts, which are the houses of the local indigenous Yin people.

Zheng Fuguang's fleet, under the guidance of local guides, moved slowly along the waterway and entered the lagoon cautiously.

Continuing south along the waterway in the lagoon, the water under the boat and around the lake begins to slowly deepen.

After sailing slowly for [-] kilometers, the shore of the lake that was not visible in the east reappeared a little abruptly.

The width of the water area immediately narrowed from nearly thirty kilometers to less than ten kilometers.

According to the guide, this is the boundary of Lake Hinamaika.

The fleet continued to sail into waters less than ten kilometers wide, and entered the final destination, the range of Lake Maracaibo.

After the fleet continued to sail for a few kilometers, they saw a piece of Western-style buildings on the west bank of the water.

This is the town of Maracaibo, the destination of your trip.

If you continue south along this water area, the lake will become deeper and deeper, and the salt content in the water will continue to decrease.

After sailing [-] kilometers south, the water area will become wider again, and the lake will basically become fresh water.

Then we arrived at the main waters of Lake Maracaibo.

Lake Maracaibo is the largest lake in Nanyinzhou, located in the northwest of Nanyinzhou, the westernmost end of Venezuela in later generations.

The lake is 190 kilometers long from north to south and 110 kilometers wide from east to west.

The water area is 340 square kilometers, about six times that of Taihu Lake.

Lake Maracaibo is a tectonic lake formed by the collapse of faults in the Andes Mountains. The depth of the lake in most areas exceeds 20 meters.

But the lagoon connected to the ocean outside is too shallow for large ships to sail directly from the Gulf of Venezuela into Lake Maracaibo.

The area where the lake is located is surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the tall Andes Mountains trap a large amount of water vapor from the Caribbean Sea, forming abundant orographic rain on the surrounding hillsides.

The rainwater pours into Lake Maracaibo through dozens of rivers and constitutes the main source of lake water for Lake Maracaibo.

The lake as a whole is always in a state of outflow.

In addition, the lagoon outside is shallow and the waterway is narrow, so it is difficult for seawater to penetrate inward.

Only when the tide is high can sea water flow in in small amounts through the lagoon.

This can only slightly increase the salinity of the lake water in the northern area of ​​the lake, and cannot make the lake water of Lake Maracaibo become salty as a whole.

So, while Lake Maracaibo is de facto connected to ocean waters, it is still a lake, not a bay.

Even Lake Maracaibo is often considered a freshwater lake.

It can be regarded as the freshwater lake closest to the ocean, and the freshwater lake whose water body is directly connected with the ocean.

But for Zhu Jingyuan, the more important thing is that this is one of the earliest oil producing areas in history.

Second only to the Persian Gulf, it can be compared with the Caspian Sea, and it is also called the two major oil lakes.

Very early someone found obvious oil seedlings here.

In 1876, some people began to use indigenous methods to extract oil, and in 1917, large-scale industrial oil extraction began.

Venezuela, which owned Lake Maracaibo in its previous life, is nominally the country with the largest oil reserves in the world.

It has the largest reserves in name, because many people doubt the "hidden strength" of No.2 Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, many people know that most of Venezuela's oil is heavy oil, or even super-heavy oil.

The difficulty and cost of mining heavy oil are relatively high, and there are also requirements for smelting technology.

However, the high cost of mining is relatively high compared to the Gulf and Lucia, and not high compared to other regions.

Moreover, although most of Venezuela's oil reserves, almost 70.00% are heavy oil.

But it's not without conventional oil, and its total reserves are too high.

Even if three-quarters of the heavy oil is removed and only one-fourth of the remaining normal oil reserves are counted, it can still rank No.9 in the world.

It is on par with No.8 Lucia and twice as high as No.10 Nigeria.

These countries are not without heavy oil.

At the same time, Venezuela's heavy oil, the most difficult to extract and use, is mainly concentrated in the eastern Orinoco heavy oil belt, where it did not start to be mined until the 80s.

The Lake Maracaibo area in the west happens to have light oil, and the heavy oil here is relatively easy to extract and use.

Otherwise, Lake Maracaibo could not have become the earliest large oil field.

Now the small town at the mouth of Maracaibo Lake has been taken over by Daming Xintianfu Huangzhuang.

After Zheng Fuguang and the craftsmen went ashore, they housed their families in the cleared houses.

After Zheng Fuguang adjusted for a day, he took the craftsmen out to inspect the environment.

Zheng Fuguang originally planned to search for oil here based on his own experience and equipment he had prepared.

As a result, they soon discovered that this was not necessary for the time being.

The oil seedlings here are too obvious, much like Baku on the Caspian Sea.

Zheng Fuguang looked at the companions he brought:

"Let's drill the well first, just behind this town called Mara, I guess it can directly produce oil.

"Let's drill out the oil first, start a continuous and stable supply of oil, and then go to other areas to verify the technology."

(End of this chapter)