Wanli 1592

Chapter 450 Ships

Beating Matteo Ricci was something Chen Fan had planned to do a long time ago. If he didn't do it sooner, when he continued to use him in the future, he didn't know what would happen to him. Beat and beat now, let him be more honest, It will be much more convenient in the future.

Xiao Ruxun learned a lot of this kind of method from Yuan Huang. This old guy has a long experience in personnel, and he knows quite a lot about this aspect.

Part of Xiao Ruxun's control ability was honed in the last days and on the battlefield, and more of it was learned from Yuan Huang's theory and then gradually practiced.

Real knowledge from practice!
After solving Matteo Ricci's matter, Xiao Ruxun promulgated the emperor's imperial decree to the army, announcing the time and force to send troops to Spain, ordering the navy to prepare as soon as possible.

The army needs to set off at the end of October, resolve the fighting before the end of November, and then spend a little time to resolve post-war matters, and rush back to Myanmar to celebrate the New Year with family members before the end of December.

This time, [-] troops were dispatched, all of which were dispatched by the navy, not a few troops organized by the army.

In fact, Xiao Ruxun put forward the idea of ​​the Marine Corps since the navy rebuilt its army three years ago. The Ningxia Firearms Battalion, the main force of the direct descendant who was born in the Northwest together with Xiao Ruxun, are all from the Northwest. They are not familiar with water. I get seasick, so I'm not very suitable for water battles.

Since ancient times, China has had the custom of northerners riding horses and southerners sailing boats. Northerners are good at riding horses, and southerners are good at handling boats. So in terms of the distribution of troops, it is natural that northerners form cavalry and southerners form naval forces.

For Xiao Ruxun, the navy is more important than the army. The army really doesn't have many battles. Except for the small group of bandits at the beginning, there is no battle. Now the army is mainly responsible for protecting the secret base in the mountainous area of ​​northern Myanmar. Prepare to deal with those restless Burmese natives, there is no large-scale war.

The navy is different, Xiao Ruxun's navy is the strongest in Nanyang, and after the rise of Nanyang commerce, it is famous for pirates.

Xiao Ruxun took the initiative to undertake the task of exterminating pirates in order to improve the combat effectiveness of the navy. During the three years of battle, he continued to polish the combat effectiveness of the navy and expand the size of the navy. The navy they were fighting head-on.

In the early Ming Dynasty and the era of Zheng He's great voyages, the tonnage of the main warships of the Ming army reached about [-] tons, and the size of the largest warship was larger than a standard football field today. It was a well-deserved ocean giant.

But time flies, and at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming army's shipbuilding technology did not advance but retreated. Among the warships that Xiao Ruxun took over, none of the warships exceeded [-] tons.

For this reason, the more than 100 warships left by the Ming court to Xiao Ruxun were all converted into auxiliary ships by Xiao Ruxun, and the hull was rebuilt, the old sails were removed, and high-quality new sails were replaced, and then ships were added on both sides of the hull. Oars, increase the muzzle, remove all unnecessary armaments, and become a fast-moving gunship with firepower.

Then within the scope of the current technology, Xiao Ruxun ordered his shipyard to try his best to manufacture galleons and multi-layered decks to increase the number of combat soldiers and artillery, although it is a pity that the ocean-going ships used by Zheng He's fleet back then Most of the shipbuilding technology has been lost, which makes Xiao Ruxun feel extremely regrettable.

In terms of the choice of sails, Xiao Ruxun still chose to use Chinese-style hard sails instead of soft sails. It’s not that there was no research. When fighting pirates, Xiao Ruxun captured more than one Western-style soft-sail ships, conducted some research, and then dismantled.

In contrast, under the existing conditions, Xiao Ruxun decisively chose the hard sail and abandoned the soft sail.

On the other hand, in another shipyard, when building merchant ships that needed to sail to Europe, some ships were manufactured with Western-style soft sails.

Military warships are basically all hard-sail structures, which require fewer sailors, and will not cause a large number of sailors to die when retracting and launching. More importantly, Xiao Ruxun currently has no way to build larger warships.

At present, the largest warship under his command only has a draft of about [-] tons, which is about twice the size of the current warships of the Ming army, but it cannot be compared with the main warships of the early Ming Dynasty. Enough time for the master shipbuilders to reverse-engineer the construction technology of the treasure ship.

So Xiao Ruxun also resented those bureaucrats whose ass decides their heads. So many important technologies have been lost, so much so that Xiao Ruxun's boatmen can't imagine how their predecessors built super giants that are four times larger than today's largest warships. They don't understand how they can use such a heavy hard sail to support the mast.

Their main task is to build warships, and exploration is a question they discuss with each other during their breaks. For three years, they have been building ships almost non-stop. It was only before this war that they managed to build more than 300 warships.

Of course, Xiao Ruxun's shipyard could not compare with the official shipyard of the Ming Dynasty in terms of equipment or number of people. The record of annual production of [-] ships is not to be missed, but it is not tiring to build [-] ships in two years.

So these masters studied Western-style soft sails in their spare time, and then used the remaining wood to build a [-]-ton Western-style soft-sail warship for Xiao Ruxun.

Xiao Ruxun laughed and scolded them that they had no place to use their energy, so they might as well find a way to study the treasure ship. They said they had to study whether the soft sailboat or our hard sailboat was better.

In desperation, Xiao Ruxun had no choice but to make a comparison for them, and sent a warship to let the two sides compare. As a result, during the sail raising process, a young man accidentally fell into the sea from the top of the mast.

Fortunately, he fell into the sea and survived. If he fell on the boat, he would definitely be smashed into meat paste.

The masters looked at each other, you looked at me and I looked at you, and they all went to build their own ship, which was assigned to the ocean caravan by Xiao Ruxun as a frigate.

Humans are a very precious resource for Xiao Ruxun now, and a population of more than 130 million is just a drop in the bucket for him. In terms of current productivity, he needs at least 100 million people to roughly develop Myanmar. When the population reaches Only when it is 500 million can it meet the needs of further development of Myanmar.

Now, apart from an area near the sea in the south, most of Myanmar is still an uninhabited area. There are only repaired roads and infrastructure facilities, but there are no people. From Bago to the north and then to the military base in the mountains of northern Myanmar, a large area is A desolate no-man's land with fertile soil and abundant water.

Xiao Ruxun felt distressed every time someone died, how could so many people be sacrificed to the soft sailing boat?
(End of this chapter)