In human history, a series of shipbuilding technologies, like many other industries, are in constant development.
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However, before modern science and technology, the development speed was relatively slow and without the support of a complete scientific system, the progress of all industries could only rely on long-term experience models and accidental discoveries.
This kind of improvement and development depends on the luck of mankind as a whole... 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 nearly ten thousand years. This is only the time when there is clear evidence from archeology. In fact, ships must have appeared in human history for even longer...
Just because you haven't unearthed ship artifacts from an earlier era, it doesn't mean that there were no ships even longer ago.
In the tens of thousands of years of ship development, from canoes to today's sailing ships, the overall progress has actually not been too much. At least there has been no change in shipbuilding materials...it has always been wood.
However, after entering the era of sailing battleships, especially after the line era, in order to pursue more powerful firepower, people deployed more and larger artillery, thus continuously pushing up the tonnage of ships.
As the tonnage of ships increases, higher requirements are placed on shipbuilding materials.
Especially for battleships, the huge weight of the ship itself, coupled with the huge weight of large-caliber naval guns, poses new challenges to the ship's load-bearing materials.
Especially the main load-bearing structures such as the deck beams, corbels, and support columns.
At the same time, you can't just stack materials because this will increase the weight.
In this way, while controlling a certain weight in the early stage, strengthening the load-bearing structure and the strength of the ship's ribs as much as possible is what contemporary shipbuilding technicians need to consider.
The idea of the Shipbuilding Department under the Naval Shipbuilding Department of the Dachu Empire is to use mild steel that is stronger than wood to make these load-bearing structures.
This is inspired by the Army's gun mount!
In the early days of the Unification War, the mounts used by the various field guns of the Chu Empire Army were all made of wood. Later, they were gradually replaced by iron mounts.
Although iron is heavier than wood, the better strength brought by steel can also reduce the size of the various parts of the gun mount, thereby achieving a weight reduction effect.
Up to now, the artillery mounts, including the wheels, of all the artillery pieces of the Da Chu Empire Army are all made of iron. The wooden artillery mounts are no longer visible, and the iron mounts used by the new artillery are basically made of wrought iron. Made.
With the continuous development of material technology, especially the continuous research and development of iron-carbon alloys by Daye Iron and Steel Company, it has been able to produce wrought iron with quite good quality that can be forged and processed, and this kind of wrought iron is also used to produce large-scale of iron castings.
The key here is to mass-produce all kinds of wrought iron, which is steel with very low carbon content. Its characteristics are relatively soft and can be used to forge and process various iron products.
However, before Daye Steel Company achieved technological breakthroughs, the major steel companies or other machinery factories in the Dachu Empire basically did not have the ability to produce wrought iron on a large-scale industrial scale.
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It's not that it can't be produced, but the output is very limited, and it's also difficult to obtain a large amount of raw materials at one time and process them into large iron castings.
The output was very low and the cost was high, so wrought iron was basically only used for cold weapons, armor and small iron products before this.
Even regardless of cost and output, it is difficult to obtain large wrought iron castings in this way.
Until the first half of this year, Daye Steel Company achieved a technological breakthrough. After more than ten years of continuous research and development, especially with the strong assistance from the Institute of Technology and other related research and development institutions, they successfully developed a brand-new steelmaking method.
That is, the stirring method. This method is actually based on further research and development of the traditional steel-frying process, but it introduces a modern scientific and chemical system. When a certain breakthrough is made in chemistry, the content of the iron material is clarified. After knowing the various impurity elements and their proportions, various production processes can be designed to solve the problem in a targeted manner.
The Daye stirring method is like this. The principle is very simple. It is to blow the flame directly into the furnace, and then heat the pig iron after reflection. At the same time, the bottom of the furnace is piled with iron oxides.
In this case, the oxides contained in the pig iron, such as carbon, can directly contact and burn with oxygen, thus achieving the effect of reducing the carbon content. Incidentally, phosphorus can also be removed, and the furnace temperature can be increased to increase the furnace temperature. reaches one thousand four hundred degrees Celsius.
Although this temperature is still unable to melt pure iron, it is still a qualitative improvement compared to the previous 1,200 degrees.
At 1,400 degrees, the carbon in the pig iron is greatly reduced and becomes a slurry lake. At this time, stirring is required to further reduce the carbon and remove impurities.
Finally, wrought iron with very low carbon content can be obtained, which can then be forged and processed to remove oxide impurities, and can then be used as raw material and processed into various wrought iron products.
And because we have mastered modern chemical knowledge and know that the strength of steel is closely related to the carbon content, when the 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 forged with wrought iron, and then appropriate carbon elements are added during the forging process so that the hardness of the armor becomes higher when it is formed. This will allow the Chu army to obtain better defensive capabilities and lighter weight. Steel plate armor.
Industrialized mass production of wrought iron was the biggest technological breakthrough in the smelting industry of the Chu Empire, and even in the entire industrial system of the empire in the past ten years. For this reason, Luo Zhixue even specially summoned and awarded relevant technical personnel.
When a large amount of wrought iron appeared, the wrought iron products of the Dachu Empire began to appear in large numbers. They were not only used in cold weapons and armor, but more importantly, they began to be widely used in various machinery industries.
The machinery industry is the industry in urgent need of various steel products, especially plastic and processable 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 from pig iron.
When the industry took the lead in using wrought iron on a large scale, the Navy naturally began to consider using wrought iron to build load-bearing structures for ships.
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For this reason, a report was sent to Luo Zhixue, saying that he wanted to build a few test ships!
However, the test ship costs money. Why did the Navy submit this report to Luo Zhixue? Is it because it wants to get some special funds from Luo Zhixue...
If it were not for the purpose of applying for funds, there would be no need to bring such technical details to Luo Zhixue. Even the navy bosses would not pay much attention to it. Generally, the Navy Ship Administration Department and the Navy Ordnance Department would handle it themselves. Decided.
But, many people in the Navy know that His Majesty is more concerned about some technical issues, especially those related to new materials, new processing methods, etc.
Many naval generals know very well that His Majesty rarely goes out for inspections, but half of his inspections are to various scientific research institutions to inspect various technological innovations and breakthroughs.
Steam engines and steel research are the things that His Majesty pays the most attention to. Because Luo Zhixue pays a lot of attention to them, many courtiers will understand and eliminate these things whether they are willing or not, and then do whatever they want...
This time the Navy's idea is to attract Luo Zhixue's attention by using the reputation of researching new technologies. Once Luo Zhixue is in a good mood and just opens his mouth, the Navy may be able to get hundreds of thousands more Chu Yuan in shipbuilding funds. .
In fact, just as the naval generals had guessed, Luo Zhixue was very interested after seeing the Navy's report, and convened several relevant personnel that day to discuss related technical issues.
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 large quantities of steel as a material on ships.
Luo Zhixue knew that iron-ribbed wooden hull ships were a feasible development path, but the problem was that he was worried about whether they could be developed with the current industrial and technical capabilities of the Dachu Empire.
These people were summoned to a meeting to understand the technical level.
Judging from the results learned at the meeting, it is still relatively optimistic.
Technical officials from the Ministry of Industry believe that the wrought iron produced on a large scale by Daye Steel Company has excellent performance and can ensure sufficient strength after subsequent forging processing, and can completely replace wood as 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 on a large scale in the machinery industry to produce various iron products.
The iron parts required for some large-scale equipment are also very large. For example, the parts required for large-scale lifting equipment are very large.
In short, the current technical capabilities of the Dachu Empire are sufficient to provide various iron parts for the shipbuilding industry.
However, output will be a problem, because some wrought iron parts used in shipbuilding are often very large. The production and processing of such large iron products are very troublesome. At present, the Dachu Empire still lacks such large-scale production. Mass production capabilities for large parts.
It can only produce some parts for specific industries, mainly large-scale machinery and equipment, on a small scale.
This low output means insufficient quantity and will also drive up prices.
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But price is a very important advantage of iron over wood.
The large amounts of wood used in building warships, especially those used in the main load-bearing parts, are very expensive.
To build a battleship, you need to use wood from thousands of trees. These thousands of trees are not ordinary trees, but specific types of trees, and they have requirements for thickness and height.
And the wood used in some key parts requires some top-quality wood. Once 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. However, for a preliminary industrialized country like the Chu Empire, the cost of building a warship was made up of wood, while artillery was relatively small.
After all, for the Dachu Empire, as long as there are no restrictions on raw materials and can use mechanical equipment to produce things in large quantities, the production costs are basically not that expensive.
But unfortunately, processing of wood is not a problem...the problem is that the wood itself is expensive!
In order to build various warships, the Chu Emperor's empire cut down and purchased all kinds of suitable wood from all over the world. They even went to Guangxi and even Yunnan and Guizhou areas to find and cut down the best wood. They also imported various kinds of wood from various parts of Southeast Asia. Fine wood.
Even so, there are actually many problems. Because it is difficult to obtain high-quality wood such as oak, the Chu Empire can only use other second-class trees, which will affect the performance of the warships built.
Secondly, even if you obtain a large amount of top-quality wood, it will still take a long time to wait. For example, after oak is cut down, it must be placed in a ventilated and dry place for more than ten years before it can become qualified wood for building warships. .
The Great Chu Empire had only been established for a total of more than ten years. As for the pre-Ming Dynasty, people did not play navy at all, but they did not have the habit of stockpiling large amounts of wood.
Therefore, when the Chu Empire was building large-scale ships, the first challenge it encountered was the lack of a large amount of qualified wood, to be precise, dried wood... and an extreme lack of rib wood for the Galen ship type. It requires wood with a certain degree of natural curvature. How can there be so many naturally curved wood in nature that are suitable, old enough, and suitable for shipbuilding...
In the Age of Discovery, some countries used artificial intervention when planting shipbuilding timber in order to obtain suitable timber for ship ribs, so that the timber would have a certain bending angle during production.
Just relying on nature alone, there are so many naturally bent trees!
Historically, during the late Qing Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty launched the Westernization Movement and encountered this problem in the process of building Western-style ships. Because this kind of shipbuilding wood was not specially cultivated in the past decades or hundreds of years, there was not much ship rib wood found in the country. , and it is also difficult to import.
How did the late Qing Dynasty solve this problem?
In the late Qing Dynasty, the Fujian Shipbuilding Bureau skipped the stage of wooden ship ribs and learned from Western powers in building iron-ribbed wooden hull ships. This was how the 'Weiyuan Iron-ribbed Wooden Hull Ship' was built in 1877.
The direct reason why this ship appeared was because the Manchu Dynasty at that time was seriously short of ship rib wood!
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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 a few decades to build a ship again? This is naturally impossible. Since there is no wood in the ship's ribs, iron ribs can be used.
If this road doesn’t work, take a detour!
As for the contemporary Chu Empire, it is also facing the same problem. The land of China, which has no tradition of building Western ships, simply cannot find so many suitable ship rib timbers. In the past few years, it could still rely on plundering all over the country. People were sent to search and cut down trees in various deep mountains and old forests, but as time passed, there were still insufficient supplies.
However, the construction of battleships and many merchant ships cannot be delayed, so the Chu Empire used some tricky methods.
For example, if oak is not available and teak is not enough, then use pine, fir and other inferior woods.
If there is not a large amount of wood to dry naturally, then artificial drying is used for rapid drying to shorten the drying process.
If there are no natural ship ribs, then strong artificial intervention will be carried out on the trees that have already taken shape, in order to make the trees form a certain bending angle in just a few years.
However, these solutions have some sequelae, and these sequelae have caused the ships built by the 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 retired after five or six years of use... because when they were built, they used wood that was not sufficiently dried, and the ribs were not very good, resulting in insufficient service life. After five or six years, it was riddled with holes, and in the end he had to retire.
In any case, wood has actually restricted the large-scale construction of ships in the Chu Empire, especially the scale of building warships.
This is also the main reason why the Ministry of Ship Administration has brought doctrine to Gangta.
Iron is something that, based on the current steel industry of the Da Chu Empire, I dare not say how much is needed, but it is definitely enough for the navy. Especially after the Daye mixing method began to be applied on a large scale, a large amount of wrought iron was produced. It also means that the price of wrought iron has dropped significantly, and costs can be controlled... In addition, after all, the Navy only intends to partially use steel in shipbuilding, mainly for load-bearing structures. It is impossible to say that all steel will be used.
As for subsequent processing, especially the processing of large wrought iron parts, it 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 Chu Empire.
As long as they are willing to spend money, the industrial sector can build several factories specializing in the production of these large parts in minutes. After all, the equipment and technology are readily available, and the only thing needed is to spend money.
And the Dachu Empire is not short of money!
Therefore, after discussion, Luo Zhixue did not refuse the Navy's special funding application, but approved it. However, the amount was not large, only 300,000 Chu Yuan, and asked them to build a test ship using a large amount of wrought iron.
Of course, not all of the 300,000 yuan is used to build the test ship, because the test ship is not a large-tonnage battleship. Even if we first build a small ship of several hundred tons to test, the shipbuilding costs will not be enough. high.
More money is actually used for early-stage technology research and development.
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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, etc.
Although the R&D and construction tasks are undertaken by enterprises directly under the Ministry of Industry, the family also has to settle accounts. If the Navy wants to build iron-ribbed wooden hull ships, it also has to provide money...
After the Navy launched the research and development project of iron-ribbed wooden hull ships, the Navy was ready to continue its efforts. Taking advantage of the emperor's interest in wrought iron, it hurriedly 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 artillery in the Dachu Empire included iron-cast artillery and bronze artillery, and the production processes of the two were completely different.
Cast-iron 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 from this pig iron with a relatively high carbon content. .
This kind of pig iron barrel cannot be finished at all in the future... because the carbon content of the pig iron material is too high and the hardness is very high, and the quality of the pig iron these days is not very good and is relatively brittle.
Therefore, it is very difficult to perform subsequent finishing processing on cannons cast from pig iron.
At present, the mainstream method of iron casting artillery, including that of the Da Chu Empire, is formed by one-time pouring of molds.
This is why the army of the Chu Empire dislikes pig iron artillery, and even the navy is disgusted with this stuff...
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 explosion, 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 were very typical cannons and small shells...
Because copper is relatively soft, bronze artillery can be poured into a solid barrel, 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 into the solid bronze barrel, and finally a barrel was produced.
It seems that the latter is more complicated than the former, with many more processing steps, and it seems to be very difficult, but in fact, for the Dachu Empire, which uses a large number of water-powered machinery and equipment, the production and processing of bronze artillery is even more convenient and faster... …and produce faster.
The Chu Empire began to adopt this method on a large scale to produce bronze artillery in the early stages of the Unification War.
During this period of the muzzle-loading artillery era, bronze artillery had no shortcomings except that it was expensive.
But the problem is that the shortcoming of being expensive is nothing in the Great Chu Empire... A 115mm bronze cannon only costs a few hundred Chu Yuan... This is not enough for an empire with a central fiscal revenue of more than 120 million Chu Yuan. Word.
He said that just by leaking a little bit from the cracks of his fingers, he could buy tens of thousands of doors...
Therefore, the military of the Dachu Empire would rather use the more expensive bronze artillery than iron-cast artillery, even if the price difference between the two is several times... Not only the army uses all Qingtong artillery, but even the navy widely uses bronze. artillery.
The artillery used by the navy is of relatively large caliber and large in number, such as the Jinling-class third-class battleships and subsequent improved models.
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The artillery configuration is the same, with twenty-six 170mm naval guns on the lower deck and twenty-eight 130mm naval guns on the upper deck.
In addition, a total of thirty 100mm naval guns are deployed at the bow, stern and sides of the ship. However, these places are not considered full-through decks. This is why the Jinling-class battleships of the Dachu Empire Navy were assigned to It is classified as a third-class battleship.
Because this thing only has two fully accessible decks.
In the classification of the Da Chu Empire Navy, first-class battleships and second-class battleships are the main battleships with three fully accessible decks.
It's just that the powerful combat effectiveness displayed by the Jinling-class battleship makes this seemingly double-deck battleship have a combat effectiveness comparable to a three-deck battleship.
And the price is not expensive...
This kind of warship has achieved a very good balance in terms of performance, cost, and even daily use costs, and is extremely cost-effective.
As for the first-class battleships, they are too expensive. The Dachu Empire only plans to build them in small quantities. As for the second-class battleships, they are too high to be built and the price-performance ratio is low. The Dachu Empire gave up on this class of battleships during the design stage. , was never built.
Whether it is a third-class battleship, a first-class battleship, or even a cruiser, it requires a lot of artillery, and most of them are large-caliber long-barreled naval guns.
If all bronze artillery were used, the cost of the artillery alone would increase several times.
But... the Da Chu Empire Navy still firmly chose to use bronze artillery on a large scale!
Although the early iron-cast artillery was cheap, and the Chu army had always experimented with equipment and improved it, the overall number was not large, and the main body was still bronze artillery, even big ones like the 170mm naval gun.
As for the cost of the bronze cannon... although it is high, it is not unacceptable.
After all, the Chu Empire had a relatively complete preliminary industrialization system, and bronze cannons were expensive, mostly due to the relatively expensive materials.
As for the processing cost, it is even cheaper than iron cannon.
Calculated in this way, although the price of copper is more than ten times that of pig iron, the final purchase cost of bronze cannons is only five or six times that of iron cannons.
After comprehensively considering the cost of the entire life, the cost of bronze artillery will be further reduced. A cast iron artillery can basically have a service life of three to four hundred rounds, but a bronze artillery can easily have a service life of eight hundred or even one thousand rounds.
Basically, two iron cannons can hold up to one bronze cannon.
In the end, even if the bronze artillery is scrapped, it can be directly pulled back and melted to continue to make bronze artillery. After the iron-cast artillery is scrapped, it is difficult to even buy scrap iron... Bronze artillery can save a fortune in resource recycling.
In the end, the overall cost of using bronze artillery in the Chu Empire was only more than twice that of iron artillery.
But it has brought more superior combat performance, both accuracy and power have been greatly improved.
Therefore, the army and navy of the Chu Empire would rather use seemingly expensive bronze cannons than pig iron cannons.
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 a performance of 70 to 80%, then the Navy can make up its mind to adopt iron-cast artillery on a large scale.
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In the past, it was impossible for cast iron artillery, but wrought iron artillery has this hope.
The Navy is thinking about using wrought iron to cast artillery to reduce the cost of the artillery. After all, the Navy needs too many artillery pieces, and they are all medium and large caliber artillery. If it can use wrought iron cannons to save a lot of costs, the Navy will be very happy. .
Of course, the premise is that the performance of the artillery made of wrought iron cannot be too high!
Luo Zhixue has nothing else to say about this. I support it... Using wrought iron to produce artillery is a major trend in the development of artillery. Now there has been a breakthrough in the steelmaking process, and the processing capacity of large equipment has also been improved, which is just right. Give it a try.
Even if you can't solve it with just a while of craftsmanship, you can always succeed if you try a few more times.
Besides, you won’t get pregnant even if you give it a try. The worst thing is that it won’t work. Even if you lose some experimental funds, it won’t be a big loss.
Moreover, Luo Zhixue is also looking forward to making wrought iron cannons now, but when steel technology and processing technology develop further, real steel cannons may be made later.
