In the fifteenth year of Chengshun, with the further development of smelting technology in the Dachu Empire's industrial sector, the Daye Stirring Method (Pudelin Method) was developed, which enabled the Dachu Empire to mass-industrialize production, which was extremely important for the development of the entire industry. of mild steel.
This also directly drives the development of the national defense industry!
The Navy was the first to follow suit. In the fall, it was the first to propose the use of steel instead of wood as part of the load-bearing structure of warships.
Trying to use the excellent properties of steel to obtain a series of load-bearing properties that are better than wood, and then promote the development of the overall performance of war, such as using the excellent properties of wrought iron to build larger warships, such as more than 3,000 tons or even more Large tonnage battleship.
At the same time, the excellent properties of steel are used to reduce weight as much as possible while ensuring the structural strength of the ship.
This may sound strange. After all, wood is lighter than steel. Why is it that ships built with steel are lighter? The reason is very simple, that is, if a certain strength is to be ensured, for example, the ribs of a battleship have very high strength requirements, and When the performance of the wood itself is limited, in order to ensure strength, thicker and thicker wood is needed, and denser ship ribs are laid.
Although the wood itself is lighter, more wood is needed to ensure the strength of the ship.
Although wrought iron is heavier, it has better strength. Less wrought iron can be used to ensure the overall strength of the ship.
Of course, this also puts forward higher requirements for the steel smelting industry, requiring the produced wrought iron parts to have higher performance, and on the premise of ensuring strength and toughness, the processability must also be ensured...
That is to say, the carbon content must be controlled at a certain level. It cannot be too low, otherwise the performance cannot be guaranteed, and it cannot be too high. If it is too high, it cannot be processed with the current processing capacity of the Dachu Empire...
So this is very contradictory. Even if the steel factory can produce better high-carbon steel, it will not be used... because it is simply impossible to carry out large-scale mechanized processing of high-carbon steel.
Therefore, the carbon content of the material depends on the processing level and application requirements, and cannot be determined casually.
This is also the reason why the wrought iron produced by Daye Steel Company has more than a dozen different specifications. Different industries have different requirements for the strength, toughness, and processability of steel.
The size of the parts also directly affects the processing level.
The larger the parts, the more difficult it is to process.
Of course, these are all because the overall smelting level of the Da Chu Empire is still relatively limited. For example, the obvious indicator of furnace temperature barely reached 1,400 degrees after more than ten years of hard work.
If the furnace temperature can be raised to more than 1,500 degrees Celsius, then there is no need to go to so much trouble and pure molten iron can be produced directly, because the melting point of iron is 1,538 degrees.
After producing pure molten iron, the follow-up process is simple. Carburizing can be carried out according to the needs of the material. By appropriately adding carbon elements, iron-carbon alloys with different carbon contents, that is, steel can be obtained.
At that time, if you want low carbon steel, you will have low carbon steel, and if you want high carbon steel, you will have high carbon steel.
Moreover, various other elements can be added according to the needs to create various different ferroalloy materials.
In addition, once the furnace temperature reaches the required level, direct casting can be used to obtain large steel parts with performance that meets the required requirements, instead of only getting hard and brittle pig iron as in the past...
In particular, very large steel parts can basically only rely on casting, and the production and processing level of large steel parts often represents the basic capabilities of a country's heavy industry.
Even in later generations, only a few truly powerful heavy industry countries will be able to directly cast those ultra-large parts that can easily weigh hundreds of tons... not to mention hundreds of tons, even tens of tons of casting capacity is not something that all countries can do. It can be played around.
As for today's... Da Chu Empire, it still needs a long way to reach this level. At least for now, it is not possible. They have not even solved the most basic problem of furnace temperature and cannot completely melt pure iron.
Therefore, they can only adopt a more primitive method, first make low-carbon steel with lower carbon content and then cast or forge it, and then add carbon elements in the subsequent process to improve the performance.
But no matter what, the Da Chu Empire has initially solved the mass production problem just now.
For this reason, the Navy has also launched the iron-ribbed wooden hull ship plan. This plan not only explores and studies steel as a load-bearing structure of ships, seeks to further improve the performance of warships and reduce costs, but also undertakes the task of replacing wood with steel as the ship's load-bearing structure. The important task of ribs.
This point has nothing to do with performance or anything, as long as it is because the warships and large armed merchant ships used by the Da Chu Empire Navy are all new ship types, and this new ship type is improved from the Galen ship type.
Let’s not talk about the quality of this type of ship, but they have one characteristic, that is, there are a large number of ribs in the ship frame.
These ship ribs are not straight, but curved.
Due to the poor plasticity of wood, it is difficult to make originally straight wood into a curved shape. The only option is to choose wood with a certain degree of natural curvature as the ship rib material.
As you can imagine, this kind of material is difficult to find, and if manual intervention is used in the wood production process, it will take a long time, not years...decades!
A report was submitted to the Ship Administration Department, saying that the ship ribs must be made of natural bent wood, and the local production is very small. A considerable part needs to be imported from various places in Southeast Asia, but the quantity is not large, even though the empire has now collected it all over the world. This kind of natural bent wood, but in the long run, I am afraid that there will not be enough rib materials for shipbuilding in a few years.
But Iron Rib can solve this problem perfectly.
There is a lot of steel for the Chu Empire, so the requirements for iron ribs for shipbuilding are higher, and production is more troublesome, but again, these can be solved as long as a certain price is paid.
Many factors eventually led to the Navy launching the vigorous iron-ribbed wooden hull ship plan.
And then it went a step further, preparing to restart the iron-cast artillery plan again after more than ten years, trying to reduce the cost of artillery by casting wrought iron artillery.
However, although the Navy launched the so-called wrought iron casting artillery plan, the Army was indifferent... It is not that the Army does not pay attention to wrought iron and does not know the situation of wrought iron. In fact, the Army knew about and paid attention to the large iron industry earlier than the Navy. The mass production of wrought iron by the Smelting Iron and Steel Company has been used even earlier. Nowadays, the mounts of newly produced new artillery have begun to use these wrought irons.
But... these are only limited to the gun mount!
As for the gun barrel, the Army still firmly uses bronze barrels!
The Army is not the Navy, and both sides have different requirements for artillery.
The navy requires power and accuracy, but is not sensitive to weight. At the same time, because the navy's artillery is large, it is also more sensitive to cost.
That's why the Navy said that if iron-cast artillery can achieve 70 to 80% of the performance of bronze artillery, they would dare to directly equip it on a large scale.
But as for the Army, they are very sensitive to the weight of artillery. On the contrary, power is secondary, and weight is what the Army values most.
As for the cost, the army's artillery is all artillery with a small caliber and a relatively short barrel. Compared with the navy's large-caliber long-barreled cannon, it is much cheaper.
The barrel of a large-caliber artillery gun in the Navy weighs two to three tons... but the barrel of a commonly used 115mm field gun in the Army only weighs a few hundred kilograms.
There is also a huge gap in quantity. Navy battleships are equipped with dozens of artillery pieces, and first-class battleships are equipped with more than a hundred artillery pieces.
As for the army, it is a combat-ready first-class division with only a few dozen artillery pieces.
So the army seems to have a lot of artillery, but in fact the navy is the largest user of artillery...
So relatively speaking. The Army is less sensitive to the cost of artillery than the Navy.
Coupled with the requirements for accuracy, service life and weight, the Army firmly chose bronze artillery.
Unless cast-iron artillery can keep up in performance, they will not choose cast-iron artillery.
However, although the Army firmly continues to use bronze artillery when it comes to artillery, the Army's opinions are different when it comes to muskets!
Although the Army has not made any big moves like the Navy, in fact many of the Army's weapons and equipment have benefited from the mass production of wrought iron.
How can I put it, the procurement cost of weapons and equipment related to iron has dropped significantly.
In the past, the output of wrought iron was low and the cost was high. But now that Daye Iron and Steel Company has developed the mixing method, the output of wrought iron has increased by leaps and bounds, and the cost has also dropped significantly.
This is also reflected in the cost of weapons and equipment of various iron products as end products.
After all, almost all iron products today are processed from wrought iron. As the output of wrought iron increases and the cost decreases, the price of iron products will also decrease accordingly.
Whether it's the army or the navy, almost the entire defense industry has benefited from the technological breakthroughs of Daye Steel Company.
In fact, the national defense industry is still a small one, and it is actually the entire industrial sector of the Dachu Empire that really benefits.
The output of steel and coal is regarded as an important indicator of industrialization because these two things are extremely important.
Strictly speaking, coal also serves steel.
Therefore, if you want to measure the national strength of a certain country in modern times, um, specifically during the first industrial revolution and the second industrial revolution, just look at their steel production.
easy to understand!
During this period, countries with large steel production were basically major powers.
And the one with the most is the undisputed world boss!
Even during the Third Industrial Revolution, although steel production capacity is no longer the most important indicator, it is still an important indicator of national strength.
This shows the importance of steel!
In today's Dachu Empire, the development of the steel industry also plays a very strategic role.
As the steel industry of the Da Chu Empire continued to develop, the national power of the Da Chu Empire also continued to increase.
At the beginning of Funiu Mountain and even in the first two years after the official proclaimed the emperor and the founding of the country, the Chu Empire did not have any steel industry. Even the iron materials needed to make weapons were smuggled and purchased from outside.
After crossing the river and capturing Wuchang, and even capturing Daye, the Chu Empire officially began to develop the steel industry. At that time, there was no technology at all. It was just throwing money and people, and relying on the most primitive methods to forcibly increase production. .
Daye Iron and Steel Company was established during this period.
At that time, the technical content of Daye Steel Company was very low, and the smelting methods of steel were all old-fashioned. In particular, the production of wrought iron still relied on the original method of frying steel. In order to obtain enough wrought iron, Daye Steel Company at that time The steel company's steel-frying factory is extremely large in scale, with a large number of workers, and they are all densely packed with furnaces for steel-frying!
Later, through continuous improvement, water power was introduced, and larger iron furnaces were built. Although the steel frying method was still used, mechanical equipment replaced manpower to a certain extent, and the scale of production capacity increased.
In fact, this production capacity can basically only meet the needs of national defense and basic people's livelihood needs, and the overall output is still very low.
But even this alone made Luo Zhixue look down on production capacity, it still gave the Dachu Empire a wrought iron production capacity that surpassed other countries. These wrought irons not only met domestic national defense and necessary people's livelihood needs, but also produced The large-scale export of various iron products, especially weapons, brought huge amounts of foreign exchange income to the Chu Empire.
And now... the wrought iron output produced by Daye Steel Company in half a year is more than the wrought iron output produced by all steel companies across the country last year combined...
In just one year, Daye Iron and Steel Company has single-handedly increased the national wrought iron production by more than three times. More importantly, this is just the beginning.
The internal production expansion plan of Daye Iron and Steel Company is still being implemented. Once the expansion is successful, the wrought iron production capacity of Daye Iron and Steel Company alone will be equivalent to twice the total wrought iron production of the country in the fourteen years of Chengshun!
The Dachu Empire includes not only Daye Steel Company, but also more than ten medium and large steel companies such as Dangtu Steel Company, Liaodong Steel Company, Liaoyang Steel Company, Qiongzhou Steel Company, and Tianjin Steel Company.
Moreover, these steel companies are under the direct jurisdiction of the Ministry of Industry, and the Ministry of Industry has taken the lead in contacting these steel companies directly under the Ministry of Industry to negotiate. Each steel company obtained the rights of Daye Steel Company by paying patent fees. The patent authorization of the stirring method is now also making relevant technical preparations.
It may not be possible this year, but by next year, these steel companies will also gradually use the Daye mixing method to produce wrought iron.
By then, the Da Chu Empire's wrought iron production capacity will show explosive growth.
Nowadays, the Steel Department of the Ministry of Industry has begun to worry that major steel plants are expanding production, but coal production capacity and iron ore production capacity are insufficient. By then, there will be iron-making plants, but there will be no coal and iron ore. Blind for nothing...
In addition, they are even more worried that increasing the production capacity of wrought iron by more than ten times or even more in just one or two years will result in a surplus of wrought iron that cannot be sold.
Although the domestic demand for iron products is large, it is not unlimited. If it cannot be sold after expanding production, wouldn't it be doomed...
For this reason, many people in the Steel Department of the Ministry of Industry are very worried.
In the end, the people from the machinery company next door asked them to relax: as long as the price is cheap enough, the domestic machinery industry will charge as much as they can!
Nowadays, domestic major factories have almost endless demand for machinery and equipment. However, because machinery and equipment are too expensive, many factories cannot afford it, or are reluctant to buy so much.
However, if the prices of upstream iron materials are reduced, then their machinery industry will naturally follow suit and rely on low costs to expand the total sales of various types of machinery and equipment. This can also further reduce the costs of end products of various downstream factories, and these end industrial products The price is lower and more markets are gained.
To sum it up, there is one sentence: I am not afraid that you will have too much iron, but I am afraid that you will not lower the price!
If it were capitalists who came over, they would be able to spit on the faces of these officials from the Machinery Department: Why should I lower the price? Why should I only earn ten yuan when I can earn a hundred?
But the factory managers of the major heavy industries in the Chu Empire were not capitalists, but officials!
The Ministry of Industry is not a consortium, but an industrial department of the empire!
Therefore, after a round of discussions between various departments within the Ministry of Industry, they happily made the decision to reduce prices!
It’s not just the price of wrought iron that has dropped, but also a range of downstream products, such as machinery and equipment and various iron products, that have seen comprehensive price cuts!
Several people in charge of the light industry also said that with the price reduction of equipment and the reduction of production costs, they can also reduce the prices of light industrial products such as cloth, which will benefit the people and further expand the export price advantage of the empire's products.
If other countries or forces, especially the princes in the areas where cotton cloth is mainly produced in several handmade workshops in India, knew about this meeting, they would definitely be furious...
Damn it, Chu Manzi's cotton is already cheap enough, but if the price is to be reduced... then what a waste of time they have!
Nowadays, a large number of employees in the handmade textile industry on the Indian Peninsula are almost unable to survive, and they can barely survive by relying on the trade protection of local princes and nobles.
If the price of cotton cloth from the Da Chu Empire continues to drop... By then, I am afraid that even local trade protection will not be able to prevent the widespread destruction of the Indian peninsula's cotton textile industry.
This is the power of industrialization. In fact, the Chu Empire did not specifically target the Indian Peninsula...it did not even target the cotton spinning industry of any indigenous country or force.
The cotton spinning industry of the Dachu Empire mainly supplied domestic consumption, and the proportion of exports was actually very low.
With a population of more than 200 million, no threat of war, sustained economic development, and the beginning of industrialization, the mainland of the Chu Empire is the largest consumer market on the planet!
Even if it is silk, porcelain, these traditional export commodities in China, most of them are actually sold domestically, and the proportion of exports is not high.
The same goes for cotton!
The production and operations of most textile companies in the Chu Empire have always focused on the domestic market, especially the two sworn rivals Hanyang Textile Company and Su Qin Textile Company. The fierce competition between them has always centered on the domestic market. ongoing.
As for exporting, they also do it, but that's all natural.
Not to mention a large number of local small and medium-sized textile companies in the country. They cannot even reach other domestic markets. They basically rely on the local market to survive. Exports are too far away from them.
Therefore, the proportion of cotton cloth exported by the Da Chu Empire was actually not large, but even such cotton cloth exports still directly defeated the handmade cotton spinning industry in neighboring countries!
In the Fuso Islands, there are no practitioners in the handmade cotton spinning industry in those cities. Those who used to either changed careers or jumped into the sea...
The same is true for the Nanyang Peninsula and the islands. Especially with the strong expansion of the Chu Empire in Nanyang and the war that forced all countries to fully open their markets, the local handmade cotton spinning industry was completely destroyed one by one.
On the Indian Peninsula, even though some indigenous princes implemented trade protection measures, the cheap cotton from the Chu Empire still had a strong impact on the survival of the handmade cotton spinning industry on the Indian Peninsula.
After all, the Indian peninsula is quite large, and not every prince has a large-scale handmade cotton spinning industry. For many Indian princes, cotton is imported anyway.
Asking the nearby prince to import cotton cloth also costs money, and it is equivalent to subsidizing the enemy. The most important thing is that it is expensive.
It is much cheaper to import cotton from the Great Chu Empire, which can save a lot of money. Moreover, the Great Chu Empire is far away and there is no direct threat to them. They can do business with the Great Chu Empire with confidence.
The Indian peninsula is not a monolith, which gives the Chu Empire's cheap cotton cloth room to enter the Indian peninsula market.
This is still before!
If the price of cotton cloth is further reduced, I am afraid that the entire Indian peninsula's handmade cotton textile industry will suffer a devastating impact, even with so-called trade protection policies.
What's more, the military of the Great Chu Empire will not always tolerate a small group of indigenous people in the Indian Peninsula and continue to infringe on the legitimate interests of the merchants of the Great Chu Empire.
The Navy has long made a promise to the domestic industry. Well, basically what the Navy boss said when chatting with the new Minister of Industry, Ji Dehua: Sooner or later, when we have the opportunity, our Navy will help the domestic industry to achieve justice. Yes, when the time comes, we will stuff those indigenous princes who play trade protection into the barrels of naval guns and launch them into the Indian Ocean!
Well, our navy is a little tight recently. How about you say hello to Songjiang Naval Shipyard and Guangzhou Shipyard and ask the shipyard to lower the price.
Today's warships are too expensive. Can they be worth dozens or millions less?
However, Ji Dehua, the new minister of the Ministry of Industry, ignored him directly: Everything else is easy to talk about, but there is nothing to talk about money...
Besides, he, Ji Dehua, doesn’t have the power to directly ask his subordinate shipyards to cut prices!
Although the Ministry of Industry directly manages major shipyards, it is only responsible for macro management and payment, and direct coordination among enterprises... but does not involve the specific operations of enterprises under the Ministry of Industry.
Enterprises under the Ministry of Industry, including Songjiang Naval Shipyard and Guangzhou Shipyard, the two largest and most technologically owned government-run shipyards in the country, operate independently and are responsible for their own profits and losses.
And when it comes to money, it's even more difficult. He Ji Dehua dares to ask the shipyard below to lower the price, and the shipyard dares to ask him to pay for it... Otherwise, don't dream that they can sell their own interests.
The huge shipyard has thousands of people, and behind it there are a large number of lumberyards, transportation, wood processing plants, machinery and equipment, ropes and sails, and many other suppliers, all of which depend on the Navy's shipbuilding funds.
You, Ji Dehua, just lower the price if you say so... This is impossible.
The Minister of Industry may seem awesome, but Ji Dehua is now just a co-minister, not a counselor.
Even if Ji Dehua is the Minister of Counselor, if he dares to make this request, he will dare to let Ji Dehua support so many people!
Therefore, Ji Dehua directly ignored the navy's request... and then pretended that the domestic market was enough for me to worry about, and the foreign market was free to do whatever it wanted.
As for the Indian Peninsula, who doesn’t know that your navy dreams of opening up the Strait of Malacca and then setting foot in the Indian Peninsula!
As for our Ministry of Industry, who told you that we are keen on the market of the Indian peninsula... We are currently too busy with the domestic market, so how can we have time and energy to toss in the foreign market!
The foreign market is actually just like that. Well, especially the market in the Indian peninsula, it has the best market, but it doesn’t matter without our Ministry of Industry...
Navy pawn!
