Taking advantage of internal and external stability, the Army of the Dachu Empire completed the reform of the overall framework of the army, formalizing the three-level units of combat readiness, standing reserve, and garrison that had been implemented in the past few years but did not have a formal name.
As a result, a three-level army system was established: a combat-ready A-level division, a standing B-level division, and a standing C-level division.
Further make better use of effective military spending to complete more combat missions and complete them better.
After all, although the Army's military expenditures are large, it is Alexander who supports more than one million people... In order to save military expenditures, the Army generally conducts military reclamation. Even in places where there are no conditions for military reclamation, the army will Growing vegetables, raising pigs and chickens is to reduce food expenses.
Don't think that just saving some money on food is not worth the massive effort, but in fact, most of the cost of raising an army these days is actually personnel and mules and horses, including personnel salaries and subsidies, as well as people eating horses and chewing food. That's food expenses.
With more than a million people and hundreds of thousands of mules and horses, the food cost is so expensive that guns and guns are much more expensive.
Things like guns and guns cost money to purchase at the beginning, and the prices of guns have never been expensive.
A 115mm standard field gun only costs 500 to 600 yuan... which is less than half a year's personnel expenses for the artillery crew.
At the same time, in the later daily use of guns, the cost is actually not much, at most it is the cost of some ammunition used for training.
During non-combat periods, the loss rate of equipment is very low, not negligible, but the overall loss level is also very low.
A front-mounted copper alloy artillery can be used for decades if it is used in large-scale operations and is properly maintained...
And you don’t have to worry about not being able to use it after ten or twenty years, because the life of a gun is not calculated by time, but by the life of the barrel.
A bronze artillery fires out a thousand shells in continuous combat. If it is only equipped for a few months, it will be scrapped. If not, the charge will be reduced, because after firing so many shells, the strength of the barrel will be reduced. It is no longer enough. If you continue to use it with normal charge, there is a risk of the chamber exploding.
Of course, this is without considering the upgrading of equipment. If it were in the original time and space, it would be normal for the front-loaded smoothbore cannon to last for decades and not become obsolete. But in the Da Chu Empire, with the current situation of the Da Chu Empire Judging from the speed of industrial advancement, it is estimated that we will enter the era of rapid-fire guns in a few decades... No matter what, we will enter the era of breech-loaded rifled racks and withdrawal of guns.
Therefore, the equipment in the Chu army may be updated relatively quickly, but this is another matter.
Generally speaking, the equipment loss rate in peacetime is relatively low. At the same time, the technical level of guns and artillery these days is just like this. They are all stupid and thick things, and they are easy to maintain. They are not like the tanks and aircraft of later generations. Likewise, maintenance is troublesome and expensive.
On the other hand, battleships in the Navy are relatively expensive to maintain, especially wooden battleships that can turn into a pile of rotten wood in just a few years if they are not properly maintained!
Therefore, the navy's maintenance costs are very high even in peacetime. Even if the sailors do not train and hide in the port doing nothing all day long, the regular maintenance of warships parked in the port is also very expensive.
The Army doesn't have so much to worry about. If the artillery is stretched to death, it just needs to be rust-proofed, and then some lubricating oil is added to the bearings and that's it.
The same goes for muskets, just wipe it with some gun oil and it's almost done.
On a daily basis, the biggest start of the army is still people eating horses' chews.
Therefore, the Army vigorously promotes military settlements in various units, planting vegetables, raising pigs, chickens and ducks to save food expenses.
The effect is also very good. Large-scale military reclamation allows the Chu Empire Army to maintain a large number of troops within limited military expenditures.
However, despite this, the Army's military expenditure pressure is still very high.
Now with the three-level organization, one of the main purposes of the Army is to obtain stronger combat effectiveness within limited military expenditures. In other words, it is to further tilt resources towards combat readiness, so that combat readiness units have stronger combat capabilities, and then retain these combat readiness units. Establish military advantage on the battlefield.
Spend your money wisely!
This is an important starting point for the Army's continuous internal reform in recent years. In this regard, Luo Zhixue also supports the Army's internal self-reform.
I'm not afraid of you messing around, but I'm afraid that you'll sit back and wait to die.
If you mess around and create problems, then just solve the problem, and you can also control the problem through small-scale pilots. First test with a small-scale army. If the test effect is good, then extend it to more troops, and finally It is promoted throughout the army, just like the previous model of combat readiness forces and standing forces.
But if you don't give in, you will just stick to your own way. When one day you find that the enemy has become stronger or even surpasses you, it will be over.
And if you want to change it then, it won't be possible in a short while.
Luo Zhixue does not want to see the Army resting on its laurels, nor does he want to see the Navy self-restraint. Instead, he wants to actively innovate and continue to explore and develop better warships and more advanced tactics as domestic industrial technology continues to develop.
This is why Luo Zhixue directly approved hundreds of thousands of additional special funds for the navy to develop iron-ribbed wooden hull ships.
With the support of Luo Zhixue, Emperor of the Dachu Empire, the navy's research and development of iron-ribbed wooden hull ships is progressing very quickly!
The Naval Ship Administration Department quickly based on the new material capabilities of various iron parts provided by many manufacturers, especially Daye Steel Company and Daye Heavy Machinery Company, which is responsible for processing large wrought iron parts, and then in Chengshun Ten In June of the same year, the design of the first iron-ribbed wooden hull test ship was completed.
This test ship is not large, with a design displacement of only over 600 tons, and its tactical positioning is only a frigate, not a larger cruiser or even a battleship.
This test ship will fully use iron materials as the main load-bearing components, such as ship ribs, beam frames, etc., and then lay wooden shells, wooden plywood and superstructures on the iron load-bearing frames.
In order to reduce the technical difficulty and reduce the risk of research and development, except for the heavy use of iron materials in the load-bearing structure, other aspects have not changed much. The deployed artillery and ship types still adopt many designs of the original frigate.
To put it simply, compared with other frigates of the same class being built and used by the Dachu Empire Navy, this test ship only differs in load-bearing structural materials, and other changes are basically not major.
After the initial design was completed, the Naval Ship Administration Department submitted the design plan. After reading it, Luo Zhixue did not interfere too much, let alone some of the design details.
It is Luo Zhixue's consistent approach to let professional people do professional things. He rarely interferes with specific matters in the professional fields of his subordinate officials.
Not to mention this test ship, even if it is such a big thing as the army reform, Luo Zhixue only looks at the results and not the process, let alone interferes too much in specific matters.
He does not think that with some knowledge from later generations, he will be smarter and more thoughtful than the professionals of this era.
Even in the research on the army's line tactics, today's Luo Zhixue is actually not as good as those professional generals in the army. People think about and study these things every day, but it is not Luo Zhixue who relies on some common sense knowledge from later generations to come up with it. You can come up with a better way if you shoot.
Because many things do not mean that they are good as long as you think they are good, nor do they mean that more advanced things in future generations will be the last.
With the current technological level of the Chu Empire, even if Luo Zhixue proposed some tactical ideas such as the trinity of land, sea and air, and the coordination of infantry and tanks, it would be of no use.
As for tactics, it is not that the advanced ones are good, but the ones that are suitable are the best!
The same goes for the Navy's iron-ribbed wooden hull ships. Luo Zhixue knew very well that steel warships were better, even if it was just laying wrought iron armor on the outside of the wooden hull, but the problem was the limitation of technical level.
An all-steel battleship cannot be built just by asking. The processing of materials, assembly of parts, welding, etc., as well as the most critical factors such as power, cannot be built just by asking.
How to make better iron-ribbed wooden hull ships under the current technical conditions is the most important thing in the field of warships of the Da Chu Empire.
Luo Zhixue, who did not interfere too much, quickly approved the Navy's construction plan for this experimental ship and named it Jiangning himself.
Jiangning County is also a county under Yingtianfu of the Great Chu Empire. It is also the seat of Yingtianfu and the capital of the Great Chu Empire.
Luo Zhixue directly named the experimental frigate after the county where the capital is located, which shows that he attaches great importance to it.
After the design plan was approved by Luo Zhixue, the Navy quickly started construction work.
However, the construction of this kind of test ship is still very troublesome and is expected to take a long time. It is completely different from the mature pure wooden frigates now built.
Now the Da Chu Empire is building a frigate. As long as the wood used to build the ship is prepared in advance, the entire construction process is very short. It only takes about half a year for the Songjiang Naval Shipyard to complete the construction, launch, and outfitting. and several months of trial sailing.
From laying the keel to being officially delivered to the navy in complete condition, the time required for a frigate is only about a year.
This is still the normal production time. If we work overtime and deploy more workers to speed up the construction, then this time can be shortened by a few more months, and the construction and delivery can be completed in more than half a year.
However, the Jiangning frigate is a completely new type of warship. Its construction has no precedent to follow. From the design drawings to the construction process, even how to construct it requires repeated thinking and study.
Here, there are a lot of technical problems that need to be overcome from zero to one.
This is only the technical difficulties faced by shipyards, and does not include the various wrought iron parts needed to build ships.
The production of a large number of iron parts is handed over to Daye Heavy Machinery Company. They have begun to carry out relevant technology research and development since last year, specializing in how to process and forge a large number of iron parts better. part.
However, you don’t have to worry too much about wrought iron raw materials. Daye Iron and Steel Company’s wrought iron output is very large and is still increasing rapidly. The small amount of wrought iron material used in a test ship Jiangning frigate is completely useless to Daye Iron and Steel Company. Not worth mentioning.
You have to know that Daye Iron and Steel Company's wrought iron output reached 8,000 tons in the 15th year of Chengshun, and this number is expected to increase to 20,000 tons this year.
The output is very large. In fact, the wrought iron currently produced by Daye Steel Company is not mainly supplied to the shipbuilding industry, but to various types of machinery industries.
A mere experimental ship would only use one to two hundred tons of raw materials when it is fully sustained. This also includes the scrap rate...the actual materials used are even less.
After all, you can't just use a 600-ton hull material for a ship with a standard displacement of just over 600 tons... it won't float...
Therefore, the problem of raw materials is not big. The technical difficulty lies in how to process these raw materials so that they can achieve the performance required by the design.
Iron ribs used in shipbuilding cannot directly use wrought iron with too low carbon content. The reason why wrought iron is wrought iron is because the carbon content is too low. If the carbon content is too low, it will be soft and lack hardness. .
Therefore, Daye Iron and Steel Company will control the proportion of carbon content in wrought iron during the production process according to the different needs of customers, and then produce iron products with different carbon contents. Generally speaking, it mainly produces carbon content ratios that are of later world standard significance. The low carbon steel on the steel is slightly lower than the wrought iron, which takes into account the plasticity and is easy to process, and can also ensure a certain hardness. It is also called mild steel in the industrial circles of the Dachu Empire.
As for medium-carbon steel or high-carbon steel with higher carbon content, Daye Steel Company can actually produce it directly. However, the problem is that it is difficult to process after production. It can only directly produce iron castings, and the performance of iron castings is often not good. , too brittle and too hard.
When the carbon content reaches a certain level, it becomes useless pig iron.
What Daye Steel Company provides is wrought iron with a slightly higher carbon content, that is, mild steel.
However, even though mild steel has certain processing properties, it is still very difficult for Daye Heavy Machinery Company, mainly because the mild steel parts used in shipbuilding are very large.
This places very high demands on processing equipment.
For the industrial sector of the Dachu Empire, which is engaged in hydrodynamic machinery and equipment, it is very difficult to process these large parts. If the quantity is small, it can be done slowly and at any cost. However, the materials needed for shipbuilding are zero. There are so many parts...
This means that industrial mass production is required, and the cost of production cannot be too high.
This is very troublesome!
Daye Heavy Machinery Company has been researching since last year to try to solve related technical problems, but so far, the progress is not smooth.
How and when it will be resolved in the future, only they themselves know.
Of course, even if the problem of industrial mass production cannot be solved at present, they can still produce a small amount of large shipbuilding parts and supplies to the military through some indigenous methods.
It's just that the price is very expensive.
Just like before, they produced some specific large-scale parts with very small order quantities. They also used some indigenous methods to do it. They could do it, but the cost was extremely high and the output was low.
Songjiang Naval Shipyard also understands some of the problems faced by Daye Heavy Machinery Company, but it has nothing to do with their shipyard.
Songjiang Naval Shipyard is the shipyard that undertook the Jiangning frigate construction order. They are only responsible for the shipbuilding itself. Strictly speaking, it is a bit like an assembly plant!
As for the parts themselves, especially large iron forgings... Come on, that's really not their business scope.
If you ask them to make large-scale iron forgings, it would be like asking them to directly produce the naval guns needed for battleships. Their expertise is inappropriate...
Songjiang Naval Shipyard did not care about the parts produced by Daye Heavy Machinery Company. Anyway, after the first batch of parts arrived, they started formal construction work.
On August 27, the 16th year of Chengshun, the iron-ribbed wooden hull ship test ship, the Jiangning frigate, which had been prepared for more than half a year, was officially laid in the No. 12 dry dock of the Songjiang Naval Shipyard, and construction began. process.
The Navy also attaches great importance to this. Rear Admiral Lin Liangze, Director of the Shipbuilding Department of the Naval Ship Administration Department, and other naval technical officers attended the groundbreaking ceremony of this test ship.
The Naval Ship Administration Department, especially the Shipbuilding Department, attaches great importance to the Jiangning frigate. Those in the Shipbuilding Department have always wanted to build a larger battleship with better performance.
But due to the limitations of materials, well, that is, the limitations of wood, it is difficult to make the trip, especially the ribs of wooden ships with oversized tonnage. This crap cannot be solved at all.
There are not many suitable materials for ship ribs, and the larger the tonnage of a wooden ship, the higher the requirements for ship rib wood. There are strict requirements on tree type, year, size, drying time, etc.
Taking advantage of the vast land and resources of the Chu Empire, coupled with the wood output from various parts of Southeast Asia, and then assisting with some later artificial intervention, the wood can obtain a bending angle.
The rib materials used for ships with a few hundred tons or a thousand tons can barely meet the requirements, but the rib wood used for warships with more than two thousand tons or even three or four thousand tons is too difficult to obtain.
In addition, large-tonnage ships have higher requirements for load-bearing capacity. It is no longer feasible to make warships purely from wood materials. Even the wooden warships in the Dachu Empire actually use a large number of iron parts internally, such as various Many of these connection structures are made of iron.
If you want to build warships with larger tonnage, you need to further expand the use of iron materials. This is the direct reason why the Navy's Ship Administration Department proposed iron-ribbed wooden hull ships.
This is actually a natural process in the development of shipbuilding technology.
Because ships are getting bigger and bigger, in order to meet structural strength and other conditions, the use of iron materials is constantly increasing in the shipbuilding process.
The more they were used, the more iron-ribbed and wooden-hulled ships appeared naturally.
In the future, it will naturally develop into all-steel battleships.
The Naval Ship Administration Department is now counting on the Jiangning frigate to be successfully built and achieve the designed performance.
If successful, the Navy's Ministry of Ship Affairs will immediately start the design and construction of a new generation of warships, from battleships to cruisers and frigates, which will be rolled out one after another.
Especially battleships, the Ship Administration Department has a plan for a 3,000-ton super battleship!
As shipbuilding designers, these people are still not satisfied after designing and building the Guangzhou-class first-class battleship of more than 2,500 tons. They want to build battleships with larger tonnage, equipped with more artillery, and larger artillery.
These people in the Naval Ship Administration Department have an endless pursuit of large-tonnage warships.
Not only those in the Ship Administration Department who pursue technology are counting on the success of the Jiangning frigate, but others in the Navy are also pursuing the success of the Jiangning frigate.
If the Jiangning can be built successfully, it will not only mean that a larger tonnage warship can be built. In fact, this will not have much significance for the current overall strategic development of the Da Chu Empire Navy... because from a comprehensive cost-effectiveness perspective, The current first-class battleships of more than 2,000 tons seem to have powerful combat capabilities, but in practical applications they are far less effective than the third-class battleships of more than 1,000 tons.
This is also the reason why the Dachu Empire Navy only built a small number of first-class battleships, but a large number of third-class battleships.
A first-class battleship is a big toy that pursues technology and extreme performance. It is a symbol of the power of the navy. It is very useful as the flagship of each fleet.
But fighting...that's a matter for third-class battleships!
In fact, the ones used more daily are not battleships, but cruisers and frigates.
Especially the frigates, which are only a few hundred tons in size, are the most commonly used type of ship in the Dachu Empire's navy and actually play the greatest role.
Therefore, even if the Ministry of Ship Affairs can produce super large battleships of more than 3,000 tons or even more than 4,000 tons, the Navy will only build a few ships for practical reasons, and then continue to serve as the flag of the Navy.
And more will be built of third-class battleships of more than a thousand tons and even cruisers or frigates of several hundred tons to about a thousand tons.
This involves cost issues.
Not only the cost of shipbuilding, but also the cost of post-maintenance and personnel costs.
How to complete the task within a limited cost so that the limited military expenditure can maximize its effect is the issue that senior naval officials are most concerned about.
As for the iron-ribbed wooden hull ship, this allowed the navy to see the possibility of reducing costs.
As we all know, the main costs of wooden sailboats are the hull, guns and sails.
Artillery and sail equipment are another topic. Let’s just talk about the hull.
The cost of the hull mainly comes from wood, and the wood used to build warships is very expensive. The cost of wood accounts for a large part of the cost of the hull, and the source is also greatly restricted, and the restrictions on the source of materials further push up The price of lumber.
After all, the supply of wood is limited, but the demand is growing, which will naturally push up the price of shipbuilding wood.
Because of the prosperity of the shipbuilding industry, the price of shipbuilding timber in the Dachu Empire has at least doubled from ten years ago. This is a terrifying figure.
But if iron can be used to replace wood on a large scale, then in the future a lot of money can be saved just in terms of materials.
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