Chapter 191 Shipbuilding! Begin!

Three days later, Chen Lingfei's fleet arrived to deliver food and silver.

A total of 3,000 stones of grain were transported from Heilong Bay to Fushan City and stored. 3,000 stones of grain were nearly 600,000 kilograms. In this time when the green and yellow are not connected, it can alleviate the food crisis for a period of time. Of course, a large amount of grain must be purchased from Jiangnan in the future. Gold in prosperous times, food in troubled times, and the eternal truth!

According to the description of Chen Lingfei's subordinates, they did not encounter Yang Shengtian's pirate ship at sea. The black iron head was hidden somewhere or had retreated. Zhang Zhun ordered the navy to temporarily retreat and continue to arrange sentries on the coastline. If the pirates were found, continue to fire a gun to warn.

After getting the money, Zhang Zhun naturally transferred 30% of it to Xue Zhidie for shipbuilding. The appearance of the black iron head made Zhang Zhun determined to build a special warship. The captured pirate ship and two pig-bellied ships could never get into Zhang Zhun's magic eye... The performance was still too poor.

He wants his own special warship!

He needs his own special fleet!

He needs his own unique navy!

So, the area along the Quail Bay became busy. A large amount of silver was poured out, and workers and materials gathered here quickly. August is a relatively leisurely slack season. As long as the wasteland is not reclaimed, many military households are free. In order to earn money for food, they support themselves before the rice harvest, and there are many people coming to work. The food consumed by the workers alone every day is hundreds of kilograms.

At the same time, a large amount of wood was also begun to be cut down in Laoshan. The thick oak, chestnut, iron, hawthorn, pine, fir and so on were all cut down. As long as the diameter was above the bowl mouth, all of them were cut down. This was Zhang Zhun's original words. So all kinds of materials were transported to Partridge Bay and soon piled up like mountains.

Zhang Zhun himself was also at Queqiao Bay and discussed the issue of warships with Xue Zhidie.

Shipbuilding is a systematic project that involves many aspects. There are many principled issues that must be determined before the formal start of construction. Otherwise, there will be no chance of modification in the future. There are several things that Zhang Zhun needs to determine.

The first is to determine the size of the warship.

The two most commonly used ships in the Ming Dynasty were: one was a blessing ship and the other was a treasure ship. The information of the treasure ship was lost and could not be built. Now the only ones that can be built are only blessed ships. The blessed ship is divided into four different types according to their size. The fourth blessed ship is the smallest, about one hundred materials. The third blessed ship is slightly larger, about two hundred materials. The second blessed ship is even larger, about three hundred materials. The first blessed ship is the largest, about five hundred materials.

The three ships owned by the Shen Lingfei fleet are the No. 3 Fu Ship with a displacement of about 200 tons and a load capacity of about 100 tons (about 1,000 stones). The three ships are fully loaded and only transport 3,000 stones (about 600,000 jin) of grain. Such transportation capacity is not very strong. In the Yuan Dynasty, the fleet basically carried more than 3,000 stones per ship. Since the implementation of the sea ban policy, the shipbuilding technology of the Ming Dynasty has severely shrunk.

The lucky ship itself is actually designed to be used as a merchant ship. The warship is just a side job. If it is to be used as a professional warship, there are a large number of special parts that need to be reinforced, which will increase its own weight a lot, and the cargo capacity will naturally be smaller. Moreover, there is a more depressing problem, that is, the lucky ship is never very suitable as a warship. The innate shortcomings are, and no matter how they are modified, it is difficult to satisfy.

After research, Zhang Zhun decided to build the smallest Cangshan boat of fifty materials.

The Cangshan Ship is a professional combat ship of the Ming Navy. Its ship size is relatively small, with a total length of less than 20 meters, a width of about four meters, and a draft of about five feet (about 1.666 meters). According to the Ming Navy, it is equipped with 2 thousand jin Folang machines, 3 bowl guns, 4 Lumi guns, 4 spray drums, 60 chimneys, 30 fire bricks, 100 rockets, 4 medicine crossbows, and 100 crossbow arrows. The entire ship is 37 people, 4 sailors, 33 soldiers, and 3 A-class. The first A-class Flang machine and a shotgun, the third A-class firearm, and the second A-class cold weapon.

Of course, in Zhang Zhun's hands, all other weapons except the Hu Ben Gun were eliminated. At the same time, in order to adapt to the shooting of the Hu Ben Gun, some changes were made. The standard Cangshan ship had a displacement of about 50 tons. However, after Zhang Zhun and Xue Zhidie's research, it was decided to expand the volume of the Cangshan ship slightly and the displacement reached about 70 tons. This is more conducive to the shooting of the Hu Ben Gun.

Zhang Zhun chose Cangshan boat as a combat ship for a full reason: First, a fifty-foot warship is easier to build and more mature in technology. With the technology mastered by Xue Zhidie, it is completely difficult. Second, it is the construction speed is relatively fast. According to Xue Zhidie's estimate, such a Cangshan boat can be completed in about three months with the guarantee of manpower, material resources and financial resources. If multiple ships are started at the same time, the speed will be faster. Third, it is easier to find the keel of a small boat. For a warship, keel is a very critical element, and the best wood must be used as much as possible.

The keel of a large ship requires strong and huge hardwood. The bigger the hardwood, the better, the longer the better, and the older the tree, the better. If it is more than three hundred years old, it would be even better. If ordinary wood that is decades old is used as keel, it will be eroded by sea water in the short term, and rotten away. However, hardwood that is more than three hundred years old is searched for in the deep mountains and forests of Liaodong, it is difficult to find in other places. Because this kind of hardwood is also the first choice for wealthy and noble families to make coffins.

"There are many ants that bite the elephant to death."

"Wolf Pack Tactics."

These are the two basic principles of naval army combat established by Zhang.

With Fushan City's current economic and technical strength, it is not enough to build large warships. Even if they are barely built, they are not applicable. Without a large number of skilled sailors and a large number of experienced commanders, they cannot control large warships at all. It seems that the power of machine guns is great, but if they are used by a child, the enemy may not be able to kill themselves, and the recoil will be killed instead.

A large number of small boats just train a large number of sailors and commanders. In fact, the combat effectiveness of dozens of small warships may not be worse than that of a large lucky ship. The key is the use of tactics. Moreover, from a strategic perspective, the Fushansou naval army does not currently need large warships.

The main task of the Fushansou naval army is still near-shore defense, that is, to guard against attacks by pirates. Therefore, there is no need for too large warships. On the contrary, considering the need for patrol and alert, the number of warships is more important. Otherwise, it cannot be rotated. Just like the later escort of the Gulf of Aden, a battleship of 50,000 tons is better than a fifteen 3,000 tons frigates.

According to Zhang Zhun's suggestion, each Cangshan ship is equipped with fifty Tiger Ben guns, which is quite powerful during naval battles. For example, if there are three Cangshan ships and the black iron head pirate ship may not be able to escape. The wolf pack tactics can attack from three directions to make the pirate ship. This is something that merchant ships like Pig Belly Ship cannot do. Pig Belly Ship is suitable for pulling goods and people, but it is really not suitable for fighting.

The second is to determine the type of sail.

The choice of sails is a very critical element of warships.

"Are you using hard sails or soft sails?"

For this issue, Zhang Zhun and Xue Zhidie expressed their opinions and argued for a full day.

I wonder if you have noticed that when you play "Age of Discovery 4", there is a big difference between warships in East Asia and Western warships on sails. The sails of Chinese sails are straight up and down, like a wall. The sails of Western warships are soft, bulging, large and small, at least dozens of yuan. This is the difference between hard sails and soft sails.

Most sailboats in China have used hard sails, and hard sails are generally woven with thin bamboo strips or cattail leaves. The advantage of hard sails is that they are highly comprehensive, can rotate around the mast, and can even completely utilize the wind in all directions. Compared with hard sails per unit area, hard sails have much greater utilization of wind power than soft sails. Generally speaking, with the same wind power, the speed of hard sails is faster than that of soft sails.

However, the disadvantages of hard sails are also very obvious. Since the hard sails are connected together and cannot be suspended separately, they must be lifted and lowered as a whole. Therefore, the weight of the hard sail is generally relatively large, and the larger the sails, the heavier it is. Some large ships even "no one can do it". Because of this reason, the area of ​​the hard sail cannot be too large, otherwise the person cannot pull it. The height of the mast cannot be too high, otherwise the strength of the mast will be affected. Otherwise, the soft sail will have no advantage compared to it.

The soft sails of Western ships have to build the mast very high because of the low comprehensive efficiency of the sail surface. The mast is too high, and the mast is too high, which brings the mast strength problem. In order to increase the strength of the mast, many ropes must be tied to the mast to enhance the strength of the mast. In this way, the sail surface cannot rotate around the mast like a Chinese-style hard sail, and some of the wind cannot be used. Even because it is a soft sail, the utilization efficiency is extremely low.

Therefore, when the soft sail is at its highest efficiency, it is when it is at a downwind. At this time, its efficiency per unit area is comparable to that of the hard sail. However, due to its light weight, its area can be very large (some are as high as more than 6,000 square meters), so the thrust you can obtain during a downwind is far greater than that of the hard sail, and it can also drive larger ships. Even if you consider the situation of headwind during sailing, Western sailboats have historically defeated the efficiency of Chinese sailboats with the total area of ​​sails, and the speed has obvious advantages, and the ultimate speed is even more so.

Of course, in modern times, except for those sailboats built for tourism, the sails used on freighters in order to save energy have all been hard sails in the world. However, modern hard sails are made of aluminum alloy materials and are completely computer-controlled. It seems that the smart Chinese in ancient times discovered the shortcomings of soft sails early, and abandoned soft sails for efficient hard sails. These great advances were unable to form a de facto advantage due to the backwardness of technology at that time...

However, in history, Western sailing ships surpassed Chinese sailing ships in comprehensive performance. After the Westerners introduced Arab spinnades and used desails to solve the problem of low efficiency of cross sails under crosswinds. In the Nanyang region of China, original Arab sailing ships often appear, so Xue Zhidie knew very well about Arab sailing ships. Otherwise, the little knowledge of sailing mastered by Zhang Zhun was not enough to make significant improvements to sailing ships.

The final conclusion is:

Continue to use the hard sail, and at the top of the mast, add auxiliary spinnakers.

The third is whether to introduce watertight cabins.

Another problem with Chinese sailing ships is the gun position and defense. However, both problems are caused by one reason, that is, the water barrier design that is nearly a thousand years ahead of the world. Because if the entire ship does not have a water barrier, it only takes one hole to lift the cargo into the warehouse, and then fill the warehouse by moving the position of the cargo. However, if there is a water barrier, it is necessary to open the opening in each warehouse to fill the entire ship, so there will be several holes on the deck, and each floor is there, so a lot of gun positions will be lost.

Because there are partitions to support the structure, Chinese sailboats either do not use ribs or use very few when constructing them. Western sailboats do not use cabins to support the structure, so they use a lot of ribs, especially warships, almost one by one, which provides a good defensive effect. Therefore, the rate of warships being sunk in the naval battles of the Age of Discovery was very small, and most of them were captured. However, because Chinese sailboats rarely use ribs, they are relatively easy to penetrate, and the damage caused by shells will be much greater than that of Western sailboats.

As the times developed to the 17th century, the damage caused by artillery in naval warfare was getting greater and greater. In large-scale naval warfares, artillery continued and shells flew across the boards. Therefore, the stronger the warships, the better. Zhang Zhun decided to reuse ribs on Chinese sailing ships, and Arab sailing ships were the best reference objects. As for watertight cabins, this could not be taken into account.
Chapter completed!