Although the modern fishing vessels owned by the traverser have absolute advantages in reconnaissance ability, protection, speed and mobility, their firepower is very weak. If there were not three pirate ships this time, but thirty, it would be difficult for Yu No. 1 to eat good fruit alone, and several pirate bosses in the Fujian and Guangdong Seas each had the strength of at least three or four hundred boats. In the entire Bopu Port, the scope of activities and various facilities of the traversers have far exceeded the scope of the Bopu camp, and more than 200 traversers and members are scattered in an extremely vast space, almost completely undefended.

To sum up: not only should the equipment of the navy be upgraded, but in case of emergency, the port fortification work of Bopu Port must also be put on the agenda. Among the staff officers' recommendations were: the construction of artillery batteries; serial production of artillery not less than the level of 1800; production and stockpiling of ammunition; Establish a coastal guard fleet - this fleet will mainly consist of sailing ships to save the overhaul life of fishing vessels, which have not yet been able to be overhauled by traversers in 5~10 years. Even simple maintenance like applying a ship's bottom paint can't be done. It's not that there are no materials, it's that the anti-rust and toxic effects of modern ship bottoms can't be made.

The task of building the cannon was handed down to the mechanical units of the industrial sector. It's a stimulant for the mechanical maniacs. I have been aggrieved for many days to make some small hardware, and even the mechanical crossbow is all wooden. Now they can finally come out with cannons, and they are all full of energy. In the workshop of the machine factory, artillery enthusiasts from all walks of life came up with a variety of schemes, and the basic styles were basically concentrated on three types of artillery: 12-pounder mountain howitzers; The 92 infantry gun is light and flexible, small and versatile; Mortars that beat the world. Each of them has added different features and improvements to the cannons according to their own preferences.

A lot of steel is needed to build a cannon. Deng Yingzhou has already brought two batches of pig iron ingots and a small amount of wrought iron, totaling 50 tons, from Guangzhou, as well as 20 tons of much-needed coal. It can roughly meet the initial large-scale steelmaking demand.

In the 21st century, small converter steelmaking belongs to the backward industry that the state has eliminated, but here it is a truly advanced industry. This industry is located in the Bopu port area.

The choice in Bopu is because Lingao's steel consortium is an enterprise that needs to import all raw materials, and the bulk of coal and iron ore transported by ship can be used nearby. The current steelmaking workshop is nothing more than a large brick and pillar shed, with four small converters and one iron furnace lined up on the hardened floor.

Ji Wusheng, the head of the metallurgical department, worked as a steelworker in the past, and although he had never engaged in small converter steelmaking, he still understood the principle. After D-Day, he had already smelted several furnaces of steel, proving that it was possible to make steel from charcoal and local pig iron products, but the disadvantage was that it was difficult to grasp the proportion of materials, so it was completely up to luck to produce any steel each time. In addition, the energy consumption of the metallurgical sector is too large to stop all the nearby power consumption departments when making steel.

According to the composition of pig iron detected in the metallurgical group, a converter side blowing method is used for iron making, and a certain proportion of wrought iron is added by the converter side blowing method. The ratio is about 76% pig iron and 24% wrought iron, and a very small amount of sand is required, which has the effect of creating acidic slag and sucking out the phosphorus contained in pig iron.

After the discovery of the refractory materials of the estate, the metallurgical group has built an iron furnace, a round iron melting furnace that is not large, but much more complex than the converter. Because the converter requires that the molten iron coming out of the furnace must reach 1380 degrees Celsius. This temperature is difficult to reach with ordinary fuels, and the maximum temperature that can be reached by humans is 1250 degrees Celsius before the regenerator.

To reach this temperature, it is necessary to replace the cold blast with a hot blast. This is called a "regenerator". The concept of hot blast was invented by the Englishman Nelson and applied to the ironworks in Glasgow in 1829.

The Jishu level of the regenerator used in the metallurgical group is roughly the same as that of the British steel mills in 1850, and the cast-iron tubular hot blast furnace is used. The cold blast passes from the upper branch of the blast main to each furnace, and through the arched cast iron pipe located over the fire into the tube on the other side of the heat exchanger chamber, and then into the air outlet of the furnace. The plant is sealed in a thick arched furnace made of bricks and refractory materials to preserve and reflect as much heat as possible, and the blast air is heated directly to a temperature of 300 degrees Celsius, enough to melt the lead. However, this temperature can not satisfy the metallurgical group, and another measure is to heat the exhaust gas, which leads the exhaust gas of the ironmaking furnace from the top of the iron-melting furnace with a ceramic pipe, enters the regenerative furnace from the top, and then discharges it from the exhaust gas port of the lower part.

In the use of coal or coke in the iron furnace will produce a large amount of gas, for centuries, this gas is basically discharged from the top of the furnace, the gas burning flame is very spectacular at night, but it is a serious waste of energy and pollution of the environment, so in 1832, an iron factory in Baden, Germany first piped the gas to the regenerative furnace for heating, a variety of methods will eventually raise the hot air to more than 500 degrees Celsius.

Without a regenerative furnace, it is possible to make iron or steel, but it is completely incomparable in terms of production efficiency. According to the calculations of the British, the early regenerative furnaces increased the supply air to more than 300 degrees Celsius, and the output of the same amount of fuel iron increased by 3 times compared to cold blast.

Hot air at high temperatures can cause damage to the air supply of the furnace and must be protected. The jishu level of the traverser is already enough to overcome this problem. They easily copied the Scottish tuyere, invented by Condy of the Scottish Ironworks, which had a wrought-iron coil embedded in a cast iron conical tube with two ends protruding from the bottom of the tapered sleeve, one on each side. Water flows in from one end of the protruding tube to the narrow end of the tuyere. The water goes around in the coil and the zuihou flows out through the pipe that sticks out on the opposite side.

With this furnace, the metallurgical team was able to successfully produce steel in several small-scale steelworks. The next step is coking.

In the early days, the traversers used charcoal, but coke was still the most ideal fuel. The significance of coal coking is not only to provide high-quality fuel for the steel industry, but also to provide various by-products obtained in the coking process as important raw materials in the chemical industry. For this reason, a complete set of coal coking equipment was shipped. In addition to coking, more than 20 important chemical products can be made from the by-products produced by coking. Including gasoline, diesel, asphalt, phenol, toluene, crude benzene, sulfuric acid, various solvent oils, lubricating oils and paraffin. It can be said that once the coal coking complex is put into operation, the chemical level of the crossing will have a qualitative leap.

However, as with all packaged equipment, installation is difficult. Although the manufacturer was trained in advance, a large number of drawings, installation manuals and special equipment were prepared. In the hands of a group of halfway installers, progress is still slow. Moreover, this system belongs to the continuous transportation transformation, which cannot be started and stopped, and hundreds of tons of coal will be required for one feeding. The Traverser now has only 20 tons of coal reserves. Therefore, the metallurgical group can only adopt the simple soil method of coking.

There are many methods of soil coking, the simplest is the open-air method of piling up, 2~4 tons of coal are piled up into a semi-circle on the ground, the bottom diameter is 3~4 meters, and the straw is covered with fire, and it can be coking in 4~5 days, and the coking rate is only 50%, this method has been used in the era of large iron and steel, and the waste of resources and environmental pollution caused by it is extremely serious.

Once again, Luo Duo found an improved solution from the computer's scientific and technological resource library, using an open round furnace for coking production. The furnace is available in three different sizes, ranging from 55 to 260 tons per feed. The 55-ton furnace is the most cost-effective, and it is also in line with the current situation that the traverser has limited coal in the initial stage.

The building materials are also very simple, except for a few parts that require iron sheets, the basic materials are bricks and refractory bricks. The whole coking process takes about 12 days, the coking rate is 75%, this furnace can use the gas produced by coking to heat the coke oven, and at the same time can recover a part of the coal tar. The tar is collected in clay pots after cooling and recycling, ready to be used as a chemical raw material in the future.

Finally, the coke and pig iron are ready. Ji silently summoned the steelmaking workers. The newly converted travelers donned asbestos suits and gloves, special hats and color-changing goggles. He repeated several key points and the people in various operating positions: first, the air volume must be adjusted evenly, not big or small, and secondly, when the molten iron is poured into the furnace, it cannot be higher than the tuyere, otherwise the tuyere will be dead, zuihou is the amount of molten iron poured, each time can not exceed one-sixth of the converter furnace cavity.

Two blowers began to operate at the same time, one blew the iron furnace, gradually raised the temperature to more than 1300 degrees, the pig iron ingot has been completely melted, at this time Ji silently commanded the workers to put in 0.4% baking soda for desulfurization, at the same time the converter is preheating, according to the requirements, the whole converter should be preheated to 1000 degrees Celsius, in order to reduce the temperature loss after the molten iron enters.

When the temperature of the molten iron in the furnace has reached 1380 degrees on the optical thermometer, the molten iron is poured into the converter and begins to blow, at this time, the wind pressure of the blower is kept at 0.07~0.12 atmospheres, and the molten iron is continuously heated under the urging of high temperature hot air. Ji Wusheng stared closely at the tongue of fire in the furnace, one by one the iron flowers were constantly bursting, the tongue of fire was red and yellow, followed by yellow-white-white, zuihou was completely white and shiny. This shows that the furnace temperature is constantly rising.

The blowing lasted for more than ten minutes, the density of the star-shaped carbon flowers continued to increase, and the white flame tongue changed from short to long, and the carbon combustion entered the peak at this time.

When Ji Silent saw that the tongue of fire began to shorten and the carbon flowers thinned out, he knew that the remaining carbon in the molten iron was beginning to approach the content of steel. He used the rocker to go up and down once or twice to see if there were more carbon sparks, and when he saw that the carbon sparks did not suddenly increase, he ordered the wind to be turned off.

Subsequently, the workers removed the furnace lid and air duct, and began to slag and scrape, zuihou pouring. The molding sand is made of 90% yellow sand, 5% clay and 5% white clay. After the casting is formed, it is the steel ingot. As for whether this steel ingot is high-carbon, medium-carbon and low-carbon, Ji Wusheng can't control it for the time being, and every time a furnace comes out, he has to do a shiyan to determine what kind of steel it is.