In order to produce more advanced nickel-chromium hardened armor, Luohai Iron and Steel Company is now immersed in the manufacturing and production problems of nickel-chromium alloy steel.

The other major armor steel supplier of the empire, Jingzhou Iron and Steel Company, they engaged in the carburizing process at the beginning, is the gaseous carburizing process, although this process can make the steel plate carburizing deeper and more uniform than the solid carburizing process, but the technical difficulty is also higher, the Jingzhou plant did not complete the research and development of the gaseous carburizing process until November of the eighth year of Qiansheng, and began to mass produce hardened armor steel.

Their gaseous armor is a little better, but it is also more expensive because it is more expensive to process.

After the Jingzhou Iron and Steel Company came up with the gaseous carburizing process, it did not stagnate, but continued to develop armor with more advanced performance, and also aimed at nickel-chromium alloy, from the end of last year to the present, it has been immersed in the research and development of nickel-chromium alloy steel mass production problems.

In the process of developing the hardened armor of the two empires, the two major steel companies of the empire conducted countless tests in order to find the exact formula ratio of the nickel-chromium steel.

At the same time, in order to find a better and more cost-effective carburizing and hardening process, they racked their brains and tried almost all the carburizing processes they could think of.

In order to make continuous adjustments in repeated attempts to find the best ratio formula, the best processing method!

At the same time, it is necessary to ensure that it can be mass-produced.

Hardened armor steel, which can only be produced in laboratories and cannot be mass-produced, is of little value to the current Empire.

What the Empire needs is a few thousand tons of armor steel that can be attached to warships, not a small laboratory product.

And this kind of continuous attempt, which requires a large number of scientific researchers to work day and night, can not help but be time-consuming and extremely expensive!

And the most important thing is that in the field of hardened armor, the empire has taken the lead, and there are no similar foreign products for their reference, let alone the introduction of technology, they can only bite the head and keep trying repeatedly to find the best solution.

Especially in the manufacturing problem of nickel-chromium alloy steel, they are deeply aware of the difficulty!

Only when I personally developed this high-performance alloy steel, did I know why foreign counterparts shouted what nickel-chromium alloy steel was many years ago, but why can't I do it now.

This thing is so hard!

Foreign countries, especially several armor suppliers from the Kingdom of Krull, discovered a few years ago that nickel-chromium alloy steel has a higher potential, but it is difficult to manufacture this thing on a large scale with the current technical means.

Moreover, foreign manufacturers have found that nickel-chromium alloy has higher potential, and it is also crooked!

They discovered the benefits of case hardening many years ago, but the problem is that they haven't been able to find the quenching process for case hardening of large areas of naval armor yet!

What, surface hardening is not a new thing, ancient swords, and now the armor-piercing bullets commonly used by warships in various countries, all use the quenching process, and what is the quenching process used for? It is to harden the surface and improve the strength.

However, the area of armor plates used in battleships is huge, and it is difficult to quench large areas of naval armor with traditional impregnation.

At the same time, in terms of the idea of armor development, they are still more inclined to composite armor, and have been trying to surface harden the steel surface iron armor......

They have gone the wrong way in the research and development of hardened armor!

It is said that seven or eight years ago, when Lin Ziran asked the industrial sector to harden armor, the technicians of the empire also took a detour, stupidly trying to use the traditional process to harden the surface of composite armor, and later found that this road was really impassable, so they turned to improve the quenching process, and only after the Li process did they have the ability to quench a large area of monomer steel.

That's how to get hardened armor!

Foreign manufacturers have been tossing composite armor and the traditional quenching process, and this toss and toss to find that the quenching process with nickel-chromium alloy steel will have greater potential......

I have to say that this is also a very coincidental thing!

Although they have not even found a way to surface harden large areas of armor steel, the large-scale manufacture of nickel-chromium alloy steel is even more difficult to solve.

But in fact, the performance of nickel-chromium alloy steel is better after hardening, which is actually the consensus of scientists in the major powers of Bluestar, and the difference between countries is whether it can be made or not!

Whether it can be done depends on the level of basic materials and processing technology of each country.

These two things are not up to standard, not to mention that the nickel-chromium steel hardened armor can't be made, even if it's an ordinary mild steel hardened armor, it can't be made!

Otherwise, why did the Daheng Empire list the Li Craft Method as top secret, it was because this thing was important!

The empire has been working on hardened armor for many years, and although it has not been able to solve the production problem of nickel-chromium alloy steel, nickel steel hardened armor is also very easy to use, and even ordinary mild steel hardened armor is also very good.

This is already a revolutionary advance that is enough to set off the protection of warships.

The Daheng Imperial Navy will not be in the third naval development plan, hardened armor has been included in the key application technology, the early construction of ships is mainly nickel steel hardened armor, supplemented by ordinary steel hardened armor.

The nickel steel manufacturing process introduced by the empire from the Krull Kingdom is already very mature, and the cost of hardening nickel steel hardened armor with nickel steel as raw material can be equipped on a large scale, but this nickel steel is still a bit expensive.

Hardened armor made of nickel steel is also not cheap.

Relatively speaking, homogeneous mild steel is much cheaper, this thing does not have any technical difficulty, and the cost is low.

Therefore, on some non-capital ships, the navy is a little stingy, and they are reluctant to harden the armor with nickel steel, but only use ordinary soft steel to harden the armor.

So there are actually several kinds of hardened armor used in the Imperial Navy!

The nickel steel hardened armor and ordinary steel hardened armor of Luohai Factory are all made of solid carburizing and hardening process, with slightly poor performance, mature technology and cheap price, also known as Luohai armor.

The nickel steel hardened armor and ordinary steel hardened armor of the Jingzhou factory use the gaseous carburizing and hardening process, which has slightly higher performance, and has just started mass production, and the price is slightly expensive, which is called Jingzhou armor by the empire.

The Navy is using both types of armor!

After all, the Empire's policy has always been to support more than two suppliers at the same time to promote their healthy competition, of course, although they are used for both, but the order volume is very different.

The construction of warships determined in the seventh and eighth years of Qiansheng was all based on Luohai Factory's armored products.

Since the ninth year of Qiansheng, the navy's armor procurement has been more inclined to the products of the Jingzhou factory, because their product performance is better, and although the price is slightly higher, it is not much higher.

But the armor orders of the Luohai plant are still there, but they are relatively fewer.

In the nine years of Qiansheng, 80 percent of the navy's armor orders were monopolized by the Jingzhou Factory, and only 20 percent of the orders were given to the Luohai Factory!

Luohai Factory has only been brilliant in the armored market for less than two years, but it was beaten out of the ring by the Jingzhou factory, and they could only pick up some leftover orders to maintain food and clothing, and they were naturally unwilling.

Recently, they have also been working on the gaseous carburizing process, but it is not enough to have a gaseous carburizing process, the most important thing is the nickel-chromium alloy.

Nowadays, the two major steel companies of the empire are concentrating a lot of strength on the mass production of nickel-chromium alloy, and whoever can get it out first will be able to obtain the navy's armor steel market, so as to eat a full mouthful of oil.

And the development of hardened armor in the empire has also given the empire a large number of small and medium-sized ships stronger survivability!

Although in order to control the cost, the Imperial Navy is reluctant to use nickel steel hardened armor on small and medium-sized ships, but only uses ordinary steel hardened armor, but this is also hardened armor, and the performance of ordinary steel hardened armor with gaseous carburizing process is also quite good.

If you use it on second-class cruisers, destroyers, etc., you can greatly improve the protection performance of these ships.

Even if their armor is very thin, according to tradition, it is only a steel-hulled unprotected ship!

But this thin ordinary steel hardened armor still brought great protection to cruisers and destroyers!

It is naturally unreliable to fight large-caliber shells, but it is very useful against small- and medium-caliber shells, especially high-explosive shells.

This has also led to a batch of newly built cruisers and destroyers in the Daheng Navy, which look like just steel-hulled unprotected ships, and the protective scum is scum!

But in fact, the protective performance is not bad, and a few tens of millimeters of hardened armor can block more than a hundred millimeters

The Daheng Imperial Navy even carried out an in-depth discussion on the protection performance of small and medium-sized ships according to this situation!

As for the capital ships, they naturally use more expensive nickel steel hardened armor, and many of the newly identified capital ships this year have clearly adopted Jingzhou armor with better performance.

The protective performance of Jingzhou nickel steel hardened armor is about 15 percent higher than that of Luohai nickel steel hardened armor, although the price is slightly expensive, but after improving the protective performance, it can have greater protection performance of the warship, and the navy is also willing to spend this money.

In order to support the two factories separately, the navy also treated them equally, and ordered armor products from the two factories at the same time to be assigned to different warships.

Therefore, there are two types of hardened armor applied to the warships of the Daheng Empire today, and it is not a single Luohai armor or Jingzhou armor.

The new warships with hardened armor have already been put into service, the most notable of which is the battleship Jingzhou.

The ship completed the preliminary hull construction in October last year and was officially launched, and then entered the outfitting state.

But the outfitting process did not go as smoothly as expected.

There was a problem with the 300-millimeter 35-caliber naval gun produced by the Jingzhou Machinery Company, because the gun used smokeless gunpowder as the propellant, and the bore pressure was higher, and the production progress was affected.