Strictly speaking, the "Zhenman" iron-ribbed wood-hulled sail gunboat was, strictly speaking, a product of the Great Leap Forward.

As early as the beginning of the year, the Navy began a series of verification work in order to build the main warship of the future.

One of the newest Ariko-class gunboats, the Surveillance, was first modified with an 18-pounder naval cannon to test the damaging effect of heavy guns on Western-style warships.

To this end, the navy also bought a second-hand armed merchant ship from the Dutch and added a 20-centimeter-thick oak hull to simulate the main warship of the West in the age of sail.

The results of the first test were not satisfactory.

Even the 18-pounder naval gun, produced using the advanced metallurgical technology of later generations, proved to be a little powerless in the face of the "sandwich hot dog", that is, the Western-style capital battleship with a thick oak hull sandwiched between a dense layer of ribs.

After all, the invading force of the iron ball is just like that, and the kinetic energy is lost quickly after the cannon is ejected.

The final test results showed that within the ideal range of 2000 meters for the Navy, the effective penetration rate of shelling was not high, only 60; It was not until the distance between the two sides was reduced to 1000 meters, or even 800 meters, that the 18-pounder gun was able to effectively penetrate the hull of the opposing ship.

This result is unacceptable to the Navy.

Because the Imperial Navy is currently taking the elite route, in the foreseeable future conflict, a capital warship is likely to be besieged by a superior number of Western warships. In this situation, the importance of firepower is greatly increased, and the battleship must quickly render the enemy ineffective.

Although historically, on this side of East Asia, the colonists did not arrange first-class battleships like the "Sea King" and "Victory", but now that there is a huge variable, no one dares to guarantee the future direction of history.

Therefore, the navy must be lenient with the enemy, and from the very beginning it must take into account the maximum combat effectiveness that the enemy can achieve.

In this way, the 18-pounder gun plan was finally passed, and the 24-pounder gun was immediately introduced.

At a huge cost in terms of total weight, the new ship's weapons system finally satisfied the Navy at a distance of 2,000 meters, and a 24-pounder naval cannon could penetrate any sailing ship in this plane.

After the most important weapon system was determined, the "Navy's 1629 Verification Capital Ship Program" was officially implemented.

Due to the unfavorable wind direction at the beginning of the year, the army was told to be patient, so the Navy at that time had no choice but to abandon the blueprint of a number of verification ships that "ran in small steps" and invested limited resources in this verification ship.

As a result, the verification ship, which was originally designed to be 800 tons, was pulled and began to make a big leap forward overnight, and was rigidly increased to 1,200 tons.

This figure is still somewhat challenging for the Navy, which has always operated combat ships under 500 tons.

It's not so much about the driving as it is about the design.

As for sailing, the navy is now very familiar with the operation of sailboats and sailboats, and the navy has sufficient experience and manpower in this regard, and enlarged sailing ships are not a problem.

The real challenge is design.

If it is carried out according to the original 800-ton plan, then several traversers in the shipyard are still confident that they will have a light-class skin, draw a scoop according to the gourd, and get the new ship on their own.

But after the new ship was enlarged to 1,200 tons overnight and the guns were changed to 24 pounds, the shipyard shrank their eggs. You must know that once any machine is enlarged to a certain extent, then there will inevitably be various problems, which is not something that a few non-professional designers can handle.

In the end, according to the old method, the navy handed over the parameters of the new ship to Emperor Cao, and then the emperor returned to the future to find a design company, first designed, and then used a large computer to simulate the sea conditions to find problems, and finally produced a drawing.

So what the Navy ends up getting, it's a hard drive.

After the construction started according to the drawings in the hard drive, the Navy waited for more than eight months before the planned verification ship named "Zhenman" was able to start sea trials.

And at this point in time, it was already the time for General Cao to return from Guangdong and prepare for the affairs of King Qin, so the sea trial plan of the Zhenman was arranged very tightly, and finally narrowly caught up with the mission of coming to Shanghai Port this time.

As the core force to maintain the hegemony of the empire for some time to come, the Zhenman received a brief naming ceremony before making its first official voyage. Emperor Cao Chuan visited the Zhenman and gave an enthusiastic speech at the bow of the ship.

And the Zhenman did not disappoint the traversers. Regardless of its majestic appearance or strong combat effectiveness, this battleship meets the public's "social expectations" and has become a new generation of powerful weapons for the country.

Since there was no need to think about low visibility, stealth and anti-radar in the 17th century, both land officers and naval warships in this era had an extremely ostentatious appearance, in order to be seen by their own people on the chaotic battlefield.

The Zhenman is not exempt from the blue and gold hull paint, coupled with the white three-masted sails, which not only makes the whole ship look off the charts, but also highly recognizable, as long as you look at it, no one can forget such a slender and beautiful battleship.

Speaking of slenderness, later designs naturally do not design the warships of the 17th century with a low aspect ratio.

In fact, including small frigates, the warships that cross the crowd have always taken the path of large aspect ratios - excellent design and advanced hull structure ensure that the roll of the hull is controlled within the permitted range.

The standard displacement of the entire Zhenman is 1200 tons, and the full load displacement is 1680 tons. This figure has already surpassed the battleship of the British's Sea King in the same period.

Although the Monarch weighs 1,683 tons, it looks a little heavier than the Zhenman, but due to its own weight, in fact, the effective volume of the Monarch is much worse than the Zhenman.

You must know that the load-bearing capacity and yield of wood are far inferior to steel, and a steel warship that seems to be "thin-skinned and stuffed" is much higher than a seemingly thick wooden ship in terms of solidity and cargo volume.

For a sail battleship like the Sovereign, the total thickness of the double hull is usually around 40-46 cm. This data, combined with the ship's ribs, is actually more than half a meter thick.

Such a heavy wooden shell, coupled with the fact that all other parts of the hull had to be made of wood, made the battleship far heavier than a steel battleship of the same size, and it looked very cumbersome and very uncontrollable when sailing.

And a sail warship like the Zhenman, due to the use of a lot of steel in the internal structure, is not only more solid, but also has a lot of effective volume.

Another difference between the Zhenman and the Sail Battleship is that the ship has two gun decks.

As a rule, large sail battleships had three gun decks.

And in order to lower the center of gravity, the guns with the largest caliber will be arranged on the lower gun deck, and the light guns will be arranged on the upper level. This situation led to a common problem of a sail warship: when the waves were high, the lower deck could not open the gun doors, otherwise the sea water would pour into the gun ports.

However, because the Zhenman adhered to the usual "all-heavy gun concept", it abandoned all light guns, and the whole ship was equipped with only 40 24-pounder long-barreled heavy guns.

In this way, with the coal in the bilge and the engine that incidentally maintain the center of gravity, the Zhenman was designed with only two gun decks, and the problem of seawater backflow did not exist.

In terms of firepower, 40 guns seems to be a small number, much less than the exaggerated 104 guns of the Sovereign, but the combat efficiency is much higher than that of the latter.

First of all, since the tasks of melee shooting were given to muskets, wingmen, and heavy machine guns that were easily unused, the number of 24-pounder guns on the Zhenman was actually more than that of the sail battleship.

It is now the 17th century, and the naval artillery of more than 24 pounder in the West is still short-barreled mortar, and the firing range is very short, and it cannot threaten the Zhenman, which has a range of 2,000 meters.

Secondly, with the assistance of advanced metallurgical technology and mechanical loading equipment, these 40 long-barreled heavy guns can achieve long-term accurate salvo fire, and the damage effect is not at all comparable to that of the original artillery.

In addition, there is a little bit of the 40 guns on the Zhenman, which can be fired at the port and port at the same time.

In a traditional sail battleship, the gun emplacements should be divided by two - half on the port side and half on the port side. This situation can be useful in a big melee at sea, and there are enemies on all sides anyway.

Most of the time, however, gunboats fired from only one porthole. If it is necessary to bombard land targets for a long time, the sail battleship sometimes even has to turn in a circle in order to call in the guns on the other side to ensure the safety of the fire and prevent the explosion.

In this way, the 100 guns of the Sovereign, in fact, only 50 on a single side, if you count all kinds of light guns, the total weight of shells in each salvo is far less than that of the Zhenman.

Due to the advanced slide rail system, coupled with the increase in cabin space brought about by the advanced structure and advanced materials, these 40 guns can be easily transferred back and forth on the left and right sides of the ship, and it takes less than a minute.

In short, the advantages brought by technology are multifaceted. In terms of ship type, weapons, protection, and power, the Zhenman far surpassed the Galen ships of the 17th century, and in some respects even surpassed the sail gunboats of the late Qing Dynasty - except for the need to "import" some power parts, the beautiful Zhenman was indeed a perfect "ideal warship".

This time, the northbound fleet with the Zhenman as the flagship set off on December 5, the same day as the sacrifice of the Jinyi Weima Baihu.

Prior to this, the "Qinwang Transport Fleet", consisting of 10 new lock ships, had already set off in advance five days ago.

After practicing various military subjects along the way, the battleship formation smoothly rendezvoused with the transport formation off the coast of Shanghai Port on the night of the seventh day of departure.

Then, at the moment when the sun rose the next morning, several gunboats in the fleet that were responsible for carrying a battalion of infantry had already begun to enter the harbor, ready to unload their soldiers and reason with Wang's guerrillas who were surrounding the harbor.

So when Wang Guerrilla saw the giant blue-gold ship at the mouth of the Yangtze River, he actually missed more important information, and there were more and more small black dots on the dock.