If we make a figurative analogy, the hull of a sail warship is like a wooden bath barrel, the circle of wood at the bottom of the barrel is the keel, the ribs are the vertical bars of the barrel wall of the bath barrel that form the side walls, and the hull of the ship is the ring hoop that tightens the vertical bars. In such an overall structure, the keel looks like a straight one, but in fact it is made of many components, the ribs are also riveted with multiple sections of wood with different bends, and the hull shell is a piece of riveted wood like a tile.

On the overall mechanism of a huge warship, all the main components of the force are connected to each other only at limited points. These hundreds of components are fixed to each other at thousands of finite points, no matter how strong they are, but in fact they are not strong, and every voyage in the stormy waves of the ocean causes an internal injury. Maintenance is required upon return to the home port. It really won't take many years before it will be scrapped.

A battleship, if more than half of the service period in the harbor to remove cannons, sails and moored (Laid up), a small half of the time to serve at sea, each mission for a few months to a year, and then into the dry dock "Minor Repair" (Minor Repair), that is, to replace local fatigue wear and mildew and rot components, then the entire hull structure can be maintained for about 10~15 years, Britain has many warships that have been in service for decades or even hundreds of years, that is actually the roster of the ruling party, in order to "rebuild" (Re-built RB) to build new warships to avoid attacks from the opposition. For example, the third-generation Victory in 1737 was nominally a reconstruction of the second-generation Victory, but 10 years before the "reconstruction", the second-generation Victory had been demolished, and the wood that was still usable was preserved in the warehouse.

Due to the lack of strength of the timber and the difficulty of connection, many ships have deformed the keel before they are built and launched. Some arch up, some pry down, and some twist left and right, just like the bend of a person's spine. The British practice was to make the keel from inferior materials, wait for the whole ship to be completed, and then knock the keel down and replace it with good wood before launching it.

Antiseptic is also a big problem, and the humid and salinity of the sea can make the wood moldy and rot. Sometimes, warships were forcibly built with wood that was not completely dried for the sake of war. As a result, 30% of the moisture is not removed, and the mold and decay will be accelerated sharply. These warships had to be kept in dry dock every six months. The cost of the whole life cycle is several times the cost of construction. If you sail at sea for several years in a row, you may enter the dry dock and be scrapped directly. There have been accidents in which a cruiser that has been on duty for a long time has no water squeezing and wrapping after entering the dry dock and draining the water, and the hull is scattered directly underwater.

The length of the mast is also very knowledgeable, because the mast is riveted directly to the keel, and then penetrates upwards through the multiple decks, and the beams of each deck are riveted and fixed. Theoretically, the longer the mast, the more sails can be hung, and the more sails the more thrust can be generated. The speed of the ship will increase. But in reality, this is entirely wishful thinking. Due to the lack of strength of the keel, too much sail thrust will be transmitted to the mast, and the mast will be conducted to the keel, thus generating thrust. This is the principle of sailboat propulsion, but if the thrust is too large, the keel will be cocked and the bottom of the ship will leak.

The boat should be inspected at any time after more than five years of use, and there must be gaps between the planks, and a twist material should be used here, which should be chiseled with a chisel. This only prevents water seepage and does not act as an adhesion between the decks. If the rivets are loosened due to long-term misalignment, the ship's planks will crack between them, resulting in water ingress and seepage. This is how a lot of ships sank.

Although Li Jing is now able to make a large amount of steel, he can use water hammer to forge keel steel components and ship ribs, including ship plates, which can be riveted with steel plates. Directly built iron-ribbed wood-hulled ships and even steel hulls at the end of the Qing Dynasty. But Li Jing was still ready to start with an all-wooden sailboat. I always feel that a shipbuilding workshop that has not gone through the stage of wooden warships is technically incomplete, and a lot of practical experience cannot be accumulated.

The foreman in charge of the keel was the Portuguese Moshi, who suggested using some Chinese-style mortise and tenon structures instead of rivets. Li Jing expressed cautious support and could build a small boat to try. There are some chemical methods for anti-corrosion, but there is really no good way for Li Jing to loosen the rivets.

I had to go straight to the dry dock every time I returned from a mission, scrape off the barnacle shellfish on the bottom of the ship, repair and replace the moldy and rotten components, and repaint them. Think about the headache of the maintenance cost when the fleet is large. The top navy is really not for everyone.

The last visit to the gun workshop. The building is made of stone and concrete, and the roof is painted 0.3 mm corrugated iron. Here are mainly cast bronze cannons and cast steel cannons. At the same time, long and short guns are produced. The furnace and crucible have now been built.

The little senior sister looked at the hundreds of bronze cannon barrels stacked outside the factory, and was dumbfounded, copper is money in this era, how much money does it cost to waste so many bronze cannons of different sizes and calibers, and she is reluctant to spend more than a dozen dollars on snacks at ordinary times. It's poverty that limits my imagination.

Here the bronze cannons are mainly three-pounder, six-pounder, and twelve-pounder cannons. Install a steel portable gun carriage with Li Jing's improved design. Two soldiers can push and walk. and ammunition carts combined into a four-wheeled carriage, which could be towed by two horses. This mainly equips the various towns of the army.

Twenty-four and thirty-six pounder guns were cast in steel. In the future, it will be mainly used for naval artillery on ships.

Regarding artillery, Li Jing was most concerned about the issue of exploding.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, not only the artillery cast in China was bombed, but also in Europe, and the bronze cast was relatively strong, the bronze was relatively soft, and the explosion would not lead to catastrophic consequences. Generally, it is disemboweled and ruptured, and it will not be broken into many pieces, and it will splash like shrapnel.

The use of raw wrought iron to make iron casting guns, even the best Swedish and British gun factories in the West at that time, the successful casting of large-caliber guns will resist 30%, and the scrap rate will be at least 7%. And there is no guarantee that it will not explode.

It was not until the 18th century that the quality ratio was more stable. Bronze cannons are much more expensive than iron cannons, and the American Civil War used a large number of bronze front-loading smoothbore guns - the famous Napoleonic cannons, which have a high success rate of bronze casting and high safety of use, but also have weaknesses, that is, after firing forty rounds in a row, the barrel is deformed because of overheating, and can not be well sealed, resulting in a serious decline in accuracy and range. It can also cause high temperatures to ignite gunpowder. It was not until the late American Civil War that rifled cannons cast directly from steel, with low prices and more effective than bronze casting, were directly eliminated by bronze cannons.

The main reason for the explosion of the bore is that during the casting, there will be inevitable trachoma and bubbles in the gun body, resulting in insufficient strength. Li Jing proposed that the artillery body should be cast in whole steel, and the gun mold was an iron gun mold with wet sand in the sandwich, and the inner layer was covered with a layer of moist toner. After the steel body is cooled, holes are drilled on the boring machine, so that the gun is more accurate and of better quality, and there will be no holes in the chamber.

The boring machine should be concentrated as soon as possible, Li Jing gave the design drawings, boring machines of different sizes and calibers. Using a hydraulic drive, the processing plant could only build a reservoir and build an impact tank on the Meixi DC in the upper reaches of the Hanjiang River. Set up a hydraulic machinery factory to process. In this way, the cannon blanks cast on Nanao Island can only be transported to Meihuawu for processing.

Due to the relatively small barrel of the musket, it can be cast through steel and then burned red, and then repeatedly forged with a water hammer to completely squeeze out bubbles and trachoma, and then transported to the plum blossom dock to be drilled with a boring machine.

At present, the Li family has bought all the mines that are currently capable of developing in the Hanjiang River basin according to Li Jing's mineral distribution map, because the local iron ore is high-grade ore, which is more suitable for making heat/weapons than the steel of Ma'anshan Iron and Steel Plant. Large quantities of iron ore are now selected from the mine and shipped to Nan'ao Island, where coke from the Nan'ao Island coking plant is used to make steel.

The little sister saw the power of industry for the first time this time, and was a little distracted, seeing the molten steel flowing directly from the steelmaking blast furnace, she grew her mouth, in eastern Henan, every catty of steel is very expensive, and here is a furnace of 20,000 catties. Li Jing pulled the little senior sister who was in a trance, returned to the boat, and continued to set off back to Taohuawu.