As soon as Hurd took office, military preparations were on track. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

In particular, the household department is in charge of Hurd's cronies, and it will not be allocated military funds, and the shipbuilding work continues to advance.

The general contractor of the shipbuilding is a privatized arsenal.

After the privatization of the arsenal, Hao Kejiu continued to control the enterprise through equity relations, so the production and operation of the arsenal almost unchanged, but Hao Kejiu's style of action has changed greatly.

The main thing is a matter of mentality, he used to be the general office of the arsenal appointed by the government, he was an official, and now he is the prime minister of the arsenal of a joint-stock company, and he is a businessman. As a result, he began to keep a low profile, and he easily did not offend anyone.

However, for the ship-building order, he was determined to win, and the arsenal was privatized, but the connections of the arsenal were still there, and he used all the relationships that he could use this time, from the army to the military department, to the household department, to the Ministry of Industry, all the favors were used, and he got the contract to build the ship.

On behalf of the arsenal, Hao Kejiu formally signed an order with the Ministry of War, in which the agreement guaranteed the delivery of all warships on schedule with quality and quantity.

But this time to build a ship, the scale of the order is too large, and the scale of production in the arsenal cannot be guaranteed at all.

For the production of ironclad ships, the arsenal can produce up to ten ships at the same time, and only five of them are 10,000-ton warships, and the others can reach up to 6,000 tons, which is only a second-class ironclad ship.

The reason why Hao Kejiu was able to win the order was because he put forward a feasible plan, the arsenal was responsible for the quality, and the order was subcontracted to other large shipyards in Daming, which was enough to build 30 ironclad ships at one time, and the arsenal was responsible for supervising the construction and ensuring the quality.

The biggest reason for the Ministry of War to hand over all the orders to the arsenal is that the weapons and equipment of these warships are provided by the arsenal, and all the naval guns can only be built by the arsenal, so other shipyards can only build hulls, and the weapons part must be manufactured by the arsenal, and the final produced hulls must be sent to the arsenal for final assembly, or the arsenal will send people to install the weapon system on these warships.

Because of this relationship, the arsenal has enough reason to be responsible for general contracting, because only in this way can the arsenal ensure that all warships can meet the standard requirements of the arsenal's weapons and equipment during the construction process.

Another most important reason is that Zhu Jinglun did not have the support of the civilian government at that time, so he had to place orders privately, so the more low-key the better, and it was most convenient and feasible for the arsenal to place orders for other shipyards.

As a result, the arsenal only got the general contracting order for thirty ironclad ships.

Among them, in addition to the 10 ships produced in the arsenal, the Tongwen Hong Shipyard, which was expanded on the basis of the Baoshun Shipyard and mainly manufactures ocean-going giant ships, received orders for 10 ironclad ships, the Chen Liantai Machinery Shipyard in Guangzhou received five, and the Hong Kong Whampoa Shipyard Co., Ltd., which was established after the merger of all the foreign shipyards such as Kebai Dockyard, Cheung Chau Qiji, Yu Yan and Hong Kong Aberdeen Dockyard in Whampoa, obtained four ships, and the last one was built by the Fuzhou Mawei Shipyard, which had just been completed and was a joint venture between Fujian Club and Arsenal.

Mawei Shipyard is a shipyard built by Hao Kejiu in order to win over the shareholders of the Fujian Association and win their support from the board of directors of the Arsenal, so he used the technical strength of the Arsenal to help the Fujian Association help build the shipyard. However, because it mainly provides maintenance and construction work for the coastal port ships of the Fujian Boat Gang, the scale is not large, and the largest can only build ships of five or six thousand tons, so I barely got one.

He was able to get this one, it was still the Arsenal's way of winning over the Fujian Association, otherwise Daming would have other more suitable shipyards, such as the dockyard built by the Arsenal itself in Shanghai to repair ships, which could also build ships of five or six thousand tons.

Thirty warships were being built at the same time, and most of them have already been carried out, and the arsenal is responsible for manufacturing weapons and equipment, warship armor and other important components, which are also being produced according to the plan.

It is worth mentioning that in the process of building the ship, the French Schneider Steel Company provided half of the shipbuilding steel, and they did not have any concerns about whether the Ming Dynasty built the ship to attack the French. However, because of safety considerations, the steel used in weapons is completely made from the arsenal's own products.

After a year of intense construction, at the end of 1884, all the main parts of the warship were completed, the armor had been installed, and only the weapons and equipment were still installed.

The Navy officers and men will continue to train while the arsenal continues to work, and the Navy's maintenance units will directly help with the construction, so as to gain experience.

In order to be able to cope with the plan of doubling the size of the army in a short period of time, the navy tried all kinds of ways to recruit new students from the naval academy into the navy, and brought their instructors and teaching materials to the ship, training during the day and studying at night. A third of the skilled seafarers were recruited from Tongwenxing's long-distance fleet and given them formal training, in the hope that they would be able to pilot and cooperate with small warships when the time came.

A series of extreme measures were adopted, and it took more than a year to successfully train officers and men who met the plan, but their military level still needs to be tested by war.

The army's expansion plan has also begun, and the regular army has expanded to 600,000 by supplementing the reserve soldiers, and at the same time starting the recruitment and training of reserve soldiers, recruiting soldiers in various parts of the Ming Dynasty, and successfully recruiting 1.4 million new soldiers, who have been trained intensively in training camps in various places, in the hope that they can train these people before the war, in addition to being able to undertake auxiliary operations, they are mainly used as supplementary soldiers of the regular army, ready to fill the casualties of the regular army at any time.

With a population of 100 million, it is easy to recruit more than one million soldiers, and one-third of them are literate soldiers.

All Western countries believe that the Ming and French wars are inevitable, and everyone is looking forward to seeing how many catties and taels this new Eastern country has, of course, no one believes that the Ming can defeat France, and only wants to measure the true strength of this country by the degree of violent beating by the French army.

At the official level, the two countries, which are the parties to the two countries, have been singing peace songs, and they have vowed that the relationship between the two countries is close and that there is no possibility of war. Apparently all in the race for time, waiting for the opportunity.

At the same time, they are secretly wrestling on the diplomatic front!