Zhu Jinglun understands why Chen Zhiting has been so in-law these days, it turns out that the first all-steel armored ship of the Ming Dynasty built by Ellison is finally about to be completed, Zhu Jinglun chose this ship as his ship, when will this ship be completed, and when will they go to France. Pen fun and pavilion www.biquge.info

Chen Zhiting hopes to keep Zhu Jinglun, so he has desperately expressed to Zhu Jinglun the difficulty of state affairs in the past few days.

The French hoped that Zhu Jinglun would be able to attend the Paris World Expo next year, and Zhu Jinglun made the decision to call it this ironclad ship, so that Westerners would know that Daming himself could produce ironclad ships, which could be regarded as a deterrent, or a protective color for the weak.

The reason why I decided to make this ship was also because I knew that the ship could be launched in time, but in fact it was much later, and the original plan was to launch in October, but there were time problems, and Ellison temporarily modified some designs to continue the smooth construction.

It can be said that the construction of this ship is full of some variables, first of all, the problem of funding, Ellison originally planned to spend 1 million taels, but in the end it took 3 million taels to complete the construction, and the Ming government paid a heavy tuition fee for this first ironclad ship.

And it used a lot of power, when Ellison just agreed to build this ship, he also underestimated the difficulty of the transformation of new technology, he initially thought that the equipment of the Daming Arsenal was very good, and it was similar to the American factory. But as the construction progressed, the more and more the level of equipment was felt to be insufficient.

In this era, the highest level of shipbuilding was undoubtedly British, so during the construction process, many times went to England to purchase equipment, wasting a lot of time and money. At the same time, Ellison also refers to the latest ironclad ships such as the Warrior built in the United Kingdom, which is a real ironclad built of pure iron.

Another country that knows how to build ironclad ships is France, but the French's ironclad ships should be put in quotation marks, because the French generally use the trick of installing ironclad on wooden hulls to build ironclad ships, and there is a big gap between the technical strength and the real ironclad built of pure iron.

On the contrary, the Americans, who have built not only pure ironclad ships, but also wooden ironclad ships. And the American ironclad ship of pure iron was built under the auspices of Ellison, so Ellison has a lot of criticism of the French ironclad, thinking that this is not a real future warship at all, and he has the heart to continue to build an all-iron battleship.

But after the end of the American Civil War, Lincoln couldn't wait to dismember the navy, obviously the United States could not give Ellison a chance to fulfill his dream, Zhu Jinglun did not hesitate to support Ellison to build an ironclad ship, which is also one of the biggest reasons why Ellison is willing to stay in Daming.

Ellison referred to the British ironclad hull design and understood that it was much more advanced than the thousand-ton ironclad he built in the United States, but summing up the experience of the Civil War, Ellison insisted that the turret was more valuable than the gunwald, and he insisted on adding the rotating turret design on the American ironclad to his design.

Another difficulty is that there is still a shortage of technical personnel, the arsenal has invested heavily in many years and trained thousands of technical personnel, but the technical force in shipbuilding is still very weak, especially mature shipbuilders, which are even more scarce.

Ellison's method was to select skilled mechanical workers from the arsenal for training, and at the same time go to the United States to recruit a group of skilled workers trained in the Civil War, and also go to England to dig up the wall, go to his home country Sweden to find talent, and go to France to recruit people.

Among them, the Changjie Army officers who Zhu Jinglun captured in Fujian were the Changjie Army officers Riyige and Dirk Bei, both of whom were French naval officers, and they were able to help Zuo Zongtang build the Fuzhou Ship Administration Bureau in history and were quite effective, proving that they were quite talented.

After questioning, Zhu Jinglun found that these two people were not pure French naval officers, as naval officers, they first knew some knowledge of ships, but more importantly, their own efforts.

Unlike the United Kingdom, which has a strong naval tradition, the French Navy does not have a high status in the army, so the French Navy is often unable to attract those elites with a strong sense of honor to join. He is especially interested in shipbuilding and driving. Later, he became a naval officer, but because he was self-taught, he did not go to any naval school.

Zhu Jinglun didn't care about their backgrounds, after he knew the abilities of these two people from history, he decided to use them. Directly threw it into the shipyard, casually installed the identity of a consultant, and let them fight on their own. The two lived up to expectations, when there was a problem in the construction of the ironclad ship, they volunteered to go to France to recruit personnel, they used all means to recruit a large number of French technical personnel, and finally combined with the power of the five countries of technical personnel trained by the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Sweden and the Ming Dynasty, they completed the manufacture of the first ironclad ship in the East, and the status of the two of them was highlighted, and they have been appointed as production supervisors by the shipyard.

Unsatisfactory is that after all, it is an ironclad ship built in a country with comprehensive backward basic technology, and Ellison did not think of comparing it with the British at the beginning of the design, so this ship is much smaller than the British Warrior in terms of tonnage, the Warrior is nearly 10,000 tons, and this ship is only 5,000 tons.

But this 5,000-ton tonnage is enough to make it proud of most countries, more authentic than the French ironclad ship, and five times larger than the American ironclad ship, it can be said that except for the United Kingdom, this ship is invincible.

And in terms of cannon design, Ellison installed the best cannon in the American Civil War on this ironclad ship, of course, it was produced in the arsenal, a total of two batteries, both of which were 110 caliber front-loading rifled guns, of course, less technically inferior than the 110-caliber breech-loading rifled guns of the British, but few countries in the world can produce breech-loading guns, and such large-caliber ones cannot be produced, and they can only be made up with front-loading guns.

In fact, the British Armstrong technology is not mature enough, in history after the 70s, the British army was all replaced with breech cannons, and what really made the breech rifled guns mature was the rise of German technology, and it was Krupp who brought the technology of the breech gun to maturity, but that was four years later, and the Franco-Prussian War made the German artillery famous.

A few days later, Zhu Jinglun really attended the trial ceremony of the ironclad ship, watched the trial and bombardment performance of the ironclad, and although the construction process was full of hardships, the result was still very satisfactory.

Zhu Jinglun praised the efforts of the staff and asked the arsenal to allocate 100,000 taels of silver to distribute red envelopes to the thousands of workers who participated in the construction of ironclad ships.

It was not only Zhu Jinglun who visited the demonstration of the ironclad ship, but also the secretary of the Ministry of Industry, and some Western diplomats also came.

The British have always been sensitive to the navy, and the Ming Dynasty has been equipped with three hundred warships built during the American Civil War, and it is already the largest maritime power in the East, and now it also has the ability to build ironclad ships, and it may be difficult for Britain to run amok in the East, and the British minister also believes that the reason why Britain compromised on the opium and coolie trade before was not only that the Ming Dynasty made corresponding concessions, They believe that the rapid increase in the strength of the Ming navy is the most critical reason.

And the French mentality is very complicated, especially in France is still very ambivalent about the construction of ironclad ships, many people do not like this kind of iron shell floating on the water, their naval thinking has always been one step behind the neighbor across the strait, and the Ming in the East has built and equipped the first ironclad ship, and it is an all-iron warship, if this is the technology of the future, France has fallen behind.

They also knew that this warship would be the first to sail to France and carry the Ming Emperor to the Paris World Expo, just in the Ming Dynasty, they were already so uncomfortable, and they didn't know what kind of repercussions this ship would cause in France when it arrived in France.

At the trial ceremony of the ironclad ship, Zhu Jinglun also unexpectedly saw a guest - Zeng Guofan.

In negotiations with the Qing court last year, the Ming Dynasty initially demanded that the Qing court disband the Hunan army.

This was obviously an impossible task, and the Qing court neither dared nor could disband the Hunan army.

Disbanded the Hunan army, not to mention the power of the Ming Dynasty, they couldn't withstand the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom alone, once the Hunan army was dismantled, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom immediately flooded to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, and it was more likely that the Eight Banners and Green Battalions in the north couldn't even fight the Twist Army in Shandong, let alone fight with the Taiping Army. Therefore, even if the Qing court was killed, Yixin and these people did not dare to disband the Hunan army now.

On the other hand, even if they dare to disband the Hunan army, they must also have this ability, the Hunan army is not a regular army, this is a local army, to put it bluntly, this is the private army of the Zeng family, the generals of the Hunan army listen to Zeng Guofan, not the Qing court, the salary of the Hunan army is mainly from Zeng Guofan from all sides, of course, the Qing court still has a certain ability to restrain the Hunan army, such as the assistance from the provinces are approved by the Qing court.

But such an army, you can ask him to help you when you can, but you say dismiss him, Zeng Guofan may not have suppressed those arrogant soldiers, the so-called Zhongxing generals in later generations Nineteen Huxiang, this is not an exaggeration, the Hunan army has cultivated most of the generals in the late Qing Dynasty, once these people feel abandoned by the Qing court, if they rebel, the Qing court will not be able to stop it at all.

After repeated negotiations, the Ming Dynasty proposed that it would be good not to disband the Hunan Army, but in order to ensure that the Hunan Army was not an enemy of the Ming Dynasty, Zeng Guofan had to go to the Ming Dynasty.

The Qing court couldn't control the Hunan army, how dare it hand over the commander of the Hunan army to the Ming as a hostage, not to mention the reputation of it, the key is that the proud soldiers of the Hunan army are rare and difficult to mess with, but in the end, I didn't expect Zeng Guofan himself to agree.

Zeng Guofan said that he himself wanted to travel around Lingnan, and wrote a letter to all the generals of the Hunan army, telling them that he would travel to Lingnan and hoped that the generals would refrain from making trouble. So Zeng Guofan came to Daming, and it has been half a year.