Seeing that King Yan and the other officials of the Imperial Protectorate shook their heads and sighed at the cost of crucible steel, Zhang Xiaofan sighed in his heart. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

In the past few months, I have tried my best to reduce the cost, which is the lowest price of crucible steel at present, and then drop? Zhang Xiaofan didn't know what method to use to lower it.

In the world, the largest consumer of steel is the weapon armor required by the army, and only the weapon armor will put forward higher and more reasonable requirements for the quality, output and cost of steel.

The high cost of crucible steel, Zhang Xiaofan had long expected that it would not become the mainstream of steel smelting.

"Although crucible steel is expensive, it can be smelted in small batches to create weapons and armor for equipping elite troops, and it is the sword armor of generals......"

Li Yu thought about it and made up his mind to allocate funds to carry out the production of crucible steel, and now it is impossible to effectively reduce production costs, but in the production process, there will always be people who find ways to reduce costs.

Crucible steel can't shine now, but Li Yu knows that in the future, the crucible steelmaking method will unify the steel smelting industry.

Zhang Shi, Liu Tao and other generals were happy when they heard it, who doesn't want to have a light and protective armor and extremely sharp weapons?

As the inventor of the crucible steelmaking method, Zhang Xiaofan could not hide his excitement, although it was a small batch production, it was better than scrapping.

After some discussion, Li Yu felt that five small crucible blast furnaces should be built to produce crucible steel, each of which is expected to produce 500 catties of steel, and the cost is as high as 10,000 guan, not counting the fuel and iron required to smelt crucible steel.

After each crucible blast furnace is steeled four times, it will basically be scrapped, and the cost of maintaining five crucible blast furnaces will be an incomparably huge permanent investment.

After some investigation, in order to facilitate the ironmaking workshop to have more reasonable production and efficient management in the future, increase steel production, and also for the production of crucible steel.

Li Yu decided to split the blast furnace department of the ironmaking workshop into two departments: ironmaking and steel-filling, and added a crucible steel department. The crucible steelmaking method was made by Zhang Xiaofan, so Zhang Xiaofan served as the director.

The ironworks also have weapons and armor to build, and this move is now opposed by Xue Jun and others in the Metropolitan Protectorate. It is extremely unreasonable for King Yan to merge two such important departments together and put Zhang Gensheng, who was born as a miner, in charge of it, and suggested that Li Yu should divide the ironmaking workshop into two workshops with their own duties.

For this reason, one of Li Yu's plans for this trip to the Iron Casting City is to separate the manufacturing department of the weapons manufacturing under the ironmaking workshop, and set up an armament workshop to make weapons and armor full-time.

There are four departments under the Wubei Workshop, including bows and crossbows, knives and guns, lances, and armor, and the four chiefs are served by the craftsmen with exquisite skills and management ability of the bank, and the owner of the Wubei Workshop is Xue Da, who is the official of the palace.

Li Yu announced the spin-off and reorganization of the iron-making workshop, and some people were happy and naturally some were disappointed. Zhang Xiaofan is undoubtedly the luckiest in this ironmaking reform, from a small steward of the ironworking workshop to the director of the newly established crucible steel department, and he also received a bonus of 3,000 yuan.

After the matter was over, after everyone retreated, Li Yu sent an edict and sent someone to immediately deliver it to Cui Xuan, who returned to Chang'an, and ordered him to quickly send someone to Tangxi Iron City to recruit swordsmiths and other craftsmen. Among them, the number of masters who can cast weapons shall not be less than 2,000, and there is no upper limit, unless there are no more suitable craftsmen suitable for recruitment in Tangxi Iron City.

If you can't recruit people, you will use salary and land to smash, each person will start from the bottom 1 per month, the upper limit is 100 yuan, and the land will start from 100 acres, and the upper limit will be 3,000 acres. According to the skill level of the craftsmen recruited, the salary and land are set within this range.

And admonished: For the famous sword-casting master of Tangxi Iron City, he will not spare money and land, and recruit him to Anton by all means.

Five days later, when Li Yu left the Iron Casting City, the ironmaking workshop was split and reorganized, and the newly established Wubei Workshop was carefully managed by the owner Xue Da, and the four departments completed the deployment of personnel to the official start of production within a few days.

At the same time, under the auspices of Zhang Xiaofan, the newly established crucible steelmaking workshop is in full swing to build a crucible furnace.

Due to the high technical requirements of the crucible blast furnace and the characteristics of long time to build, in a short time, the crucible workshop can only rely on the crucible furnace built by Zhang Xiaofan before to smelt crucible steel.

Li Yu, who left the cast iron city, went to the capital town to inspect the Liaodong shipyard.

Under the guidance of more than 5,000 craftsmen, tens of thousands of slave laborers worked overtime for nearly two years, and all the hardware facilities of the Liaodong Shipyard, the world's largest shipbuilding base, were completed.

Twenty large and small docks lined up along the west bank of the Dragon River are either laying keels, ribs, or the main body of the ship, and boatwrights are building superstructures.

The dockyard is like a huge ant nest, the craftsmen and slaves work like workers with a clear division of labor, and the soldiers guarding are like soldiers and ants staring vigilantly at every corner of the shipyard.

The East Port of Lushun Port is berthed with hundreds of large and small ships of Jiaolong Naval Navigation, which has been greatly expanded in the past year, so that there are no spare berths in the East Harbor at present, and the ships returning from Jiaolong Maritime Airlines can only dock at the West Port Wharf of Liaodong Shipyard.

"Your Highness, this is a big ship bought from Yangzhou with a storage capacity of up to 20,000 stones......"

Xie Yuexi, the director of Jiaolong Hainan Airlines, was overjoyed, and pointed to the five sea ships moored on the Donggang Wharf that were like giants and introduced to Li Yu.

Although he had heard of large sea ships in the Jiangdong area that could build storage materials of 20,000 to 40,000 stones, it was the first time he saw a huge ship with a displacement of 1,000 tons, and Li Yu was still shocked by its huge size.

"So-and-so's mother!"

As a pure northern man, Zhang Shi was even more shocked by the giant ship in front of him, and sighed: "This is actually done by man? ”

"Hehe, General Zhang said with a smile, this ship is not the biggest in our Jiaolong HNA. Xie Yue smiled proudly.

"W-This isn't the biggest?" Zhang Shi's brain couldn't reflect a little, and looked at Xie Yue in dismay.

The rest of the officials and generals brought by Li Yu all had horrified eyes, this is not the biggest of the scriptures, how big is it? One by one, those who did not believe in evil asked Yuan Zuo, Gu Cheng, deputy director of Jiaolong HNA, about the truth or falsehood.

Don't blame these officials and generals who follow Li Yu for not being knowledgeable, they are all real northerners from childhood to adulthood. The shipbuilding industry in the north is underdeveloped, and when you first arrive at the beach, you can exclaim when you see a ship of several tens of tons. In addition, the information exchange between the north and the south in this era was not smooth, and in the north, except for the officials in charge of the Ministry of Industry in charge of the DPRK and China, who probably knew the technical level of the shipbuilding industry in the south, the others were basically blind to the shipbuilding level of the south.

Li Yu remembered that a few months ago, Xie Yue wrote a book, saying that Quanzhou could build a huge ship with a load of 40,000 stones. Now it seems that Xie Yue must have used the money he allocated to Jiaolong Haihang to buy a ship to buy a 40,000-stone giant ship.

In addition to being surprised, Li Yu was even more looking forward to seeing the giant ship on the sea with a load of 40,000 stones. In terms of tonnage, this is 2,000 tons, which is only 500 tons smaller than Zheng He's treasure ship in the Western Ocean.