The thud of the riveting machine echoed in the dock, and the former Longtian Maru cruise ship and the current Ninghai aircraft carrier were like a half-eaten fish that exposed its black and gray skeleton to the outside world. Workers www.biquge.info stand on a scaffolding higher than the dock, with steel plates between its blank ribs. The plates are cut for purpose, each with its own calculated size and curvature, and they sit firmly on the ribs before the red-hot rivets rivet to death.

"Forty-eight meters in total." Ma Deji, who accompanied the visit, said that he was accompanied by Zhou Maobai, the head of the shipyard, Ye Zaifu, the Chinese designer, Andy Brown, the American designer, and Winston, the chief engineer. "When completed, the whole ship will be 225 meters long, and the flight deck will be 445 meters long."

"Good." Li Kongrong nodded with satisfaction, but he was worried about the center of gravity, so he asked, "How to solve the balance problem?" ”

"After the recalculation, the current practice is to move the boiler room forward, and at the same time, some more equipment will be reserved for the center of gravity adjustment before launching outfitting, and if there is still a problem, then use ballast to adjust." Ma Deji replied.

"When will I be able to get into the water?" Li Kongrong knew that there was no way out, and he could only settle.

"Mister Weinstein, the Navy wants to know when it will be able to launch." Ma Deji asked Weinstein, the chief engineer of the shipyard, who was recruited from the New York Electric Ship Company at a high price, with an annual salary of $65,000, which caused a sensation in the United States.

"Sir, I think she'll be in the water in six months." Weinstein was a bearded man with a red nose because of his alcoholism - and he was not popular with the top brass of the electric ship company because of his alcoholism. "It will take about three months to outfit."

"No, it's too late." Li Kongrong shook his head suddenly. "It must be in service by September next year."

"Before September? Sir, even if there is only one month of sea trials, we have to advance it by one month, and normally two months in advance. Weinstein began to scratch his hair, which clearly didn't fit his schedule.

"The best sea trial is two months." Li Kongrong said. "That means you have seven months left."

"God!" Weinstein looked at the empty skeleton of more than forty meters at the front of the aircraft carrier, and his head shook like a rattle, "This is impossible. Unless workers are willing to work overtime, but unions are against it. ”

"No need to work overtime." Li Kongrong also shook his head. "Like a bridge, we can make it on flat ground and then hoist it all together and weld it. This is not the main load-bearing mechanism, nor is it an underwater part, and the welding is completely trial-ready. ”

"Sir, this is not in line with the traditions of the Navy." Weinstein insisted that he didn't like welding because it wasn't reliable.

"Victory is the tradition of the Navy!" Li Kongrong also insisted. "The faster the shipyard, the more warships the Navy will launch, and the more warships, the more likely it is to win. Mr. Chief Engineer, the Japanese Navy has five aircraft carriers and four more in the dockyard, and if we can't speed up the construction of aircraft carriers, we will lose this war. ”

"Mr. Weinstein, this is war, and we have to go beyond the norm." Zhou Maobai also reminded on the side.

"Good...... All right. Weinstein said helplessly, and after agreeing, he said bitterly: "Gentlemen, I'm going to be laughed at by everyone." ”

"No, if war breaks out, the electric ship company will definitely ask you to go back and guide, because they are too slow to build." Zhou Maobai comforted, with a smile on his face.

"Catapults, arresting cables, lifts are all right?" Li Kongrong didn't care about the complaints of the chief engineer, he cared about the details of the aircraft carrier.

"No problem. The arresting cable is the standard equipment of the US Navy, the catapult is developed at our expense, and so is the elevator. Ma Deji answered these questions.

"We funded the research and development ourselves?!" Li Kongrong was very tight, and the catapult seemed to him to be high-tech.

"We should pay for the manufacturer to develop it." Ma Deji corrected, "This is the model of cooperation between American companies and the military, the right to use it belongs to the military, and the ownership of technology belongs to the manufacturer. The approximate performance of today's catapults is to catapult at a distance of eighty-five feet, which can increase the speed of a 10,000-pound weight to fifty-two knots......"

"Ten thousand pounds? Fifty-two verses? After a quick calculation in his heart, Li Kongrong said disappointedly: "What should I do if the attack plane takes off?" ”

In order to be strong, the empty weight of the saboteur attack aircraft is more than four tons, and the total weight of fuel and weapons is more than six tons, and 10,000 pounds is less than five tons, and the growth rate of the attack aircraft with a full load of 6.5 tons is estimated to be less than 40 knots. The saboteur attack aircraft needs to take off at about 85 knots, and even with the addition of 30 knots of deck wind, it is still five knots away from taking off. This is tantamount to saying that the catapult is only effective against fighters, and the attack aircraft still has to take off against the wind at 30 knots of the aircraft carrier.

"The total weight of attack aircraft plus ammunition and fuel often exceeds 6.3 tons, and there is really no way to catapult and take off. Now GM is trying to find a way to increase the power of the catapult, and they think that they may be able to develop a more powerful catapult next year. Ma Deji explained in detail. We have calculated that a fully loaded attack aircraft takes off at a wind speed of 15 meters per second (i.e. 29.15 knots) and a glide distance of 120 meters. The deck of the aircraft carrier is two hundred and forty-five meters long, and one hundred and twenty-five meters are left after subtracting this one hundred and twenty meters.

And with a width of 29 meters on the deck of the aircraft carrier, four attack aircraft with folded wings can be arranged in each row. One hundred and twenty meters can row ten rows, that is, forty planes, and there are eight more left. These eight attack planes can also be platooned, and when taking off to the middle and rear sections, the middle and rear lifts can lift the remaining eight attack planes in the hangar to the deck. It takes 15 seconds for each attack plane to take off, 20 is 300 seconds, and the two lifts are raised four times in five minutes, making a total of eight planes, which is enough time. ”

The deck of an aircraft carrier is related to the number of planes released in a single flight, but this only makes sense under certain conditions - if the aircraft are willing to hover in the air after take-off and wait, all the planes on the aircraft carrier can take off and merge into a wave of attack. But this obviously outweighs the loss, if the two waves converge, then the first wave of take-off has been waiting for the plane to depart by the time the fuel is already tight. It is true that the aircraft carrier fleet has air tankers, but air refueling adds to the complexity of the attack.

The more complex things are in warfare, the less reliable they are, and the real use of tankers is in elaborate ultra-long-range attacks, ultra-long-range attack patrols against merchant ships, and in the predicament of Japanese mobile forces at Midway, where they are not used to replenish the fuel that has been lost by circling and waiting for aircraft before attacking.

Even so, Li Kongrong also hoped that the aircraft carrier designers would increase the size of the deck as much as possible, so a large deck with a length of 245 meters and a width of 29 meters came out. It is extremely rare to see two ends lengthened by 10 meters out of thin air, and it is very abnormal to add 4.5 meters on both sides out of thin air. This is tantamount to saying that it is difficult for the anti-aircraft guns on the two side gun corridors to attack the top - the extra-wide deck seals the anti-aircraft guns at an angle of more than 45 degrees, and these 20mm and 40mm anti-aircraft guns can only shoot at the surface of the sea.

The real designers of the aircraft carrier were completely opposed to this, but Li Kongrong still suppressed any objections. In order to have an extra row of planes, he preferred to abandon the anti-aircraft fire of the anti-aircraft guns on the two-string gun gallery, and gave up the task of defending the sky over the aircraft carrier, that is, against the Japanese shipburst dive bombers, to the bridge and the anti-aircraft batteries in the front of the aircraft carrier. This is an extremely dangerous measure, but it also adheres to the principle of aircraft carrier air defense that he repeatedly emphasized from the beginning: if you let go of ten ships, you can't miss a single ship attack.

The twenty-nine-meter-wide deck could theoretically place six fighters or four attack aircraft side by side. Seventy-two carrier-based aircraft require a fighter deck length of forty-four meters (24 aircraft in 4 rows) and a deck length of attack aircraft of one hundred and forty-four meters (48 aircraft in 12 rows), for a total of one hundred and eighty-eight meters. If the attack planes can take off by catapults, then according to the take-off regulations written by Li Kongrong himself (every two catapults take off/30 seconds, and each taxiing takes off every 15 seconds), all 72 carrier-based planes can be lifted into the air within 20 minutes. Now the catapult power is insufficient, it is difficult for the attack aircraft to eject and take off, and it has become impossible for all carrier-based aircraft to take off in the air to carry out an all-deck attack.

"Hansheng, can't I say what I said?" Seeing that Li Kongrong had been pondering, Ma Deji had to ask.

"Probably doable." Li Kongrong is not good at discouraging him. "But you missed the bridge."

"Bridge?" Ma Deji was stunned for a moment, and then said with a smile: "Yes, yes, I forgot about the bridge, the bridge occupies the deck position." ”

"It's not impossible." Li Kongrong thought of the early warning aircraft whose positions were exposed due to radar, and also thought of the proportion of carrier-based aircraft in the US Pacific aircraft carrier task force in the later stage of the war, and said: "I think the proportion of carrier-based aircraft should be adjusted: The number of attack planes should be fixed at 36, and the number of fighters should also be fixed at 36, so that there will be more escort forces." ”

"Half? This way, there will be less power to attack. Ma Deji muttered.

"But if you use radar, you will definitely expose the target, so you have to increase the number of fighters." Li Kongrong said. "An attack aircraft can hang two torpedoes and three 500-kilogram bombs, which is already twice as powerful as an ordinary attack aircraft. In addition, it is very important that the center of the war situation must be perfected, and the radios of carrier-based aircraft must also be perfected. ”

"The center of the war situation is the center of gravity, I know that. All the cabins on the bridge are designed around the center of the situation. Ma Deji said. The radio also uses the best communication system at present, with a power of 5 watts, using the 100-124MHZ VHF band, and the voice communication at an altitude of 3,000 meters is 150 kilometers, and the voice communication to the ground is 200 kilometers. ”

"Can't it be farther away?" Hearing that the distance of voice communication was only 160 kilometers, Li Kongrong was a little disappointed.

"Well, I don't know." Ma Deji is only in charge of ships, and the radio energy is not too clear.

At this time, several people had already circled around the dock and returned to the original point, and Zhou Maobai took Li Kongrong back to the office. Li Kongrong has been thinking about the distance of voice communication -- all of them are single-seater planes, and it is impossible to type Morse code while flying the plane, and it is necessary to increase the power of the airborne radio so that the distance between the early warning planes and the attack aircraft group can be shortened. Otherwise, the two sides may only have one-way communication, and the attack aircraft group can hear the command of the AWACS aircraft, but it is too far away to reply to the order.

"Sir, this is a model ship of the Ninghai." Back at the shipyard office building, Andy Brown, deputy chief designer, asked Li Kongrong to look at the model of the Ninghai, and he wanted to hear what other suggestions Li Kongrong had for modification.

The ship model is placed in the pool, the ratio is 100 to 1, this is the same ship model that was originally sent to the US Navy Shipbuilding Bureau for pool experiments, and it is said that the Americans called the Chinese crazy after looking at the flight deck. In fact, in addition to the excessively wide flight deck, the design of this type of aircraft carrier is quite good. The enclosed bow, double-decker open hangar, the lift uses a broadside lift like the Essex class, and can lift two carrier-based aircraft at a time.

This was quickly adopted by the Americans, but this design was eventually vetoed by the Naval Aviation Administration - none of the existing carrier-based aircraft could fold the wings, nor could the future SBD dive bombers. The use of the saboteur attack aircraft developed at the expense of the Chinese, the aviation bureau assessed that the single attack aircraft is not conducive to navigation, and lacks self-defense firepower (no rear-seat turret).

There is no way to do things that the Americans will always steal from them when they experiment in the pool, but they can't learn the internal details of the bow and stern lateral thrusters, the stern pressure plate, the water mist sprinkler system, and the regional power unit.

Li Kongrong looked at the aircraft carrier in the pool repeatedly, and couldn't think of what he had missed for a long time, so he had to say: "For now, I have no suggestions for revision. What do you guys think? ”

"Sir, the deck is too wide, it completely blocks the angle of fire from the two side gun galleries, which is very disadvantageous for defense against dive bombers." Andy Brown mentioned deck width again, and he forgot how many times he had forgotten about it.

"Mr. Brown, if the deck is too narrow, there will be one less row of planes." This is the first time Li Kongrong has answered this question in person. "I'd rather give up part of the anti-aircraft fire than put an extra column of planes. This is a request from the user, so please don't pay attention to it. ”

"Sir, a large part of the attacks came from the air. Both types of carrier-based bombers of the US Navy attack from the air, and if the anti-aircraft defense is abandoned, the probability of the aircraft carrier being hit in an engagement will be greatly increased. "Brown hopes to convince Li Kongrong to change while it is still possible." In addition, the three-inch anti-aircraft guns near the bridge were seriously insufficient, their caliber was too small, and it was better to install twelve five-inch or four-point-and-five-inch anti-aircraft guns; Although the 40mm anti-aircraft guns were sufficient, they were not powerful enough. ”

"Mr. Brown, it's not necessary at all. Twelve three-inch anti-aircraft guns were enough. Large-caliber guns cannot be installed on the bridge, you know that we are a double-decker hangar, and the center of gravity is already high. If large-caliber anti-aircraft guns are installed, the ballast will increase again, and if it increases, the displacement will also increase, and the displacement will be large, and the horsepower will only be 105,000 horses, and the speed will decrease. In order not to reduce the speed, fuel and ammunition will have to be reduced, which will affect the operation again. ”

Li Kongrong described the disadvantages of replacing five-inch anti-aircraft guns, not to mention the fact that one of the 100,000 dollars was very expensive, and the 12 guns plus the gun mount were two or three hundred tons. The bridge is heavy, and the elevator side will also be heavier for balance, and the center of gravity will be higher again. It's essentially a system problem, and you can only make one trade-off in every aspect. Brown did not understand the Japanese Navy, he chose defense according to common sense, and Li Kongrong knew the disadvantages of the Japanese with 250 kg bombs, so he gave up part of the defense and strengthened the attack.