The Anglo-Afghan war continued, but in reality the Chinese Empire and the British Empire, which were actual confrontations, were only political and military tensions, and neither country had excessively aggressive reports or directed hostile public opinion in their respective countries.

In this era, if there is any industry that can reflect a country's comprehensive industrial level to the greatest extent, it is undoubtedly shipbuilding, especially warship construction.

A large ship, especially a warship, from design, to slipway construction, to launching outfitting, to sea trials, including ports, shipyards, supporting factories, docks, slipway design and construction, covers almost all industrial sectors, and involves all aspects of basic science and application technology.

In the construction of a ship, the design phase is organized by systems engineering, including oceanography, physics, fluid mechanics, blasting, etc.: the slipway construction and launching outfitting stage is designed to meet the soft and hard sciences of metallurgy, riveting, electroplating, electrical, steam power, cannon construction, optics, surveying, standardized interchangeable parts, construction control and supervision.

The development of the shipbuilding industry can drive the progress of countless surrounding industrial chains, and can imperceptibly improve the overall industrial level and technology of a country as a whole. Therefore, building your own warship is much more than saving a few dollars and strategic security.

It's a really big article.

Lin Hong's arrival brought the world's second naval power fleet, but the shipbuilding industry is not something he can pull out the seedlings to promote, in fact, the shipbuilding industry of the Chinese Empire, as far as the navy is concerned, started from imitating small inland river gunboats, and then imitated shallow water heavy gunboats, and then developed to design and build shallow water heavy gunboats, and then lightning strike ships, cruisers, and developed to this day, with the help of advanced concepts and more than 30 years of solid efforts, it has occupied the forefront of this era in terms of overall shipbuilding standards.

This is an industry in which Lin Hong has invested the most resources and placed the greatest hopes, and it is the leading industry in China in the past 30 years in the Ocean Age. Although compared with the huge shipbuilding capacity of the United Kingdom, China's shipbuilding industry is still far from the scale of the shipbuilding industry, but the foundation has been laid, and the accumulation of technology and technology has reached the critical point of the explosion, and now is the time to soar.

The subsidy method for the purchase of domestic ships, which had been implemented for 20 years, gradually came to an end at this time. This is not because the government is no longer focusing on the development of the shipbuilding industry, but because China's civilian and military shipbuilding industries have become so strong that they do not need government protection: they have achieved an absolute advantage in cost and have become superior in terms of performance and quantity.

Led by Lin Hong and organized by the Ministry of Commerce, the shipbuilding industry of the Chinese Empire has explored a new shipbuilding idea in the past two years: the assembly line method.

Specifically, in terms of operation, on various ships, the Ministry of Defense, now the Shipbuilding Department of the Ministry of the Navy, will design some standard models, and complete all the construction details in the sample construction, and realize the standardization of parts and components, and the modularization of structure.

The shipyard is no longer responsible for all the manufacturing processes, but mainly assembles, most of the parts are interchangeable standard parts, and the castings are also prefabricated parts. These parts are produced on an assembly line at each plant and then transported to each slipway for assembly.

This mode of production originated from the "free wheel" of the United States during World War II in another time and space.

At that time, the Americans, who were accustomed to the assembly line operation mode, made the use of the large industrial assembly line to the extreme. Different from the German-style workshop supporting and hand-made, and the Soviet-style one-stop factory completion from screws to machines, the foundation of the American industry is the interchangeable parts and components of the ten Taylor ten Ford manufacturing industry, with a large division of labor, a large flow of water, a large supporting model, not only to promote product quality and process improvement, but also greatly improve the speed of mass production.

The American Liberty Wheel is the culmination of this line of thinking: it doesn't perform very well, but thanks to all standardization, its construction time has dropped from 230 days in the early days to just 45 days. The fastest record, from laying the keel to launching even in 15 days and 30 minutes. By mid-to-late war, the United States had three Liberty ships launching every day. Such a terrifying speed of shipbuilding, so that the German "wolf pack" Japanese submarine ambush, kamikaze, all into floating clouds, in addition to modularity also helps to repair and maintain, of course, the modularity of warships and ordinary ships is not the same, but it can also reach 23% versatility.

Limited to the industrial foundation, the maturity of the process, especially the welding technology is far from the standard (welding technology was just born in the early 19th century and is still in the rising stage of technological development), China has not been able to do such a terrifying speed. However, the new type of bulk carrier, known as the "standard ship", with a standard displacement of 8,200 tons, achieved the fastest speed of 220 days in this year, which is enough to shock the entire Chinese shipbuilding industry.

This production model has also been tried to be applied to warships, especially light warships.

The Chinese Shangyu-class light cruisers have proven to be very good and reliable weapons. After redesigning the scheme based on the data of naval combat simulations and naval flight time, especially with reference to the construction ideas of the standard wheel, the new Yuyao-class light cruisers began to produce the first sample ships at the naval plant.

But in terms of heavy warships, the large-scale assembly line production of standard wheels is obviously not suitable.

After all, the warships in this era are updated too quickly, even if Lin Hong has absolute confidence in his country's design concept, it is impossible to open an assembly line to produce a luxury that quickly becomes obsolete like battleships, especially since the Admiralty often spends money to build some strange warships (mentioned above).

At present, the Imperial Admiralty Shipbuilding Department has designed six types of dry bulk ocean carriers, four types of offshore dry bulk carriers, and four types of river ships, and has completed the construction of sample ships and the accumulation of construction details.

The interchangeable parts of these vessels are tendered by different manufacturers, and basically all of them are operated in an assembly line standard. Due to the unified specifications, large production capacity, and assembly line operation, the time occupied by the slipway is greatly reduced, and the cost of a single ship has plummeted.

This also brought another benefit, which was that Akari reduced the technical requirements for shipbuilding workers.

The shipbuilding industry in the East and the West is basically still training the master-apprentice system to train shipbuilding technicians. Due to the complex and high requirements of shipbuilding and welding technology, it often takes more than five years, or even more than ten years, to train a qualified skilled worker before he can start to take an apprentice. In Japan, due to the high labor intensity and hard work in the shipbuilding industry, apprentices under the master-apprenticeship system are under too much pressure, and the proportion of apprentices who eventually quit halfway is very high.

In China, the British system was also modeled on before, and high school graduates who were interested in entering the shipyard began to enter the factory at the age of twelve, learning cultural knowledge and crafts from their masters. In order to prevent the withdrawal and the huge investment from going down the drain, the Chinese side adopted a long-term contract system, provided various recreational activities, a vacation system, and a reward system to provide more labor security for shipbuilding technical workers, gave high salaries, and finally accumulated a large-scale shipbuilding team.

However, with the rapid expansion of shipbuilding, even China's shipbuilding worker training system, which is based on "scale", is somewhat inadequate. On the one hand, the country's naval orders and Germany's orders have squeezed out a lot of shipbuilding resources, and on the other hand, there is a tidal tide of merchant shipping orders from state-owned and private shipping companies