Fuzhou, Mawei Shipyard.

He Ruzhang looked at Qingbeile Yikuang, who was pointing at the large torpedo boat (only the hull part) of the "Lei Gan" that had already been completed and launched, and couldn't help but feel a little funny in his heart, but he didn't show it on the surface -- after all, he is now the real prime minister and minister of shipbuilding affairs, and he, the governor of Fujian, is also the minister of shipbuilding affairs of the Huiban, which is equivalent to his deputy.

For such a bad reputation in Beijing, Lord Belle came to preside over the shipyard, although it was to expand the influence of the shipmaster and consider the future development of the shipmaster, but He Ruzhang has always been worried that the shipmaster will go astray or even decline under the auspices of people who do not know how to do it, but in the current situation, everything is still in Lin Yiqing's control.

After this Belle Lord came to the shipmaster, he was not bent on making money (of course, he would not do less about this), but after making up for the Western shipbuilding under the guidance of Lin Yiqing, he worked hard to do his own job - to build momentum for the shipmaster, as for the specific shipbuilding affairs, all of them were handed over to the French foreigners such as Yige and Dasbo, and he did not interfere too much in the technical problems he did not understand, except for consulting Lin Yiqing.

Originally, the Harbour Master already had a plan to build torpedo gunboats, but after Chingbeiler took charge of the Harbour Administration, the plans of "large torpedo boats going to sea" and "large submarines going to sea" brought by him were put in a priority position; although there was a major adjustment to the shipbuilding plan, the shipbuilding master did not slack off because of this, but because he had changed the Great Seal of Customs and Defense and "corrected his name" -- no longer called "Fuzhou Harbour Administration" or "Harbour Administration Bureau" -- and had the support of the imperial court, they became more energetic.

And He Ruzhang also knew that it was not for nothing that the imperial court vigorously supported the construction of large torpedo boats for going to sea this time.

After the two anti-smoking wars, the Qianguo began the Westernization and self-improvement movement, and once took the initiative to open the country, its ability to accept new foreign things far exceeded the imagination of the people of the time. It was initiated and promoted by Li Shaoquan and a group of other powerful local bureaucrats. Qianguo began to stride into the international political arena with great difficulty from a backward ancient feudal country, and all aspects of domestic life also slowly began to change, and various modern military and civilian industries were set up one after another, thus laying the earliest modern industrial foundation of Qianguo, and the giant lion of the East slowly woke up. But that's suffocating. This bottom-up reform, because it has not touched the national political system in the face of too strong resistance, is still superficial.

In the early days of the Westernization Movement, which centered on military self-reliance, Qianguo maintained a high degree of concern for new inventions and new weapons in the world's military field and closely followed the world trend. In October 9074, Li Shaoquan, the minister of Beiyang, was invited to visit Russian warships at the mouth of Dagu, Tianjin. The first time I saw a torpedo launch, I was immediately impressed by this new weapon. Since the beginning of the construction of modern coastal defense, while purchasing and building Western-style warships, Qianguo has purchased and imitated a large number of mines for the defense of key ports, and Li Shaoquan, who is well aware of the astonishing explosive power of mines, suddenly saw a special kind of mine that can sail on his own to attack the enemy. Li Shaoquan became a well-known torpedo fan in the high-level officialdom of Qianguo, and he single-handedly promoted the torpedo armament work of the modern navy of Qianguo. It was carried out vigorously.

In 9078, when Li Danya, the minister of Qianguo in Germany, and Xu Jianren, counselor, inspected the construction of large ironclad ships in Germany, they simultaneously ordered two torpedo boats from the German Volkeng shipyard, which was the beginning of the purchase of torpedo boats for Qianguo. These two torpedo boats were of the same class and were the first torpedo boats built in Germany with a torpedo tube installation with a displacement of 28 tons. It is 26.82 meters long, 3.05 meters wide, and has a draft of 1.02 meters, and is equipped with a small car-type boiler (the name given to a small coal-fired boiler that is mainly used for small boats such as torpedo boats), a reciprocating steam engine. It has a power of 650 hp, single-shaft propulsion, a speed of 18.2 knots, and a coal tank capacity of 12 tons. The main armament on board was a 14-inch torpedo tube, mounted on the bow deck, which can be rotated 150 degrees, using black-headed torpedoes, but the boat was also equipped with four pole mine launchers, and one 37 mm Habkes five-barrel rapid-fire gun for close defense, with a total strength of 16 people.

The two torpedo boats were built by first building wooden molds, then assembling steel ribs and skin panels, and then removing the wooden molds. The materials used in the construction are all high-quality steel made by Krupp, and each piece of steel must be carefully inspected by the Qianguo supervision personnel and treated with galvanizing. In the summer of 9079, the Volken shipyard towed two small torpedo boats from Stendin to the Rainer Gate for sea trials and tested torpedoes and various weapons with satisfactory results. Later, under the guidance of the engineers and Englishmen Grande and Antisen, the engineers and technicians of Qianguo successfully assembled them in the Dagu dock in Tianjin, and named them "Xuan" and "Huang" respectively. Because of their small tonnage, these two earliest torpedo boats were mainly used for the defense of the Baihe waters in Tianjin, and could not go out to the open sea to fight.

Starting with these two small torpedo boats, Beiyang Haiphong's purchase of torpedo boats was unstoppable. In order to deal with the Russian navy that may attack the dry river from the east, Li Shaoquan successively asked to be equipped with small torpedo boats, and ordered four torpedo boats from Germany, named "Sun", "Moon", "Ying", and "Xuan", the four boats are of the same level, all built by the German Volkeng shipyard, the hull is steel, the displacement is 15.7 tons, the length is 19.74 meters, the width is 2.59 meters, the draft is 1.07 meters, and the use of 1 automobile boiler, 1 steam engine, single-shaft propulsion, power 200 horsepower, speed 15 knots, The main armament was two 14-inch torpedo tubes, and the boat was equipped with a total of two black-headed torpedoes. This type of small-tonnage torpedo boat adopts a mature fully enclosed design style, and the whole appearance is clean and tidy, with the typical characteristics of Western naval torpedo boats at that time, all the personnel on the boat are active inside, and there are no personnel on the deck. The head of the torpedo boat is a tortoiseshell-like deck with low front and high rear, which is conducive to breaking waves, and a bunker-like conning tower is connected to the center of the end of the tortoiseshell-like deck, and the handling and driving of the torpedo boat and the torpedo firing are completed in this armored protected part, and on both sides of the armored conning tower, there is a mussel-shaped opening on the left and right sides of the tortoiseshell-shaped deck at the end of the tortoiseshell, which is used to transport the torpedo to the two torpedo tubes arranged on the left and right sides of the bow. The deck behind the conning tower is a dome type with high slopes in the middle to facilitate drainage, and there are basically no superfluous facilities on the deck except for the chimney and engine bay. It is worth noting that the chimneys of torpedo boats at that time were generally not arranged on the center line of the boats, because the deck was not wide in the first place, and if a chimney was placed in the center, it would definitely hinder the handling and loading of torpedoes, so as in all German torpedo boats. The chimney was designed away from the center line of the ship, arranged close to the starboard side of the torpedo boat.

At the same time that Beiyang was buying new and trendy weapons and torpedo boats with great fanfare, there was also a feudal official in the Qianguo officialdom who was also obsessed with this kind of underwater weapon, Zhang Shusheng, the governor of Liangguang at that time, and Li Shaoquan, the minister of Beiyang, were also a standard torpedo fan. In 9080, when Beiyang ordered torpedoes in Germany, following the "heaven" and "earth" of Beiyang, Liangguang also ordered three torpedo boats from the German Volkeng factory, which were named "Thunder Dragon", "Thunder Tiger" and "Thunder Leopard". The 3 boats are of the same class, fully enclosed style, with a displacement of 58 tons, a length of 33.53 meters, a width of 3.96 meters, a draft of 1.68 meters, and a composite steam engine and 2 boilers. Single-axle propulsion with 900 hp. The speed is 18.5 knots, the coal tank capacity is 10 tons, there is a 14-inch torpedo tube on the left and right sides of the bow, a total of 3 blackhead torpedoes (1 of which is a spare mine), and 2 37mm Haqikaisi five-barrel rapid-fire guns, with a total of 20 people. Since it was impossible for small torpedo boats to sail home on their own. The torpedo boats were later dismantled and transported back to China by ship, where they were unloaded in Guangzhou and assembled at the Whampoa Dockyard in Guangdong.

It seems that he wants to steal the limelight of Li Shaoquan's Beiyang, and when Li Shaoquan purchased a batch of ship-based torpedo boats with his warships, in 9081, Zhang Shusheng sent an order to Germany again. In Germany, Elbing Schichau ordered 8 torpedo boats in one go, and simply named them after the traditional Fuxi Bagua, called "Lei Gan", "Lei Kun", "Lei Li", "Lei Kan", "Lei Zhen", "Lei Xun", "Lei Gen", "Lei Dui", these Bagua torpedo boats are of the same level, belonging to steel single mine boats, that is, torpedo boats with only one torpedo launcher, with a displacement of 26 tons and a length of 26 meters. It is 3.58 meters wide, the draft data is unknown, the main engine has a power of 420 horsepower, a speed of 19.5 knots, and the armament is a 14-inch torpedo tube in the bow. After being made in Germany, it was also dismantled and transported back to China, and assembled in the Whampoa Dockyard in Guangdong. For a time, torpedo boats in the Beiyang and Cantonese oceans were ubiquitous, and Li Shaoquan and Zhang Shusheng jointly contributed to the trend of torpedo boats and weapons entering the Qianguo.

The new appearance of torpedoes and torpedo boat weapons has set extremely high demands on the quality of naval professionals. Unlike traditional warships, torpedo boats cannot accommodate too many personnel, and torpedo weapons are complicated to operate, and the difficulty of aiming, adjusting the bearing, depth, and firing is much more difficult than that of artillery and other weapons, which requires that the officers and men on the boat must be very capable and extremely familiar with their own business technology. At the same time, the combat readiness maintenance of torpedoes and torpedo boats, as well as the work of depth fixing, also need professional and technical personnel. Therefore, in the early days of the purchase of torpedo boats, under the single-handedly establishment of Li Shaoquan and other bureaucrats, the training of torpedo boat officers and men and technical engineering personnel also began.

As early as 9077, the Harbour Master sent the first batch of naval students to study shipbuilding, including some students who studied shipbuilding in France, and specialized in the knowledge of torpedo and torpedo boat construction. In 9078, when Beiyang negotiated the construction of "heaven" and "earth" torpedo boats in Germany, Li Shaoquan specially transferred skilled workers from the Tianjin Machinery Bureau and other places, and sent them to the Volkeng and Brush Kaofu factories to learn the repair of torpedoes and torpedo boats. During this period, Beiyang also sent a group of naval officers to Germany to learn the specialty of torpedo boat driving. At the same time as sending students abroad, in 9080, Li Shaoquan instructed Liu Hanfang, an alternate of the Zhili Governor, to set up a torpedo battalion in Weihai, Shandong, to concentrate on the training of purchased torpedo boats, and began to train a large number of professional torpedo sergeants and sailors.

Just when the construction of the modern navy of Qianguo was in full swing, the Southwest War broke out in Japan in 9078, and in the previous naval battles of the Southwest War, the attack of the Russian Navy's "Demolition" mine-strike ship on the Satsuma Navy's "Mt. Fuji" gunboat was very eye-catching.

Soon after the end of the Southwest War, Ding Yusheng, the Minister of Shipping, immediately went to the imperial court, first pointing out that "(torpedoes) are really strange in opening the waves." In the battle of Japan's southern island, the Russians had torpedoes and the Satzans did not, and they were in danger of suffering from them, so they could be a wake-up call for me." He immediately proposed to purchase a first-class sea boat made by Volkeng for Fujian. and a batch of requests for brushing Kaofu torpedoes, and said that the required funds will be raised by Fujian and Zhejiang provinces themselves, and will not occupy the central financial funds. It is particularly worth mentioning that Ding Yusheng also put forward a rather far-sighted plan in the recital, that is, after the torpedo boat was purchased, the Fujian Shipping Administration would make a batch of copies and conduct formation training in the Wulong River on the other side of Mawei.

This torpedo boat was built in Fujian. Belonging to the first-class large torpedo boats, that is, the ancestor of modern destroyers, because the German shipbuilding industry has never built such a large torpedo boat, the lack of confidence made Volkeng shipyard say that it gave up the order, this 57,000 taels of silver order was finally transferred to the world-famous Torpedo Boat Shipyard, the factory did not dare to slack off, organized a large number of skilled workers, and began the construction of the first torpedo boat with a displacement of more than 100 tons in the history of the German shipbuilding industry. THIS LARGE TORPEDO BOAT WAS LATER NAMED "FULUNG" (ENGLISH TRANSLATION "FULUNG"). Known in Germany as S10, it has a displacement of 120 tons. The boat is 42.75 meters long, 5 meters wide, with a draft of 2.3 meters, and is powered by a three-expansion steam engine and a car-type boiler with single-shaft propulsion. The power measured during the test was as high as 1,597 hp, the speed was an astonishing 24.2 knots, and the standard capacity of the coal tank was 14.5 tons, and the maximum capacity was 24 tons. The turtle-shaped bow has one 14-inch torpedo tube on the left and right of the bow, in addition to the two brushed Kauv torpedoes as standard. There were also 2 spare torpedoes. Behind the bow of the boat is a bunker-like command tower, which is used to control and control the two launch tubes in the front, and on the rear deck of the "Fulong" boat, there is also a 14-inch torpedo tube that can be rotated, with this launch tube, there is another spare armored command tower nearby, both armored command towers can be used to control the warship, and the top of the command tower is also equipped with a 37mm Haqikes five-barrel rapid-fire gun. Because the "Fulong" boat is large in size, it is not convenient to disassemble and assemble it back to China, so there are also three masts on the "Fulong" boat for sailing. On September 24, 9081, under the command of German naval officers and sailors, the "Fulong" boat arrived in Fuzhou and handed over the ship, and Qianguo had its first first-class torpedo boat.

He Ruzhang, who succeeded Ding Yusheng as Minister of Shipping, appointed Chen Cairui, an engineer who had studied in Germany, to set up a torpedo factory of the Shipping Bureau at the beginning of his tenure to produce black-headed torpedoes on his own. After the "Fulong" torpedo boat returned to China, He Ruzhang immediately went to the imperial court and asked for funds to be allocated to make a batch of imitations, but there was no progress due to the lack of funds. In order not to make the sharp weapons of naval warfare wasted, He Ruzhang and the officials of the shipping administration held that torpedo boats should be used to attack in formations, and that the only torpedo boat in Fujian was too thin, and that it would be better to withdraw it if there was not enough funds to continue to purchase or build it, and that no matter the Nanyang, Beiyang, and Yueyang, as long as 60,000 taels of silver were paid, the money obtained would be used as the operating expenses of the shipping administration. Soon, due to the threat of the Russian Navy, the "Fulong" boat went north and was incorporated into Li Shaoquan's Beiyang Naval Division.

As if the imperial court played a joke with He Ruzhang, not long after the "Fulong" went north, the imperial court appointed Qingbeile Yi Kuang to replace himself as the Minister of Shipping, and Yi Kuang brought the shipbuilding plan by the imperial court was a large torpedo boat.

Although the policy of the imperial court was reversed, the shipmaster was well prepared, and as soon as the plan for the construction of a large torpedo boat was finalized, the construction began in a hurry, and it only took four months to build the hull, and the power part was completed, and it was ready for formal sea trials.

For his own "achievements", Qingbeile naturally did not forget to boast about himself and the subordinates of the shipmaster, and at the same time played the imperial court to report the merits, but also widely publicized in the newspapers, because it was built the largest and latest torpedo boat in the East, it naturally attracted the attention of Western naval observers, calling it "the first in East Asia", the imperial court was naturally overjoyed that the shipmaster under the leadership of Qingbeile had achieved such an achievement, not only rewarded Qingbeile with double stilts, Peijin flowers and jade belts, but also participated in the construction of the shipmaster craftsmen were also rewarded.

The court's reward made Chinbeiler even more motivated, and he was now ambitious not only to fulfill the military order for a "large submarine to go to sea", but also to advance the construction of the torpedo gunboat, which had been shelved by the shipmaster. (To be continued......)

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