Chapter 46: The Launching of the Battleship

The chances of an accident on a wooden sailing ship in the Age of Discovery were relatively high, and once an accident occurred, the sailors would put their last words in wine bottles and drift in the wind, hoping to be picked up. Later, when the new ship was launched, the wine bottle would be smashed on the bow of the ship, which means "the drifting bottle will never be used again", which is a deep blessing for the newly launched ship.

"Bang! ——”

As the champagne in Chen Zeyu's hand hit the bow of the ship, the electric button in the dock was suddenly opened by the workers, and the 16 water filling holes in the entire floating dock began to fill water at the bottom of the dock at the same time.

At the same time, the same ceremony was being performed in two other dockyards in the shipyard.

The workers of the surrounding shipyards immediately cheered one by one, and many government officials who came to visit also hugged and high-five each other, and everyone fell into a joy.

When the water level reached the predetermined standard, as another button in the dock control room was turned on, the "Xiangshan" ironclad battleship, which had been slowly lifted up in the water, slowly opened the open gate of the dock.

After the three "Luzon" class battleships were launched one after another, they gathered on the sea surface and lined up in a neat column, which looked more and more magnificent.

This class of "Luzon"-class ironclad battleship, originally influenced by Chen Zeyu, the shipyard's design team abandoned the traditional vertical bow, but adopted the inward inclined flying scissor bow pushed by Chen Zeyu.

In addition, the high-freeboard design, inherited from the "Taiwan" class and which has long been proven to be effective, is also applied to the warships of this class.

This makes the main deck of the entire battleship reach a staggering 5 from sea level. With a height of 3 meters, this design has been proven to withstand wind and waves equivalent to 7 levels in the bow of the battleship.

This also makes the battleship no longer susceptible to waves, the stability of the hull is extremely high, and the shape of the whole battleship is extremely trendy.

The three Luzon-class ironclad battleships still wore the traditional livery of the Seris Navy, and the entire hull was a silver-gray hull that is unique to the Republic.

Cold-applied zinc anticorrosive coatings specially developed by Avalanche Chemical Group for shipyards are also able to protect these brand new Seris naval vessels. In addition to ensuring that your ships are stainless all year round at sea, this livery also reduces the long-range visibility of your naval vessels.

The hull with a slight hint of silver-gray in the white color not only makes the battleship look very beautiful as a whole, but also the color of the painting carefully chosen by Chen Zeyu is also the color of the intersection of the sea and the sky.

This livery will be a good camouflage color when the entire battleship is sailing on the surface of the water.

In addition, the guns of this class of battleships also adopt the twin layout of later generations, and the front chimney zigzags backwards and merge with the rear chimney to merge into one place, making the hull look very smooth and simple from the outside.

The facilities of the mast and bridge in the front mast expansion make the entire battleship hull very close to the modern warships of later generations, and it looks very beautiful, compared to most armored ships of this era, the layout of the hull of the own warship is unusually compact and reasonable.

In addition, the biggest feature of the hull on the side of the ship is that it is different from the soft hull curve of Western warships.

In this way, it is naturally far inferior to the warships built by their own welding technology, and the time-consuming and laborious rivet beating process also greatly increases the unnecessary weight of the battleship's hull, which can be used for armor or naval artillery armament.

It is precisely because the Avalanche shipyard of the Republic gradually replaced a large number of original riveting links with welding processes in the process of building these warships, so that these warships of the Seris Navy can be equipped with more weapons and power systems while ensuring that the armor thickness is not inferior to that of Western warships.

Chen Zeyu looked at another open-air slipway not far from here, which had just been newly built.

It was there that the keel part of the first updated battleship of the Republic of China, the "Dreadnought", had been completed and was now in the process of intense construction of the battleship's hull.

When the construction of the battleship "Dreadnought" is completed and launched, all the warships of the navies of various countries in the world sailing on the sea will be obsolete.

Turning his head to look at the "Luzon"-class ironclad battleship undergoing sea trials on the sea not far away, Chen Zeyu hummed the song of his previous life happily.

Due to the fact that from this class of Luzon-class battleships, the shipyard design department has begun to adopt the central axis armament layout suggested by Chen Zeyu on the warships, and the overall simple and compact hull is completely a reduced version of the British Dreadnought class in the previous life.

The layout of the central axis, which is different from that of other countries, coupled with the wide firing range specially designed by the ship, allows the warship of this class to concentrate all six 305mm huge naval guns on the ship at the same time to fire in the same direction when fighting at sea.

Like the Dreadnought being built at the shipyard, the last three Luzon-class ironclad battleships abandoned the secondary guns of the mid-caliber in favor of a large number of mini-guns to deal with future torpedoes and small ships.

In addition, because of the improvement of the battleship's sighting equipment and firing command system, the three twin-mounted main guns distributed on the battleship can not only be aimed at their respective targets in different directions, but also use the new firing command system to make the three twin-mounted naval guns shoot at the same time using a calculated ballistic angle.

In particular, the power of the latter when firing in a concentrated manner, because the firing curve is the same, the metal heat flow bombarded by the main gun of the battleship will be able to walk within a relatively concentrated target range, so that the long-range hit rate of the battleship's guns will be greatly improved, and the importance of this to modern naval warfare is self-evident.

When Chen Zeyu was secretly proud, he also deeply felt that his Republic Navy had a first-class "monster" warship that was different from the development trend of the original navy ships. Strictly speaking, the "Luzon"-class ironclad battleship in front of us should be called an epoch-making new type of battleship.

Shaking his head, no longer imagining how this class of warships would bully the enemy's navy in future naval battles, Chen Zeyu called Sheng and Wu beside him to get into the carriage that was already waiting on the side.

Today's trip is on the one hand to celebrate the launch of the last three "Luzon" class warships, and on the other hand, it is also to cheer up Sheng and Wu, who are about to return to China. Let them know that their republic has not only the belief of invincibility, but also the overwhelming power over the countries of Asia.

Sheng Xuanhuai, who has been taken under Chen Zeyu's command, Wu Tingfang and Wu Tingfang of course returned to China with a purpose.

In addition to Wu Tingfang, who is a family member, will continue to go to the United States as his counselor to the United States, the main role will still be Sheng Xuanhuai, the minister of supervision of Beiyang Customs.

Tomorrow, two Seris freighters laden with arms will join the grand man on his way to the Qing Kingdom.

In addition to the 50 base 1,000 special 305mm artillery grenades that can be used for the Beiyang Navy Division and the Zhener Ship of the Qing Dynasty, there are also a large number of 150mm small-caliber rapid-fire naval guns that can be loaded on warships and their corresponding ammunition of 2,000 bases. And these are not the most important things, the arms on the other ship are the focus of Sheng Xuanhuai's trip.

"You bring this person first, he is equipped with the latest individual radio communication equipment in our country. When the time comes, the Navy will have a training ship dedicated to your relay station, and our intelligence officers in North Korea will contact you when needed. ”

Chen Zeyu gave Sheng Xuanhuai an order to see an opportunity to hand over the arms on the ship to a North Korean force called "Dong Hak-do". Their leader is called Jeon Junjun......

Although Sheng Xuanhuai and the others were very troubled by Chen Zeyu's order, they still agreed.

Regardless of their doubts, Chen Zeyu's Seris Republic will not do anything harmful to the Qing State in a short period of time, and even the opposite side of the Republic will appropriately strengthen the weight of the Qing State.

Naturally, it is Chen Zeyu's long-awaited battle of the First Sino-Japanese War!