"What are you thinking, Haydn?"

Jogura took a glass of milk and placed it on the snow-white linen table, turned his head sideways and asked, Lechelton stared out the window at the shipyard of Istria not far from the bay, and fell into a habitual daze.

They now live in a crimson villa halfway up a steep hill by the sea, with a clear panoramic view of the shipyard from the window, and in the other direction the pointed roof of the Evant Cathedral and the Gothic-style office buildings of the Imperial Mail Line.

"I'm wondering if it's necessary to build another 20,000-ton dock." In the bay, Hirton said, the expansion of the Isterian shipyard had begun since he returned from the Far East a year earlier, with locks being installed in two 6,000-ton and a 12,000-ton dry docks, and on the other side, several new buildings were also being topped out, and the occasional clanging of iron was heard.

"Oh my God, you've already invested nearly 7.6 million kroner in the shipyard, and you still have to spend money?!" Jogura screamed, although the man in front of him was very profitable, he was definitely not slow to spend money, she had never seen the company's dividends, and even her usual expenses depended on the income of her own estate.

"Now that Ferdinand has embarked on his circumnavigation on the Queen Elizabeth, when he returns to Vienna, he will become very interested in the navy, and our opportunity will come." Li Haiton said lightly, in fact, he was thinking about how to snatch the order of two cruisers of the Argentine Navy from the Italians, "We have to prepare in advance." ”

"But I usually have to use money, Haydn." Jogura said.

"Well, well, you can take a dividend of 20,000 kroner a year from the company's profits." Li Haidon said helplessly.

"It's not enough, I need 200,000." Jogura said.

"What are you doing with all that money?" Lechelton jumped, "There are only two of us, oh, and little Luther, of course. "Luther is the son of Jogura and is only four years old this year.

"One hundred thousand!" Jogura took a step back, and Lehydon had no choice but to accede to her request.

He looked at Jogula's snow-white chest and remembered one thing that had occurred to him last night when he was sweating profusely in bed, "Piston movement, yes, it looks like I need to set up my own internal combustion engine factory and automobile factory." ”

"Hey!" Jogula raised her voice helplessly, "Did you agree to this?!" ”

……

"Haydn, if you keep adding new things to the drawings that have not been proven in practice, I am afraid that the new battleship design of the Imperial Navy will not be completed by 18.95." Vice Admiral Poppel sighed, the old emperor's brain was in water, and he actually sent his nephew, an assistant engineer of shipbuilding, into the Navy's technical committee, which has now caused great trouble to the design of the new ship.

"Admiral Popel, before we begin to design a new warship, we must first determine its performance and purpose, and I insist that the Admiralty's request from the beginning is wrong." "A warship with a displacement of less than 6,000 tons would be asked to be fitted with four 240-millimeter guns, and the only option was to choose that ugly open-air turret." ”

The main point of contention between Helton and Poppel was artillery and armor, and since the invention of the Broken Threaded Bolt as a gun locking device in 1880, naval naval guns have finally completed the transformation from breech guns to breech guns. Since 1875, the British have been experimenting with equipping warships with rotating turrets, and since then, a variety of turret designs have been developed, and it was not until the early 20th century that the fully enclosed rotary turret completely replaced the silhouette turret.

It was an era of a mix of silhouette turrets and fully enclosed rotating turrets, and even the British, who were extremely sensitive to naval technology, had not yet completely replaced the exposed swivel turrets with fully enclosed rotating turrets. With the popularity of smokeless gunpowder, the smoke generated by gun firing is no longer an insurmountable difficulty, and the advantages of using a fully enclosed rotating turret with heavy armor are obvious, otherwise the fragmentation damage of a single high-explosive shell of the enemy in naval warfare is enough to scrap the main gun on a battleship.

The dilemma before Vice Admiral Poppel was whether the new battleship of the Imperial Navy should be an armored ship or a cruiser, which could only be designed as a cruiser according to the budget. However, the Admiralty required an armored ship with at least 4 or more 240 mm guns, so its only option was an open-air profile turret, since a fully enclosed rotating turret was structurally much more complex and heavier than a silhouette gun.

As chief designer and shipbuilding director of the Imperial Navy, Admiral Poppel was well aware of the development and latest technology of the world's navies. The problem is that in the application of new naval technologies, he and the warship designers of various countries will be troubled in many aspects. The first is that naval technology is changing with each passing day, and the development is too fast, and many newly built warships have become "obsolete goods" even before they are launched, which is also a reality that the navies of all countries cannot avoid. Second, the application of new technologies is very risky, and at the same time, it also means more costs, and before these new technologies have been tested in actual combat, no one can guarantee that they will definitely play a certain role in improving the performance of warships.

Finally, there is the budget problem from the Admiralty, which always wants the best and most powerful warships, and the Parliament, which is looking for ways to reduce the Navy's military spending. The Hungarian parliament never passed any budget bill on naval appropriations, and the Magyars, who had long coastlines in Croatia and Dalmatia, had always considered them a standard landlocked country and had no intention of paying the 30 per cent of the coastal defense costs of the Imperial Navy that they had promised.

Heldon strongly advocated a fully enclosed main turret with a smaller-caliber rapid-fire gun, which was obviously not well received by the Admiralty. On the other hand, in the design of watertight compartments, Helden advocated the elimination of all horizontal and longitudinal compartment watertight doors according to the German method, and only the watertight hatches at the top of each deck were retained.

"It's going to make the sailors in the Navy curse to death, like the sailors in the bilge, if they want to be in the next cabin, they have to climb up three or four decks, and then climb down the adjacent lattice." "Why did we set up the hatch? It's not for ease of movement yet. "Since 1795, when British naval engineer Samuel Bentham first used the watertight compartment technology invented by the Chinese to build warships, the watertight compartment design of ships around the world has been like this.

"The problem is that it is not reliable and strong enough, on the other hand, in tense battles, sailors often forget to close it in time. Especially in the case of a bullet, this has been strictly contrary to the original intention of setting up these compartments in the first place. "The sailors' whining and scolding is something we don't hear anyway." Our bulkheads were designed to improve the ship's resistance to sinking and survivability, not to be praised by sailors. ”

"Okay, let's give up the argument on that, I agree with your idea of incorporating some of the compartment armor into the hull structure, and this will need to be done all over again." "But cutting armor to increase speed won't do it, and the navy needs an armored ship, not a cruiser." ”

"Then let them make additional appropriations."

"It can't be done, and it's not going to be approved by Parliament." Poppel shrugged his shoulders, and now he threw the puzzle at LeHaydon to give him a sense of his own difficulty.

However, Helton did not expect the Naval Technical Committee to adopt his proposals, he was too young, although he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel, but that was only because he was a member of the Habsburg family, and now he was not qualified to let the old fellows in the Naval Technical Committee listen patiently to his proposals.

Qualifications, yes, unless he can design something that will make people's eyes shine, and now, he is unwilling to do that. The current accumulation of technology is not enough to achieve satisfactory processes for his designs, and it is too expensive to implement them, and it is not economical.

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