Since ancient times, both the navy and the army have been quite conservative, and this conservatism is especially true to the navy.

Ironclad ships have been developed for more than 20 years, but now there are still many people holding on to wooden battleships, steam engines have been used for so many years, and pure steam-powered battleships have been in service for a long time, but before that, except for those small gunboats, the other main warships still have sails.

This is true even in the Imperial Navy.

Even with the existence of Lin Zhe, in the early stage of the development of the Imperial Navy's ironclad ships, they only tested pure steam power on offshore and inland ironclad ships, and they were still equipped with sails on ocean-going ironclad ships.

This situation lasted until after the Battle of the Pearl River Estuary this year, when the navy reflected on whether to equip the main ocean-going warships with sails, and finally decided to remove the sails and use pure steam power.

And this is still the Imperial Navy.

The Imperial Navy has been a weak navy since its founding, thinking all day long about how to catch up with the navies of the great powers, so it dares to take risks and adopt some advanced but immature technologies, the most obvious example of which is the rear-loading artillery.

China's rear-loading artillery technology comes from the British Armstrong gun, although the later technical improvements were carried out by themselves, but strictly speaking, there is no essential difference between the rear-loading artillery attached to the Imperial Navy and the rear-loading artillery of the British.

Everyone has flaws.

For example, the Armstrong cannon was expensive to build, the production was low, the gun was too bulky, and the bolt was not strong enough to exist.

But the two have different ways of solving this problem.

The British believed that the Armstrong gun was advanced, but it was too bulky, expensive to build, and low in production. And there are frequent breakdowns, which the British are quite dissatisfied with. And it was not said to go for improvements, but to take a direct decommissioning. Then the practice of replacing the technically mature front-loading rifled gun.

However, in the face of these problems, the Imperial Navy adopted active improvements, the most serious of which was the bolt problem, which was improved several times, and through the use of new steel to make bolts, in order to strengthen the strength and reduce the failure rate, at the same time, it also specially prepared spare bolts, limited rate of fire, maximum charge and number of shots.

These have effectively reduced the failure rate of rear-loading guns, and at the same time, years of continuous improvement have also allowed the rear-loading artillery technology of the Imperial Navy to be greatly developed.

You're welcome. Through years of continuous improvement, the Imperial Navy has surpassed the British Armstrong gun in the technology of rear-loading artillery to a certain extent.

The two countries' different attitudes towards rear-loading artillery are also related to the different models of the two countries, Britain is a typical commercial country, and the manufacture of naval guns is a commercial factory, and there is no national background, for them to manufacture new naval guns is a commercial behavior.

However, the three major arsenals on the Empire's side are all royal enterprises, and the development of large-caliber rear-loading naval guns is not a simple commercial activity. Rather, it is a political task related to national defense and security.

The Royal Arms Company's investment in the development of rear-loading naval guns is huge, and if you consider it at the commercial level, it is actually a loss.

The difference between the two systems even has a different perspective on the future technology of the navy. This has led to differences in the development of future ironclad ships between the two navies.

The British Navy was determined to completely remove the breech-loading naval guns and replace them with the front-loading rifled guns.

However, the Imperial Navy did not hesitate to spend a lot of money to once again equip it with breech-loading naval guns of a larger caliber. That is, two hundred and fifty mm breech-loading naval guns.

This gap in the path of development is also one of the few in the Imperial Navy. The opportunity to shorten and catch up with the gap with the navies of the great powers.

It was learned that the British designed a new turret, purely steam power. However, after preparing to equip the front-loading rifled guns, the Imperial Navy also reacted quickly.

In August 1866, after the construction of the Chiyou ironclad ship officially started at the No. 4 dock of the Qingdao Naval Shipyard, the Imperial Navy submitted a plan for the construction of the second 10,000-ton ironclad ship.

The second 10,000-ton ironclad ship is the second ship of the Chiyou-class ironclad ship, and the basic design is comparable, but the displacement has decreased, only 9,800 tons, and there is little change in other aspects.

The reason for the reduction in tonnage is that the ship is intended to be built at the No. 3 dock of the Qingdao Naval Shipyard, and the design standard of this No. 3 dock does not mean that it is 15,000 tons, like the No. 4 dock, but only 10,000 tons, that is, more than 10,000 tons of warships cannot be built.

The ship was named the Zhuan, and it was still a 'low-freeboard all-heavy gun ironclad ship' with obvious characteristics of the Imperial Chinese Navy, using four twin-mounted eight 250 mm main guns, a fully enclosed turret, and a diamond-shaped layout, which could concentrate six main guns to one side during battle.

It was also equipped with a number of 150 mm secondary guns and 80 mm secondary guns.

It adopts pure steam power, and the design speed is 14.5 knots.

The ship is expected to start construction at the No. 3 dock of the Qingdao Naval Shipyard in September, because the eight-year-old ship, the Tianwu, which has been under construction for several years, is expected to be officially launched in September.

The outfitting of the Tianwu is expected to take a long time, and it is estimated that it will not be completed until next year, and then a series of sea trials will continue for a long time, and if it is really to be put into service, it is estimated that it will not be until after 1868.

In September, the Tianwu was successfully launched, and it did not take long for the construction of the Zhuan to officially start, which also marked that the Imperial Navy has two 10,000-ton ironclad ships on the slipway, and after entering the seventies, the Imperial Navy will have two 10,000-ton giant ships into active service.

Of course, although the two 10,000-ton ironclads are currently the most important, the expansion of the Imperial Navy is not limited to the 10,000-ton ironclad ships.

There were many more battleships working on the slipway.

This year, the Imperial Navy also started construction of an ironclad ship called Kuafu, a successor to the Tianwu, with a displacement of 5,500 tons, which is currently under construction at the Shanghai shipyard.

In addition, the Guangzhou shipyard also started construction of an offshore ironclad ship of the Emperor, with a displacement of 2,500 tons.

Then the 1,600-ton Kunming-class ironclad rapid reconnaissance ship also started construction at the Shanghai Shipyard and Tianjin Shipyard respectively.

As for the Zhenguang-class small ironclad ship and Jining-class gunboat, they are being built in many shipyards in China.

Affected by the tensions in the first half of the year. In 1866, the Imperial Navy started construction of two new 10,000-ton ironclad ships. A large ironclad ship, an offshore ironclad ship. Two fast reconnaissance ships and a group of small ironclads and gunboats.

And this is not counting the ironclad ships that started construction before and are still under construction, such as the fifth ship of the Pangu class, the Jumang, and the third ship of the Yandi class, the Yellow Emperor, both of which are currently being outfitted and are expected to enter the official service of the Navy next year.

The year 1866 was a year of leapfrogging for the Imperial Navy, with so many warships being built at the same time, plus the naval battles that had previously been fought in Hawaii and at the mouth of the Pearl River. Let the military spending of the Navy be connected to the rise.

Although the empire had already drawn up a military budget for the navy, in fact, in April and July of this year, the empire successively allocated a total of 4 million yuan to the navy for additional war and ship building expenses.

And these five million will not be able to support the expansion plan of the navy, and by next year and even in the next few years, the navy's military spending will still increase significantly.

However, this is also the total military expenditure of the navy is relatively small, after all, the army is the boss in the empire, and the army takes the lion's share of the annual military expenditure, the navy only takes a small half, and the guards only take a fraction.

Today, even though the Navy's military spending seems to have increased a lot. But compared with the army's annual military expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, it is a drop in the bucket and not worth mentioning.

For this purpose, in 1866 just ended. In 1867, the navy began to fight for more military spending, and their efforts did not mean that they fought directly in the total military spending. Instead, a special naval construction plan was put forward in an attempt to get the central government to directly allocate funds for the construction of ships.

After all, warships are getting more and more expensive these years. In the past, the Pangu class was only 600,000 yuan, and the Yandi level behind it had climbed to 900,000 yuan. As for the next eight years, the number of armored ships has reached 1.4 million. The Chiyou-class 10,000-ton ironclad ship is a terrifying 2.2 million.

The price of several other Kunming-class fast reconnaissance ships is 500,000, which is not much cheaper than the Pangu-class.

Although the Ironclad Ship is cheaper, it also costs 450,000 ships.

As for the Kuafu-class ironclad ship, although its cost is not as good as that of a 10,000-ton ironclad ship, it is also 1.1 million.

What does this mean?

This shows that the basic cost of the ironclad ships with a slightly larger tonnage in this year is almost 500,000, and if you want to act as the capital ship, that is, the ironclad ships of more than 5,000 tons, they all start with one million, and as for the 10,000-ton ironclad ships, they all start from two million.

This 10,000-ton giant ship must be equipped with at least 800 officers and men, and it will cost a lot of money to build a special deep-water berth and a matching repair system.

The Navy's military spending has never been too much, and if it is paid from the Navy's existing funds, it is estimated that the Navy will have to kneel directly.

That's why a special shipbuilding grant plan was proposed!

In other words, the navy did not want to see these expansion plans as a burden on the navy itself, but wanted to pass them on to the central government.

It's not that the admirals are smart or anything, but there's really no way.

In fact, it is not only the Imperial Navy that does this, in modern countries, to expand the navy, in fact, the central government has specially allocated funds, and even has to formulate special laws to carry out, otherwise the navy alone cannot be completed.

In this way, the Navy officially submitted the first five-year development plan of the Imperial Navy to Lin Zhe, detailing the threats that the Imperial Navy may face now and in the future, and how to build the Navy in response to such threats.

No one cared about the large discourse content of the development plan, but the number of ships built made a large group of people gasp.

According to this development plan, the Navy will start construction of at least six first-class ironclads of more than 10,000 tons, eight second-class ironclads, 12 third-class ironclads, and 10 fast cruisers in the next five years.

Its purpose is to maintain sea power in the western Pacific Ocean and to ensure the security of Japan's coastal areas and the South China Sea.

At the same time, it is necessary to renovate and expand the existing naval bases, build deep-water berths, build the three major core large naval ports of Shanghai, Qingdao, and Guangzhou, build second-class military ports such as Zhanjiang Port, Taiwan Jilong Port, and Zhoushan Port, and build overseas colonial military ports in Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay and Hawaii's Pearl Harbor.

After a series of plans, it is enough to make the army and the cabinet bigwigs vomit blood.

The Navy removed a fraction of the various expenses of this plan, saying that only 200 million yuan of additional funds were needed, well, this 100 million yuan did not include the annual daily expenses of the Navy.

And the empire's annual central financial revenue is only four or five hundred million, and the navy actually needs two hundred million in one mouth!

Whether it is the army or the cabinet of those bigwigs, it would be strange if they did not oppose it, even Lin Zhe, who has always supported the development of the navy, had to marvel after seeing this plan, if there are these two hundred million, I still want the navy to dry up, and directly use the money to kill the British. (To be continued.) )