"That's the boat." Scrooge pointed to a boat being tested in the pool and said to Morgan, then he turned around and shouted to a young man in his thirties in a white lab coat standing on the other side of the pool, "Crouch, please come here, well, come and tell us about the boat." ”

"Okay, Mr. MacDonald, I'll come right over." The man responded. However, the pool in the laboratory was quite large, and the man had to put his things away and explain a few words to his assistant by the way, so Scrooge still had time to say a few words to Morgan before he walked around the long test pool.

"Look at that ship, it has a standard displacement of 60,000 tons, which is larger than any ship we have built before, and the largest ship ever built by mankind. However, due to the breakthrough in the design of the boat, the resistance of this boat when sailing at low speed is surprisingly small. When sailing at a speed of about 12 knots, the boat can save about 10 percent of fuel. ”

"So much?" Morgan paused, "How is this done?" Apparently, Morgan, who considers himself half a ship expert, was interested.

"Oh, it's more complicated to talk about, involving fluid mechanics, vortex dynamics, and a lot of very specialized things, even for me, it will take a long time to figure it out. Do you really want to know? Scrooge looked at Morgan with a smile.

"Hell, can't you explain it in simpler terms?" Morgan did as Scrooge had expected, and flinched in front of the barrage of nouns that he didn't know what they meant, but that sounded powerful.

To put it simply, it was this young man who discovered that when the ship was sailing, the eddies brought up by it could produce a kind of force, which, when properly used, could counteract the effect of wave resistance to a certain extent. Well, this force is named after his surname, and it is called Charshev force. By harnessing this force, our new ship type has less resistance than the average boat, which makes our new boat very economical. Scrooge explained.

"Very nice lad. Well, this design should also allow us to build warships faster, right? Morgan asked.

"Unfortunately, this design is only useful at the low end, as the speed increases, the positive effect of the Scharshev force becomes less and less, and by about 18 knots, it is basically useless, beyond 18 knots, it can even be counterproductive, and if it reaches 30 knots, this force combined with the wave resistance can even damage the keel structure of most boats. Therefore, whether it is a warship or a high-speed cruise ship or yacht, this design is not needed. This design is only used by some cargo vessels that are not sensitive to speed. Scrooge said to Morgan as he put his hands on the railing by the pool, staring at the large-scale model in the pool that was being tested for seaworthiness.

"Hello, Mr. MacDonald, Mr. Morgan." By this time, Crouch Charshev had bypassed the long pool and walked to Scrooge and Morgan.

"Well, good lad." Scrooge nodded and said, "Tell our big boss Morgan about the features of this boat." ”

"Okay." Crouch replied. He then turned to Morgan and began to introduce Morgan to this newly designed ship type......

……

Soon, news appeared in various newspapers about the Morgan MacDonald shipyard was going to produce a completely new giant cruise ship with a displacement of up to 60,000 tons for Mobil Oil. Of course, the angles of each newspaper are different. The Sun, for example, which has a more popular audience, focused its coverage on the enormity of the ship, and compared it with similar ships in other countries, especially those built by the British, which had long been hated by the American people, and then unceremoniously described the British shipbuilding technology as scum.

The New York Times, which prides itself on rationality, objectivity, and neutrality, pointed out that although the United States has made considerable progress in shipbuilding technology, the ship is still only a ship on the drawing board, and the work of cutting steel plates has not even begun. In addition, the ship was too large, so a new specialized slipway was needed, and the construction of the giant slipway was not yet complete. So the ship will not be built on the slipway until at least August next year. So at this time, I cheered for this, and I felt that the United States was the first in the world in shipbuilding technology, which was a little early.

The journal Science, which focuses on science and technology, analyzes the technical advantages of this type of ship, such as the results of tank experiments, the seafaring performance of this type of ship, especially in high sea conditions, should be excellent, and in addition, in order to be able to quickly load and unload oil, the ship uses a variety of new technologies......

As for the Wall Street Journal, which is the most specialized in economics, it analyzes the advantages of such ships from an economic point of view:

"The huge carrying capacity has greatly increased the efficiency of sea transportation, so that the cost of transportation has been reduced by at least two-thirds. The high sea conditions brought about by the huge water distribution also allow the vessel to sail on the toughest routes during the most unseaworthy seasons, which also greatly increases the flexibility of use...... The appearance of such ships almost directly announced that the previous oil tankers of several thousand tons or more than 10,000 tons have become completely obsolete. Compared to these monster ships, which resemble prehistoric behemoths, they have no chance of winning in the race to transport across the oceans, and it is almost certain that those small displacement tankers will be eliminated in a very short time as long as these giant tankers can be put into service.

In the same way, the advantages of supertankers over ordinary tankers will also be superfreighters. It can be expected that with the maturity of the construction technology of ultra-large displacement ships, more and more giant ships will appear on the ocean transportation routes one after another, and by that time, the current ships with limited transportation capacity will almost certainly be phased out in the future. Because only a shipping company with a large number of such ships can survive and thrive, if a shipping company still uses those old ships, they will soon find that their operating costs will make them have no resistance to competitors. Therefore, the emergence of such ships almost directly means a great change in the transportation industry and the shipbuilding industry......"

……

As analyzed by the Wall Street Journal, Morgan MacDonald's giant tanker called "Poseidon" broke all the rules of previous tanker competition, reducing the cost of transporting oil by nearly two-thirds. This makes the profits that the enterprises that have such ships can obtain in the transportation process have increased significantly, or it means that in the competition with other companies, they can easily defeat their competitors with a simple way to reduce the freight, because they can completely reduce the price to the point that the opponent needs to be upside down to follow up, and can also ensure that they have a good profit.

Therefore, whoever can have such an oil tanker in the first place will be able to quickly gain an advantage in the oil transportation market. In this case, although the two new slipways for the production of such ships have not yet been completed, the shipyard will receive orders that will be auctioned for five years. Encouraged by this, the Morgan MacDonald shipyard announced that it would add two more of these large slipways.

Since the supertanker has not yet had time to be launched, it has already shown such a good money situation, so shipbuilders with a little ability around the world have invested in the competition to build supertankers. The British, the Germans, and even the French and Italians joined the game. The British saw the supertanker battle as a struggle to preserve the country's prestige. So they declared that they had developed a plan to build a supertanker larger and more advanced than the American Poseidon, and it is said that some of the slipways originally used to build battleships have begun to be rebuilt in order to build a supertanker that can rival the Poseidon. In addition, the construction of a new, larger slipway has also begun.

As for Germany, their emperor, who sometimes had a little problems, was known for his great success. However, his reaction was much slower in this matter, and he even felt that it would not be a bad thing if the British were willing to take the slipways that could be used to build battleships and battlecruisers into civilian ships.

Of course, this lack of foresight of the German emperor was quickly corrected, and his generals, who were close to the business owners, told him that the production of supertankers was a very profitable business, and that with it they could further expand their ability to build battleships. In addition, the construction of such a giant oil tanker would provide a large number of jobs and allow the economy to recover quickly from the recession.

As for France and Italy, they have no intention of competing with the United States and Britain for the crown of the world's largest ships. They don't expect their supertankers to surpass the British and Americans in terms of performance, but they all see that the slipways of the Americans and the British, especially the large slipways needed to produce supertankers, are actually very limited. As a result, they can't be producing too fast. And those carriers may not be able to wait that long. If at this time, they can develop a supertanker that is comparable in performance to the Poseidon of the Americans, or has a limited gap, then those orders that cannot wait will definitely fall into their hands.

……

"The boom in giant oil tankers is always set off, and the next step is to work on ordinary cargo ships." Looking at the information in his hand, Scrooge thought so.