After nearly a year of arduous negotiations and several setbacks, the international debt restructuring plan finally reached a preliminary consensus in Washington on July 21 and entered the stage of substantive debt repayment arrangement.

Based on the principal amount of the outstanding loan of the former United States of 376.2 million Tang Yuan, the principal of the outstanding loan will be reduced by 18.2 percent, and the principal of the outstanding loan will be determined to be 307.732 million Tang Yuan, and the countries will discuss the repayment of the loan on this basis.

How much did each of the countries after the division of North America and the Tang occupation zone share their own contributions? An accurate ratio needs to be determined.

This is another difficult process of bargaining, and every decimal point increase in debt means a huge debt of more than 3 million Tang Yuan, which is a disaster for the small North American countries.

As a larger political entity, the Republic of New York needs to bear nearly half of its debts, totaling about 150 million Tang Yuan.

For it

There is a huge difference between one more decimal point and one less decimal point, and it is related to vital interests.

The same is true for the Democratic Republic of Maine and the Republic of Connecticut, although they only need to bear a few decimal places, that is, 3%~3.5% of the total debt, which will also be cut down desperately.

3% is to bear the debt of more than 9 million Tang Yuan of the previous government, and 3.5% is to bear more than 10 million Tang Yuan of the previous government, can it be the same?

Fortunately, after negotiations, the International Creditor Committee, composed mostly of French creditor banks and big capitalists, agreed to forgive the international debt of the disputed area in Colombia, that is, 3.2% of the total debt.

Now this disputed area of Colombia is occupied by three countries, Washington, D.C., Colombia, occupied by the French Expeditionary Force, and Maryland and Delaware by the Tang Empire and British troops (Note; The total number of British troops is more than 1,300 people) occupied, how to repay the debt?

The Kingdom of Massachusetts is part of the Tang Empire, and its repayable former government debts are also summed up in the total plate, and the Tang State should bear 42% of the total, totaling 126 million Tang Yuan, which was determined early.

This part of the debt is divided into three, and the total one-third of the total is borne by the imperial government and the royal family, and will be settled by the funds allocated in the next year, and the loan will not be extended.

The remaining two-thirds, totaling about 84 million Tang Yuan, will be repaid by several major multinational banks with strong domestic strength and settled at one time.

Each of the three states and one vassal state of the empire paid a different proportion, which was to be repaid annually by local expenditures over the next ten years.

The government of the Tang Dynasty and the royal family subsidize part of the interest respectively, and this part of the interest is not high, and the preferential annual interest rate is only 2.1%, which does not need to be borne by the three states and one feudal state.

This is how it is calculated

With a total population of more than 8.6 million people, the three states and one feudal state can afford less than one Tang Yuan public tax per capita per year, and the debt repayment pressure is relatively small, so it can be easily borne down.

The New York Republic, the Democratic Republic of Maine, and the Republic of Connecticut are under heavier pressure, and their divided finances will certainly not be able to repay their debts in one lump sum, which will require negotiations with international creditor committees on interest and repayment years.

On the one hand, they actively negotiated, and on the other hand, they were in frequent contact with several major business consortia of the empire's powerful business consortia to discuss loans at preferential rates.

With an abacus in his heart, he still "demolished the east wall and made up the west wall".

In order to retain this large amount of international borrowing business, the international creditor committee has also made significant concessions in terms of loan interest rates and tenure, roughly talking about an annual interest rate of about 4%~4.2% and a new loan term of 12~15 years.

But looking at the preferential interest rate of 2.1% in the Tang Empire, New York, Maine and Connecticut are unwilling to continue to reduce the level of annual interest rates.

If you don't expect an annual interest rate of 2.1%, then at least about 3%, and ideally 2.8%.

This kind of excessive demand made the international creditor committee skew its nose and angrily pointed out that it was "a big bargain for Tang Guo to his family, and there is no such low preferential loan interest rate in the world", which is simply unheard of.

So, the negotiations dragged on......

In Philadelphia

More than 300 hectares of land around Wuthering Heights, a secret research and development base in Fairmont Park, has been set aside as a military exclusion zone, with barbed wire and heavily guarded by military and police.

In the R&D base, a large group of experts, scholars and students have moved into the base and began to propose as many as a dozen R&D plans for the needs of the military.

There are light tracked armored vehicles, medium-sized tracked armored vehicles, and all kinds of strange shapes, round, square, hexagonal, and water tank shapes, and explore various ways to achieve them.

With the support of abundant funds, three programs have already been approved by the military representative, Lieutenant Colonel Ling Xiao, and the development of real vehicles will soon begin, and these tracked armored vehicles will be based on agricultural tracked tractors, which will be advanced at a fairly fast pace.

A complete logistical supply has been established, and the base even raises more than 30 dairy cows, hundreds of fat piglets and some chickens, ducks and poultry to provide a rich supply of meat, eggs and milk here.

In front of the two-story British-style building, there are seven or eight crawler tractors covered in dirt and dust, and a dozen staff members are busy with repairs.

Lieutenant Colonel Lei Xiao also changed out of his straight woolen officer's uniform, wore coarse cloth overalls, and squatted next to the crawler tractor to inquire about the malfunction.

"Sir, the chassis design of these crawler tractors is unreasonable, and the stiff setbacks are serious, and once the high-intensity operation for a long time occurs, the entire chassis will fall apart."

"The strength, wear resistance and toughness of these track pins are not enough, and basically after running for more than ten kilometers, mechanical fatigue frequently occurs, which is easy to break, deform or fall off, and the wear is very bad."

"There are also the front and rear buttresses of the chassis load-bearing, the load-bearing wheels are not good, in the case of rough driving, the teeth of the idler are deformed, it must be reinforced, and better alloy materials must be used......

"And the design of the walking mechanism is not reasonable......"

As soon as the crawler tractor chassis was used at first glance, it exposed a lot of problems, which simply made Lieutenant Colonel Lei Xiao's head as big as a fight.

Because of the different use scenarios, agricultural machinery in the farm or pasture, most of the agricultural work is dry ploughing, raking soil harvesting, the operating environment is relatively stable, a busy season down to travel twenty or thirty kilometers, enough to cultivate a large piece of land.

In military use, however, Lieutenant Colonel Lei Xiao demanded that these tracked armored vehicles be able to travel at least 120 kilometers autonomously without any problems, once they were separated from the railway line.

According to the speed of 15 kilometers per hour, that is, 8 motorcycle hours, which has to cross ditches and hurdles in the field, climb slopes and wade through water, the experimenters all sprint at maximum speed to verify its reliability.

When these crawler tractors come to the base, they usually have to run more than 100 kilometers a day, and they can afford such a high-intensity toss when they change people without changing vehicles.

It's not ...... After more than 10 days, I was all lying on my stomach.

Lieutenant Colonel Lei Xiao is the kind of person with a more axial personality, who must be more serious when he sees a path, he pursues perfection and cannot tolerate all kinds of flaws.

So when he was keenly aware of the huge use of armored vehicles in the military field, he was even willing to pay for modification out of his own pocket. With the help of royal relations, he produced thin bulletproof armor, led a group of technical engineers to work hard, and established a cavalry armored brigade.

Now that he has projects, money, people, venues, and ample time, he is even more reluctant to lower his R&D standards.

After collecting a large number of questions, Lieutenant Colonel Lei Xiao stood up and frowned, turned his head to look at Captain Pan Zhixin, who had written with a pen, with an inquiring look in his eyes.

I saw Captain Pan Zhixin smile bitterly, flipped through the notebook in his hand, and then added together the dozen or so questions that had been recorded recently, and then replied;

"Chief, there are already as many as 171 problems related to tracked chassis, of which 66 are related to material strength, wear resistance, toughness and torsional resistance, 37 are related to irrational design, 21 are related to harsher use environments, 9 are related to chassis girders, 7 are related to design concepts, 16 are related to the special needs of the military, and 14 are related to your high requirements.

Especially in terms of materials, we urgently need to increase the number of experts who are familiar with the steel material process, the need for senior engineers in automobile factories, the need for customized special components, the need for comprehensive improvement of the chassis girder structure, and more support. ”

"So, you go and meet up with the expert group and make a list of what kind of experts are needed, and what kind of special materials are needed? What kind of technical support is needed? I'll solve these problems. "Lieutenant Colonel Lei Xiao knows that any difficulty will stump the rest of the project team.

This kind of troublesome thing can only be done by yourself, and it's a big deal to find the royal brother to go to the door!

Gathering the industrial forces of the whole empire, he did not believe that it was impossible to develop a tracked armored vehicle chassis suitable for the needs of the military.

These agricultural-tracked armored vehicles did not represent the highest level of the Reich's industry, because of the cost factor, and the best materials were used.

Lieutenant Colonel Lei Xiao knew;

Salem has a special steel mill that specializes in bearing steel, improved Harvey armor steel, cannon steel and some other special needs steel, and its strength is among the best in the world.

Don't ask why you know, Lieutenant Colonel Lei Xiao paid for a furnace of thin armor steel from his own pocket, which came from this special steel factory, and it took him more than 10,000 yuan to refine more than 120 tons, and the price per ton is almost more than 70 times that of ordinary steel.

That's it, people still charge the cost price, and the face is bigger.

Wouldn't the performance of using high-quality bearing steel to make track pins multiply?

There are always ways to improve......

If it doesn't work, you can also redesign the track, and thicken the original little finger thickness of the track pin, so that its ability to withstand rough driving, tensile and torsion resistance will be qualitatively improved, enough to meet the needs of the military.

If you have to overcome the scientific and technological difficulties one by one, the material difficulties one by one, and the design difficulties one by one, he doesn't believe that he can't build a tracked armored vehicle that meets the requirements of the military?

Confidence comes from strength.

As the world's No. 1 industrial power, the second wave of industrial revolution represented by electrification and petrochemical industry has developed in depth, and ranks among the world's top in dozens of electrification and petrochemical industry fields.

With such a strong strength, Datang can't develop qualified tracked armored vehicles, so other countries have no play.