Chapter 154: The First Ironclad Ship (Third update, please subscribe)

It is important to transform people ideologically, but there must be someone to be transformed!

In fact, no matter whether they are weak or gentle, for Zhu Xianhai, there must be enough people, this is the most important thing. As for the other things, they are secondary.

Only when there are people can we have the opportunity to use whips, sticks, laws, and discipline to transform their thoughts and behaviors.

But if there are no people, everything is just talk and castles in the air.

Since that long simulation, facing the reality of limited human resources in Nanhua, how to increase the population has always been the most important issue facing Zhu Xianhai. Military national education is to achieve the goal of a nation of soldiers and to increase national defense strength, but what is the real national defense strength?

Still human!

Without people, everything is empty talk!

How to increase immigration? This is the problem that Zhu Xianhai has been trying to solve in the past few months. Increasing the number of immigration ships and purchasing the Great Eastern are solutions, but these are only temporary solutions and do not address the root cause.

What is this?

The origin of Nanhua immigrants is in China, in the Qing Dynasty. Only when they open their doors can there be a steady stream of immigrants. How to make them open their doors, instead of prohibiting workers from coming to Nanhua as in the simulator, there is only one way - to let the Taiping Rebellion continue.

To put it bluntly, it is to increase the aid to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom! In order to allow the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to continue fighting, Zhu Xianhai was very painstaking and even considered purchasing weapons in the UK to "aid" them, but this was unrealistic. Fortunately, Nanhua's industry had already established a foundation and could realize some of his ideas.

"Speaking of which, I should thank the Taiping Army. If it weren't for them, you probably wouldn't be able to come to Nanhua."

Standing in the dock, listening to the "dong, dong" sound of iron nails hammering, Zhu Xianhai smiled at Liang Mingwei.

"Boss, you are right. If it weren't for the Taiping Army, how could I have come to Nanhua?"

Liang Mingwei smiled helplessly.

"I was doing well at the Changzhou Dockyard Company, but I never thought I would be brought here by them for no apparent reason."

Liang Mingwei, who speaks Cantonese Mandarin, is still a little confused even now. He was just eating hot pot and singing... No, he was not eating hot pot at that time. Instead, he was an employee of his American boss Novi, negotiating with the landlord to buy land outside Ningbo city. Novi was the owner of Cheung Chau Shipyard and planned to open a shipyard in Ningbo, so he sent him to Ningbo. He had just bought the land and before he could recruit stonemasons to build a shipyard on the seashore, he encountered the Taiping Army. He was unable to escape and was captured along with dozens of shipbuilders from Hong Kong.

Although the Taiping rebels did not chop off their heads directly as the legend goes, they "sold" them overseas. For Liang Mingwei, who can speak fluent English, this is not a bad thing, but a good thing!

After all, after arriving at Nanhua, because he could speak English and knew how to repair ships, he went directly to the shipyard and became a junior engineer.

"It was a strange combination of circumstances. If it weren't for this, how could Akihito have been able to display what he had learned?"

Zhu Xianhai smiled. In the 1860s, there were actually Chinese engineers, or Chinese technicians, in the Hong Kong shipyards. This was beyond his imagination. However, the scale of the Hong Kong shipyards at that time was far beyond his imagination. In more than a dozen shipyards of varying sizes, there were tens of thousands of shipwrights engaged in ship repair and shipbuilding. This seemed to be natural. After all, those ocean-going ships also needed dock repairs after sailing to China, and those docks were basically built in Hong Kong. Over the past decade, not only a group of skilled shipwrights were trained, but also a group of junior Chinese technicians.

We need to find a way to get some of these people here, so they don’t just waste it in Hong Kong. This is a complete surprise!

"Even if you learn shipbuilding in Hong Kong, you can only help foreign engineers in foreign shipyards. After graduating from a church school, I worked as an apprentice in a shipyard for six years. If I were a foreigner, I would have been recommended to go to an engineering school in the UK. But it's not possible there. Not only that, foreigners don't believe we can build ships..."

Shaking his head, Liang Mingwei suddenly said.

"Okay, I was complaining so much that I almost forgot to formally announce it. Boss, look, the keel of the Taiping gunboat has been installed. It is 38.1 meters long, 9 meters wide, and has a draft of 2.41 meters. The power system uses two compound steam engines, and the speed is about 10 knots..."

Pointing at the gunboat under construction in the dock, Liang Mingwei seemed somewhat proud. Although the idea of ​​this ship came from the boss, he was one of the direct designers. Well, the chief designer was Mr. Harris.

"…Although it is a wooden hull with iron ribs, we have covered the wooden hull, that is, above the waterline, with a one-inch thick iron plate. This can increase its protection, save materials and money, and reduce the ship's tonnage, making it easier to sail. Add in the ten-inch Dahlgren cannon, and it is definitely a military weapon."

Such a small boat actually carries a ten-inch cannon!

In fact, when Zhu Xianhai proposed this idea, everyone, including the shipyard's chief engineer Mr. Harris, was stunned.

How big is this ship?

The displacement is about 400 tons, but it is going to be equipped with a ten-inch Dahlgren cannon. Is this possible?

In history, there really was one, the so-called "mosquito boat" or "mosquito gunboat", which was purchased by the Beiyang Navy in its early days. It was also the "Randolph gunboat", which was used for offshore defense. Its characteristic was that it was a small ship equipped with a large cannon. At that time, the Qing Dynasty bought this kind of gunboat because it was cheap. The biggest feature of the mosquito gunboat was that it was equipped with a naval gun that could suppress the firepower of the ironclad ship, but this kind of gunboat was too small and not suitable for ocean-going operations.

In the late Qing Dynasty, Li Hongzhang and others introduced this type of warship in order to achieve an asymmetric combat effect - with the cooperation of coastal artillery, small ships can defeat large ships, but facts have proved that this type of gunboat is basically useless, it can neither attack large ships nor cooperate well with artillery.

But that did not prevent Zhu Xianhai from taking out this kind of gunboat - its technology is simple, and it is essentially a small boat with a displacement of several hundred tons, but it is just nailed with a layer of iron plate.

Technically speaking, except that the technology of the iron ribs is slightly more complicated, there is no essential difference between it and a wooden boat.

Even the iron ribs were not complicated, after all, they were just wrought iron forged with a steam hammer.

What's the only thing that makes this technically simple boat so special?

He just installed a cannon that looked intimidating.

That’s right, it was just “bluffing” - during the entire Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, the several “mosquito boats” never played any role, and even if they fired a few shells... they all missed the target.

But, the ten-inch cannon is indeed "intimidating"!

What could be more intimidating?

It's his iron armor!

There were not many ironclad ships in those days. Even though it was just a layer of iron sheet nailed onto a wooden hull, no, it should be called iron armor. It was still an ironclad ship!

This is Nanhua’s number one ironclad ship!

Invulnerable iron armor plus a ten-inch, or 254mm, Dahlgren smoothbore gun, how intimidating would these two be when placed on the sea?

It's so scary!

"Well, this is also an ironclad ship, let's take it step by step!"

(End of this chapter)