I want to be emperor

Chapter 632
Taking advantage of internal and external stability, the Army of the Great Chu Empire completed the reform of the overall framework of the army, and formalized the three-level troops of combat readiness, standing reserve, and garrison that had existed in the past few years but had no official name.

As a result, a three-level army composition system has been established, which is a first-class division for combat readiness, a second-class division for standing, and a third-class division for defense.

Further and better use effective military expenditures to complete more combat tasks and complete them better.

After all, although the army has a lot of military expenses, it is Alexander who supports more than 100 million people... In order to save military expenses, the army generally conducts military reclamation. Vegetables, pigs and chickens are used to reduce food expenses.

Don’t think that it’s not worth mobilizing so many troops just to save some food money, but in fact, most of the cost of raising the army these years is actually personnel and mule expenses, including personnel salaries and subsidies, and there are people who eat horses and chew gangs. That is food costs.

With more than 100 million people and hundreds of thousands of mules and horses, what kind of guns are much more expensive than the cost of food.

Guns and other things cost money to purchase at the beginning, and the price of guns has never been expensive.

A 115mm standard field gun is only five or six hundred Chu yuan... It is not as much as the personnel expenditure of the gun crew for half a year.

At the same time, in the later stage of daily use of guns, the cost is actually not much, at most it is the cost of some ammunition used in training.

During non-combat periods, the attrition rate of equipment is very low, not negligible, but the overall attrition level is also very low.

A front-mounted copper alloy artillery, if you fight on a large scale and maintain it properly, it can last for decades...

And you don't have to worry about not being able to use it after ten or 20 years, because the life of a gun is not calculated by time, but by the life of the barrel.

A bronze cannon, if you continue to fight and shoot out a thousand shells, it will be scrapped if it is only equipped for a few months. It is no longer enough. If you continue to use the normal charge, there is a risk of bombing.

Of course, this is on the premise that equipment replacement is not considered. In the original time and space, it is normal for the era of front-mounted smoothbore guns to be outdated for decades, but on the side of the Great Chu Empire, with the current situation of the Great Chu Empire Judging from the speed of industrial advancement, it is estimated that it will enter the era of rapid-fire guns in a few decades... No matter what, it will enter the era of rear-loading rifled racks and retreating guns.

Therefore, the equipment in the Chu army may be updated faster, but this is another matter.

Generally speaking, the equipment loss rate in peacetime is relatively low, and at the same time, the technical level of guns these days is the same. They are all stupid things, and maintenance is very convenient, unlike those tanks and aircraft of later generations. Similarly, maintenance is very troublesome and expensive.

On the other hand, the warships in the navy are more expensive to maintain, especially if the wooden warships are not properly maintained, they will turn into a pile of rotten wood in a few years!

Therefore, the maintenance cost of the navy is very high even in peacetime. Even if the sailors do not train and hide in the port doing nothing every day, the routine maintenance of warships moored in the port is also very expensive.

But the army doesn't have so much to worry about. If the artillery is stuck to death, it is to prevent the artillery from rusting, and then add some lubricating oil to the bearings.

The musket is also similar, just get some gun oil and wipe it.

On a daily basis, the biggest start of the Army is people eating horse chews.

Therefore, the army will promote military settlements in all units with great fanfare, grow vegetables, raise pigs, and raise chickens and ducks to save food expenses.

The effect is also very good. The large-scale military reclamation also allowed the Great Chu Empire Army to maintain a large number of troops with limited military expenditures.

However, this is the case, the army's military expenditure pressure is still very high.

Now that the three-level organization is in place, one of the main purposes of the army is to obtain stronger combat capabilities with limited military expenditures. In other words, it is to further tilt resources towards combat readiness, so that the combat readiness troops have stronger combat capabilities, and then retain these combat readiness troops. Establish military superiority on the battlefield.

Spend your money wisely!

This is an important starting point for the continuous internal reform of the Army in recent years. In this regard, Luo Zhixue also supports the self-reform within the Army.

I'm not afraid of you tossing around, I'm afraid that you will sit and eat and wait to die.

Tossing and tossing, if there is a problem, then it is enough to solve the problem, and you can also control the problem through a small-scale pilot. First, use a small-scale army to conduct the experiment. After the experiment is effective, it will be extended to more troops. It is the promotion of the whole army, just like the model of the previous combat readiness and standing troops.

But don't make any fuss, just keep sticking to yourself like this, until one day you find that the enemy has become stronger or even surpassed yourself, then it will be over.

And if you want to change it at that time, you won't be able to change it in a while.

Luo Zhixue doesn't want to see the army stand still, and he also doesn't want to see the navy self-restraint. Instead, he must actively innovate and continue to explore and develop better warships and more advanced tactics in the context of the continuous development of domestic industrial technology.

This is also the reason why Luo Zhixue directly approved hundreds of thousands of additional special funds for the navy to build iron-ribbed wood-hull ships.

With the support of Luo Zhixue, the emperor of the Great Chu Empire, the development of the navy's iron-ribbed wooden hull ships is progressing very fast!
The Admiralty Department of the Navy quickly based on the new materials of various iron parts and components provided by many manufacturers, especially Daye Iron and Steel Company and Daye Heavy Machinery Company, which is responsible for processing large wrought iron parts, and proceeded to make a decision in Chengshun 16 In June [-], the design of the first iron-ribbed wooden hull test ship was completed.

This test ship is not big, with a design displacement of only more than 600 tons, and its tactical positioning is only a frigate, not a larger cruiser or even a battleship.

This test ship will fully use iron materials as the main load-bearing components, such as ship ribs, beam frames, etc., and then lay wooden shells, wooden plywood and superstructures on the iron load-bearing frames.

In order to reduce the technical difficulty and reduce the risk of R&D, except for the large amount of iron materials used in the load-bearing structure, other aspects have not changed much. The deployed artillery and ship type still adopt many designs of the original frigate.

To put it simply, compared with other frigates of the same class being built and used by the Great Chu Empire Navy, this test ship only has a difference in load-bearing structural materials, and there are basically no other changes.

After the initial design was completed, the Naval Ship Administration Department submitted the design plan. After reading it, Luo Zhixue did not intervene too much, let alone some of the design details.

It is Luo Zhixue's consistent way to let professional people do professional things. He rarely interferes with the specific matters in the professional field of subordinate officials.

Not to mention this test ship, even if it was such a big matter as the army reform, Luo Zhixue only looked at the results and not the process, let alone interfering too much in specific matters.

He didn't think that he would be smarter and more thoughtful than the professionals of this era with a little knowledge of later generations.

Even in the study of the army's line tactics, today's Luo Zhixue is actually not as good as those professional generals in the army. People are thinking about studying these things every day, but it's not that Luo Zhixue relies on some common sense knowledge of later generations to come up with a head. You can think of a better way to shoot.

Because a lot of things don’t mean that you think it’s good, and it’s not that the more advanced things in later generations must be later.

With the current technical level of the Great Chu Empire, even if Luo Zhixue proposed the trinity of land, sea and air, and the coordination of infantry and tanks, it would be useless.

As far as tactics are concerned, advanced ones are not good, but those that are suitable are the best!

The same is true for the Navy's iron-ribbed wooden-hull ships. Luo Zhixue knew very well that steel warships were better, even if it was just to lay wrought-iron armor on the outside of the wooden hull, but the problem was that the technical level was limited.

The all-steel warship is not something that can be produced just by doing it. The processing of materials, assembly of parts, welding, etc., and the most critical factors such as power are not something that can be done if you want to do it.

How to make better iron-ribbed wood-hulled ships under the current technical conditions is the most important thing in the field of warships of the Great Chu Empire.

Luo Zhixue, who didn't interfere too much, quickly approved the navy's construction plan for the test ship and named it Jiangning himself.

Jiangning County is also a county under Yingtianfu, the capital of the Great Chu Empire. It is also the seat of Yingtianfu's government and the capital of the Great Chu Empire.

Luo Zhixue directly used the county where the capital is located as the name of this experimental frigate, which shows that he attaches great importance to it.

After the design plan was approved by Luo Zhixue, the navy quickly started the construction work.

However, the construction of this kind of test ship is still very troublesome, and it is expected to take a long time, which is completely different from the current construction of mature pure wooden frigates.

Now that the Great Chu Empire is building a frigate, the entire construction process is very short when the timber used to build the ship is prepared in advance. The Songjiang Naval Shipyard only needs about half a year to complete the construction and launch, and then outfitting and several months of trials.

From the laying of the keel to the official delivery to the Navy in a complete state, the time required for a frigate is only about one year.

This is still the normal production time. If we work overtime and deploy more workers to speed up the construction, then this time can be shortened by a few more months, and the construction and delivery can be completed in half a year.

However, the Jiangning frigate is a brand-new type of warship. There is no precedent for its construction to follow. From the design drawings to the construction process, even how to construct it requires repeated deliberation and study.

Here, there are a lot of technical problems from zero to one that need to be broken through.

This is only a technical difficulty faced by the shipyard, and does not include the various wrought iron parts needed to build ships.

The production of a large number of iron parts is handed over to Daye Heavy Machinery Company. They have started to carry out related technology research and development since last year, focusing on how to process and forge a large number of iron parts better. part.

However, there is no need to worry too much about wrought iron raw materials. The wrought iron output of Daye Iron and Steel Company is very large, and it is still increasing rapidly. Not worth mentioning.

You have to know that when Daye Iron and Steel Company was in Chengshun for 15 years, its wrought iron production had already reached [-] tons, and this year this number is expected to increase to [-] tons.

The output is very large, but in fact, the wrought iron currently produced by Daye Iron and Steel Company is not mainly supplied to the shipbuilding industry, but to various types of machinery industries.

For a mere test ship, it would only use one or two hundred tons of raw materials when it was exhausted, and the scrap rate had to be counted... the actual materials used were even less.

After all, you can't let a ship with a standard displacement of more than 600 tons use [-] tons of hull material directly... it won't float...

Therefore, the raw material is not a big problem, and the technical difficulty lies in how to process these raw materials so that they can meet the performance required by the design.

The iron ribs used in shipbuilding cannot directly use wrought iron with too low carbon content. The reason why wrought iron is wrought iron is because the carbon content is too low, and if the carbon content is too low, it will be soft and lack hardness. .

Therefore, Daye Iron and Steel Company will control the proportion of carbon content in wrought iron in the production process according to the different needs of customers, and then produce iron products with different carbon content. The low-carbon steel on the surface is slightly lower than the wrought iron, which takes into account the plasticity and facilitates processing, and can also guarantee a certain hardness. It is also called soft steel in the industrial circles of the Great Chu Empire.

As for medium-carbon steel or high-carbon steel with higher carbon content, in fact, Daye Iron and Steel Company can also produce it directly, but the problem is that it is difficult to process it, so it can only directly produce iron castings, and the performance of iron castings is often not good. , too brittle and too hard.

If the carbon content is high to a certain extent, it is useless pig iron.

What Daye Iron and Steel Company provides is wrought iron with a slightly higher carbon content, that is, mild steel.

However, even though mild steel has a certain processing performance, it is still very difficult for Daye Heavy Machinery Company, mainly because the mild steel parts used in shipbuilding are very large.

This places very high demands on processing equipment.

For the industry of the Great Chu Empire and its hydrodynamic machinery and equipment, it is very difficult to process these large parts. If the quantity is small, it can be done slowly and at any cost. There are so many parts to go...

This means that industrial mass production is required, and the cost of production cannot be too high.

This is very troublesome!

Daye Heavy Machinery Co., Ltd. has started research since last year, trying to solve related technical problems, but so far, the progress has not been smooth.

How to solve it in the future and when it will be solved, only they will know.

Of course, even if the problem of industrial mass production cannot be solved at present, they can still produce a small amount of large shipbuilding parts and supply them to the military through some local methods.

But the price is very expensive.

Just like before they produced some specific large-scale parts with very few orders, they also did it through some local methods. It was possible to do it, but the cost was extremely high and the output was low.

Songjiang Naval Shipyard also understands the problems faced by Daye Heavy Machinery Company, but this has nothing to do with their shipyard.

Songjiang Naval Shipyard is the shipyard that has undertaken the construction order of the Jiangning frigate. They are only responsible for the shipbuilding itself. Strictly speaking, it is a bit like an assembly plant!

As for the parts themselves, especially things like large iron forgings... Please, that's really not their business scope.

If you ask them to make large iron forgings, it’s like asking them to directly produce the naval guns needed for battleships. The profession is not right...

The Songjiang Naval Shipyard did not care about the parts produced by Daye Heavy Machinery Company. Anyway, after the first batch of parts arrived, they started the formal construction work.

On August 16th, 27th year of Chengshun, the iron-ribbed wood-hulled ship test ship that had been prepared for more than half a year, that is, the frigate Jiangning, officially laid the keel in the NO.12 dry dock in the Songjiang Naval Shipyard and started the construction process.

The Navy also paid more attention to this. Rear Admiral Lin Liangze, Director of the Shipbuilding Department of the Naval Ship Administration Department, and other naval technical officers participated in the groundbreaking ceremony of this test ship.

The Naval Ship Administration Department, especially the Shipbuilding Department, attaches great importance to the Jiangning frigate. Those in the Shipbuilding Department have always wanted to create a larger and better-performing battleship.

However, due to the limitation of materials, um, the limitation of wood, it is difficult to make the trip, especially the ship ribs of super-large-tonnage wooden ships, which cannot be solved at all.

There are not many suitable ship ribs, and the larger the tonnage of wooden ships, the higher the requirements for ship ribs. There are strict requirements for tree types, years, sizes, drying time, etc.

With the vast land and resources of the Great Chu Empire, coupled with the timber output from all over Nanyang, and then assisting with some later manual intervention, the timber can obtain a bending angle.

The ship rib materials used for ships with hundreds of tons and thousands of tons can barely meet the requirements, but the ship rib materials used for warships with more than 2000 tons or even three to four thousand tons are too difficult to obtain.

Coupled with the fact that large-tonnage ships have higher requirements for load-bearing capacity, it is no longer possible to manufacture warships made of pure wood materials. Even the wooden warships in the Great Chu Empire now actually use a lot of iron parts inside, such as various Many of these connection structures are made of iron.

If you want to build a warship with a larger tonnage, you need to further expand the use of iron materials. This is the direct reason why the Navy's Ship Administration Department proposed iron-ribbed wood-hull ships.

This is actually a natural process of the development of shipbuilding technology.

Because ships are getting bigger and bigger, in order to meet the structural strength and other conditions, the use of iron materials is constantly increasing in the shipbuilding process.

And the more it is used, the iron-ribbed wood-hulled boats will naturally appear.

In the future, it will naturally develop into an all-steel warship.

The Naval Administration Department is now counting on the Jiangning frigate to be built smoothly and achieve the designed performance.

If it is successful, then the Naval Ship Administration will immediately launch a new generation of warship design and construction work, from battleships to cruisers and frigates, will be rolled out one after another.

Especially for battleships, the Ship Administration Department has a [-]-ton super battleship plan!
As shipbuilding designers, these people are still not satisfied after designing and building more than 500 tons of Guangzhou-class first-class battleships. They want to build battleships with larger tonnage, more artillery, and larger artillery.

The pursuit of large tonnage warships by these people in the naval administration department is endless.

Not only those who pursue technology in the Ship Administration Department are counting on the success of the Jiangning frigate, but other people in the navy are also pursuing the success of the Jiangning frigate.

If the Jiangning can be built successfully, it will not only mean that warships with larger tonnage can be built, in fact, this will not be of much significance to the overall strategic development of the current Great Chu Empire Navy... because in terms of overall cost performance, At present, the first-class battleships of more than 2000 tons seem to have strong combat effectiveness, but in actual application, they are far inferior to the third-class battleships of more than 1000 tons.

This is also the reason why the Great Chu Empire Navy only built a small number of first-class battleships, but built a large number of third-class battleships.

A first-class battleship is a big toy that pursues technology and performance limits, a symbol of a powerful navy, and it is very useful as the flagship of each fleet.

But fighting... that's for third-class battleships!

In fact, it is not battleships that are used more in daily life, but cruisers and frigates.

Especially the frigate with only a few hundred tons, which is the type of ship that the Great Chu Empire Navy uses the most in its daily life and actually plays the greatest role.

Therefore, even if the Ministry of Ship Administration can produce super-large battleships of more than 3000 tons or even more than 4000 tons, the Navy will at most build a few ships out of practical considerations, and then still serve as a flag of the Navy there.

And more will be built for those third-class battleships of more than 1000 tons or even cruisers or frigates with a size of several hundred tons or about [-] tons.

There is a cost issue involved.

Not only the cost of shipbuilding, but also the cost of later maintenance and personnel.

How to complete the task at a limited cost so that the limited military expenditure can be used to the maximum effect is the most concerned issue of the navy executives.

As for the iron-ribbed wood-hulled ship, this allowed the Navy to see the possibility of reducing costs.

As we all know, the main cost of wooden sailing ships is mainly the hull, artillery and sails.

Artillery and sails, this is another topic, only talk about the hull.

The cost of the hull is mainly derived from wood, and the wood used to build warships is very expensive. The cost of wood occupies a large part of the cost of the hull, and the source is also greatly restricted, and the limitation of material sources is further pushed up. the price of lumber.

After all, the supply of lumber is limited, but the demand is increasing, which will naturally push up the price of shipbuilding lumber.

Because of the prosperity of the shipbuilding industry, the price of shipbuilding timber in the Great Chu Empire has at least tripled compared to ten years ago. This is a terrifying statistic.

But if iron can be used to replace wood on a large scale, then the cost of materials alone can save a lot in the future.

(End of this chapter)