my steam dam

Chapter 63 Steam Airship
above Taihu Lake.

Three giant ships in the shape of "pin" ride the wind and waves.

On the uppermost deck of the leading flagship, Peng Ke stood at the bow, looking at the endless lake, enjoying the refreshing feeling of the breeze blowing on his face.

Taihu Lake is so big that when you are in it, you almost think you are on the sea.

It's just a little different from the sea, that is, the lake is very calm and not as rough as the sea.

Therefore, this old-style flat-bottomed boat can gallop freely in Taihu Lake without worrying about the danger of being overturned by huge waves.

"My lord, it should take an hour before we arrive at Knight Island. You can go to the cabin to rest first." The fleet commander said with a smile.

This Mr. Peng has brought his beautiful family, why is he standing alone on the deck blowing the cold wind.

Hongwu's 18-year-old ship, which uses steam engines as auxiliary power, can reach a speed of [-] to [-] miles in half an hour when there is wind and waves, which is quite fast.

Knight Island is in the center of Taihu Lake, fifty or sixty miles away from the lake.

An hour's voyage is enough for Penke to "do" many things.

Penke glared at him angrily.

Taking a boat in this era is really not a comfortable enjoyment!

A dark and stuffy cabin.

It's really not human!

No matter how good the cabin is, it will inevitably be humid, and because there is no good solution for cabin ventilation in this era, the air in the cabin is very turbid.

Peng Ke felt that he was not a very seasick person.

But after entering the cabin, within a few minutes, I already felt like throwing up.

Then I ran to the upper deck to get some fresh air.

Not just him.

Ah Hu, Mo Xu, Yan Qingbo and her maid, Xiao Cui, are people who rarely take boats.

In other words, I seldom take this kind of big boat with a bunch of cabins, and only do that kind of rafting boat.

Everyone couldn't bear the unpleasant smell and bumps in the cabin, and ran to the deck together, looking like they were alive after a catastrophe.

That is to say, those soldiers, including the garrison in Suzhou Prefecture, have daily water combat training, and they have become accustomed to the internal environment of this kind of warship before they can bear it.

It is not easy to be a sailor and a navy officer in this era.

Ying Tianfu.

Turn back the time a little bit.

Before Penke and his party set off.

Yingtian Mansion's capital camp was already busy.

Three military bombing airships about 20 meters long and seven or eight meters wide are being inflated.

A can of the gas separated by the Institute of Ink Research Institute, which is lighter than air and named "light gas", is filled into an airbag made of an aluminum shell wrapped with metal wires.

It takes an hour to inflate these three airships.

This light gas is a gas that is difficult to burn. It is much safer than the "explosive gas" used in the first generation of airships, and it will not explode. The praise rate of the soldiers is very high.

The "explosion gas" used to inflate the airship before has been completely eliminated.

An hour later.

The ground soldiers fully filled the airbag with hundreds of cans of light gas, and the airship slowly lifted the cabin into the sky.

However, after only rising two or three meters, the airship was held back by four large iron chains connected to the ground, and did not continue to rise.

"Board!"

The general of the Jingying Airship Battalion waved his hand, and a dozen soldiers climbed into the three airships along the escalator.

Each airship carried six people, a squad.

After entering the personnel compartment, the captains of the three airship teams ordered to their subordinates: "Check before flight!"

The five soldiers immediately began to check the ammunition compartment, power compartment and cockpit of the airship with a clear division of labor.

This kind of military airship is much simpler than the passenger-carrying civilian airship.

Basically all the payload is used for shells, and an airship can hold nearly a ton of shells.

In addition, except for a steam boiler engine in the power compartment, the cockpit and personnel compartment basically have no extra items.

Except the cockpit has a driver's seat.

In the personnel cabin, there are only steel cylinders that are as tall as a person placed in the corner, and there are no seats.

When the soldiers are flying, they can only hold the anti-bump handle and sit on the ground.

None of the common aerial life-saving equipment in later generations was available.

Daming's airship is on a mission, how about completing the mission safely and returning to the camp smoothly.

Either it was directly destroyed by the enemy, and the entire army was wiped out.

Thousands of meters high, how to escape?

The soldiers checked that the steam engine was running normally, that the loaded shells were complete, and that there were no holes in the cabin, and then reported to the captain.

After the three airship captains confirmed that everything was ready, they stretched out their hands from the cockpit and made a ready gesture to the ground.

After the ground crew saw it, they immediately untied the four iron chains connected to the ground.

As the soldiers in the personnel cabin put the iron chains back into the cabin, the three airships lost ground traction and slowly rose straight into the sky.

100 m.

200 m.

300 m.

400 m.

500 m.

The airship rose higher and higher, and the distance from the ground became farther and farther.

When the altitude indicator in the cockpit pointed to 500 meters, the captain in charge of driving the airship immediately shouted: "Deflate! Control the height of the airship!"

Two soldiers who had been prepared for a long time immediately opened a valve connected to the auxiliary airbag in the personnel compartment.

The light gas in the auxiliary airbag is drawn through the valve into the steel cylinders placed in the personnel compartment one by one.

The auxiliary airbag is a small airbag inside the large airbag of the airship, which can be inflated and deflated during flight to control the flying height of the airship.

If you don't want the airship to continue to fly upwards, just deflate it.

If you feel that the flying height is not high enough, then continue to inflate the airbag.

The reason for controlling the flying height in this way is because only by controlling the flying height of the airship can the direction of the airship be controlled.

At different heights of clouds, the wind direction is different.

For clouds at a height of 500 meters, the wind direction is north to south, and for clouds at 800 meters, it may be east to west.

Anyone who has rowed a boat knows that driving with the wind is much less labor-intensive than driving against the wind, and the speed is also faster.

The wind direction of the clouds is different every day, and the flying height of the airship needs to be controlled according to the wind direction of the day.

This allows the airship to travel with the wind.

The wind direction of the 500-meter cloud today is north to south, so the three airship captains chose to control the flying altitude of the airship at 500 meters.

With the help of the wind direction, the three airships maintained a speed of 20 miles per hour, and began to fly south with the wind.

However, this flight speed was still too slow, which made the three captains very dissatisfied.

"Boilerman, activate the steam propulsion device!"

The captain's order was accurately conveyed to the power cabin through a sound-transmitting copper tube connecting the cockpit, personnel cabin and power cabin.

The boiler hand, who had already stripped naked because of the heat, immediately waved the iron catalpa and shoveled shovelfuls of high-quality anthracite into the boiler.

The heat energy is quickly converted into steam kinetic energy by the steam engine.

After precise and complex gear transmission, a propeller with a diameter of five meters installed at the tail of the airship began to slowly accelerate and rotate.

The powerful propellers pushed the airship to accelerate.

A quarter of an hour later, the three airships reached their maximum flying speed of nearly one hundred miles per hour, heading straight for Yingtianfu!

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(End of this chapter)