Opening game, American Tycoon

Chapter 154 Tianzi No. [-] Ironclad Ship ([-]rd update, please subscribe)
It is important to reform people ideologically, but there must be someone who can reform!
In fact, no matter whether it is frail or gentle, for Zhu Xianhai, there must be enough people, and this is the most important thing.As for the others, it is secondary.

Only when there are people, can there be opportunities to use whips, sticks, laws, and discipline to reform their thoughts and behaviors.

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

Since that long-term simulation, facing the reality of Nanhua's limited human resources, how to increase the population has always been the most important issue before Zhu Xianhai.Military and national education is to achieve the goal of serving the whole country as a soldier, 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 buying the Great Eastern, but these are only temporary solutions, not the root cause.

what is this
The "base" of Nanhua immigrants is in China, in the Qing Dynasty. Only when the country is opened can there be a steady stream of immigrants. How to make them open the country, unlike in the simulator, where laborers are prohibited from coming to Nanhua, there is only one way - to let The Taiping Rebellion continued.

To put it bluntly, it is to increase assistance to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom!In order for the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to continue fighting, Zhu Xianhai took great pains. He even considered purchasing weapons from the UK to "aid" them.

"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 sound of "dong, dong" beating iron nails, Zhu Xianhai smiled at Liang Mingwei.

"What the boss said is true, if it weren't for the Taiping Army, how could I have come to Nanhua!"

Liang Mingwei smiled helplessly.

"Originally, the villain did a good job at the Cheung Chau Dock Company, but he never thought that he would be plundered here by them somehow."

Liang Mingwei, who speaks Cantonese mandarin, is a little confused even now. He happened to be eating hot pot and singing... No, he didn't eat hot pot at the time, but as an employee of the American boss Novi, he was in Ningbo City. Negotiating with landlords to buy land, Nuo Wei is the owner of Changzhou Dockyard, and intends to open a dockyard in Ningbo, so he was sent to Ningbo. He just bought the land here, and before he could recruit stonemasons to build a dock by the sea, he bumped into him. When he arrived in the Taiping Army, he couldn't escape and became a prisoner together with dozens of shipwrights from Hong Kong.

Although Changmao didn't behead them directly as in the legend, but "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 in Nanhua, because he knew English and knew how to repair ships, he went directly to the dock and became a junior engineer.

"By chance, if it weren't for this, how could Mingren show what he has learned?"

Zhu Xianhai laughed.In the Hong Kong shipyard in the 1860s, there were actually Chinese engineers, or Chinese technicians, which was a bit beyond his imagination. However, the scale of the Hong Kong shipyard in this era far exceeded his imagination. In the shipyard, there are actually tens of thousands of shipwrights engaged in ship repairing and shipbuilding. Over the years, not only trained a group of skilled shipwrights, but also trained a group of junior Chinese technicians.

This group of people has to find a way to get a batch of them, and they can't just waste it in Hong Kong for nothing.This is a complete surprise!

"Even if you have studied shipbuilding in Hong Kong, in a foreigner's shipyard, you are just helping foreign engineers. After graduating from a missionary school, I have been an apprentice in a shipyard for six years. If I were a foreigner, I would have recommended it. Engineering schools in the UK are not acceptable there, not only are they not possible, but foreigners also don’t believe that we can build ships..."

Shaking his head, Liang Mingwei said suddenly.

"Okay, I just kept complaining, and I almost forgot to be formal, boss, look, now the keel of the "Taiping" gunboat has been installed. Its length is 38.1 meters, its width is 9 meters, and its draft is 2.41 meters. The power system uses two composite steam engines, and the speed is about 10 knots..."

Pointing to the gunboat under construction in the dock, Liang Mingwei looked a little proud. Although the idea of ​​this ship came from the owner, he was one of the direct designers. Well, the chief designer was Mr. Harles.

"...Although it is a ship with an iron-ribbed wooden hull, we wrap a layer of one-inch thick iron plate on the outside of the wooden hull, that is, on the waterline, which can increase its protection, save labor and materials, and save money. The tonnage of the ship made it easier to navigate, and with the ten-inch Dahlgren cannon, it was definitely a military weapon."

Such a small boat carrying a ten-inch cannon!

In fact, when Zhu Xianhai proposed this idea, everyone including Mr. Harles, the chief engineer of the shipyard, was stunned.

How big is this boat?
The displacement is about [-] tons, but it is necessary to install a ten-inch Dahlgren cannon. Is this possible?

In history, there really are, that is, the so-called "mosquito boats" and "mosquito gun boats", which were purchased by the Beiyang Navy in the early days of its formation.It is also the "Randolph gunboat", which itself is used for offshore defense, and is characterized by small ships equipped with cannons.At that time, the Qing Dynasty bought this kind of gunboat because it was cheap.The biggest feature of the mosquito gun boat is that it is equipped with naval guns with firepower to suppress iron-clad ships, but this kind of gunboat is too small to be suitable for ocean-going operations.

When Li Hongzhang and others introduced this kind of warship in the late Qing Dynasty, they thought of an asymmetric combat effect-with the cooperation of coastal forts, small ships beat big ships, but it has been proved.This kind of gunboat is simply tasteless, it can neither fight a big ship, nor can it cooperate well with a fort.

But it didn't prevent Zhu Xianhai from taking out this gunboat - its technology is simple, and it is essentially a small boat with a displacement of several hundred tons, only nailed with a layer of iron plates.

Technically speaking, except for the slightly more complicated technology of iron ribs, there is no essential difference between them and wooden boats.

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

What is the only thing that stands out about such a small boat with simple technology?
It's just that he installed a cannon that looks very bluffing.

That's right, it's "bluffing people"-during the Sino-Japanese War, several "mosquito boats" never played any role, even if they fired a few shells...they failed.

But, the ten-inch cannon is really "bluffing"!

What is more "bluffing"?
It's his armor!

There are not many ironclad warships in this year, even if it is just a layer of iron skin nailed on the wooden shell, no, it should be said to be ironclad, that is also an ironclad warship!
This is Nanhua's Tianzi No. [-] ironclad ship!
The invulnerable iron armor plus the ten-inch, 254mm Dahlgren smoothbore gun, how bluffing would it be to put the two together on the sea?
It can scare people to death!

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

(End of this chapter)