It has been four days since the city of Zunhua was captured, and so far the industrial zone has still not been penetrated.
Obviously knowing that there are steel ingots, what they dream of. Yang Fan restricts the import of steel into the Liaodong area. It is too difficult for them to get good steel. They want to have better armor and sharper weapons. Even Huang Taiji is now shooting and hunting.
Love the arrowheads made from open hearth steel.
However, Yang Fan refused to sell to them, and would rather sell to Lin Danhan than to them. Last year, Lin Danhan bought 500 tons of open-hearth steel. Huang Taiji was envious. In the entire Eight Banners, only Dorgon didn't know
I found a smuggling camel team somewhere and got some open-hearth steel. Others were just greedy.
In the past six months, the two white flags, which were already half-dead, have improved their weapons to a higher level due to the availability of good steel. Their strength has obviously recovered a lot. This is why Huang Taiji is wary, but now he can't live without it.
Two white flags of support.
The Eight Banners obtained a small amount of open-hearth steel, which was secretly smuggled by Guan Ning's army. But this is also very risky. One is that there are many horse bandits in Rehe Province in Monan, and they will attack caravans. The other is from Beitangkou
The small clipper gunboats that come out will attack smuggling merchant ships along the coast.
These clipper gunboats have a displacement of only more than 480 tons. They are equipped with a rotatable 36-pound gun on the front and rear decks. Nine 12-pound guns are installed in the gun windows on both sides. These gunboats are all three-masted fast sailing ships.
, a steam engine was also installed.
This kind of gunboat has been finalized and is called an offshore-class patrol gunboat. It has a capacity of 150 people. In the future, offshore patrols in the Ming Dynasty will mainly rely on this kind of gunboat. Yang Fan plans to build the first batch of thirty boats. They will be named after the counties of the Ming Dynasty.
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This kind of ship was already a very large sea-going ship at this time, with a displacement of 0.325 tons per material. This kind of gunboat cost about 1,500 materials, not counting a small boat. In this era, ocean-going cargo ships generally cost about 2,000 materials and carried about 200 people.
people.
(Japanese) The paper "Pictures of Chinese Merchant Ships in the Ming and Qing Dynasties" edited by Da Ting lists the dimensions of eleven merchant ships from China to Japan during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. These ships include the so-called Nanjing ships, Ningbo ships, Fuzhou-made ships, Nanjing-shipping ships, and Taiwan ships.
Siam has the largest ship material, about 4,000 materials, and the other eight ships cost between 1,000 and 2,000 materials. The average material value of these eight ships is 1,310 materials.
During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, no matter whether the official ship was a "sealed boat" or a private merchant ship, there were no ships with more than 5,000 tons. Most official ships were nearly 4,000 tons, and most merchant ships were less than 2,000 tons. That is, the official ships did not exceed 1,800 tons, and most were only about 1,300 tons.
Merchant ships are all under 700 tons.
As for the Ming Dynasty warships, although they are also marked with materials, the situation is quite different from merchant ships and official ships, which are mainly transportation ships. Because materials are a unit of volume, not displacement. The author has discussed in detail in the previous article, warships and merchant ships
difference.
In the age of sailing, the biggest difference between battleships and merchant ships was that the materials used in the hulls were different. Merchant ships used ordinary wood. Battleships used special hardwood, which was not only strong, corrosion-resistant, but also heavy. Moreover, the walls of merchant ships were
The plate is relatively thin, usually only two or three inches thick. The keel is also relatively small and slender.
The keels and ribs of the battleship are unusually thick, and there is one rib every one foot apart. The thickness of the ship's siding is not inches, but feet. The thickness of the siding is one foot, one and a half feet, or even two feet. This is a wooden ship.
In that era, armor was naturally made of wood.
The best wooden armor of this era was teak produced in Burma. The second was the oak tree from the Northeast, which is the kind of oak wood used to grow fungus. In fact, it is the oak wood from the West.
Therefore, merchant ships cannot defeat battleships. In order to reduce costs, the hulls are too thin, and each shot has a hole.
This resulted in a battleship with the same material quantity, but a significantly smaller displacement. Because the space was smaller, too much wood was used.
Two famous shipbuilding books in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, "Nan Chuan Ji" and "Longjiang Shipyard Chronicles", both listed the detailed dimensions and ship drawings of the 400-material warship. The ship's displacement was about 260 tons.
Ten of these gunboats are currently in service, and they are catching smuggling ships everywhere in the Bohai Sea and the Yellow Sea. As a result, the open-hearth steel purchased by the Jiangnan gentry through legal channels was attempted to be transported to Liaodong hidden in other legal goods, and a very high proportion was seized.
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At present, Guan Ning's army can only transport a small amount of steel to Jiannu by relying on warship smuggling and frontier cavalry disguised as camel caravans. This amount of steel is simply not enough. Moreover, Huang Taiji wants to develop production and change the current situation of being unable to be self-sufficient.
A serious situation. A large amount of steel is needed to make production tools and agricultural tools.
Now when he arrived at Zunhua, the legendary iron smelting center, he could not open the door to the industrial zone. This made him extremely anxious. However, they raided the surrounding areas and captured more than 100,000 miners and iron smelting workers. These people
They are all industries owned by civil servants in Zunhua.
They didn't listen to Yang Fan at all, and Yang Fan didn't bother to care about them.
Now that Zunhua is making money, these civil servants are like flies that smell the smell of blood and pounce on them. However, the steel industry is no better than other industries. It is impossible for them to monopolize it. It is also impossible for them to rely on the privileges of civil servants to squeeze out other competitors.
impossible.
The reason is very simple. Only Yang Fan has an open-hearth furnace that can produce steel on a large scale. Other iron ore mines, coal mines, and small iron-making workshops all supply Yang Fan.
Because open-hearth steel requires pig iron, coke and other raw materials, the demand is huge. Therefore, there are small mines and small coke factories everywhere outside Zunhua. Many civil servants saw the huge business opportunities and invested in blast furnaces to smelt pig iron so that they could be sold to the industry.
He Iron and Steel Factory.
Yang Fan didn't object to them squeezing in. Anyway, it was just one more company providing raw materials.
Yang Fan encourages investment. After all, if the steel industry wants to grow bigger, it is impossible for him to monopolize it. As long as he is willing to join this industry, no matter which faction he is from, he is welcome. Anyone can invest and even be given some technology and support.
Yang Fan only needs to master the steelmaking technology. As for the blast furnace technology for ironmaking, Yang Fan can even provide it to them in the form of technology patent fees.
It is impossible for them to be evil even if they want to. Because the competition is too strong, the profits will not be too high. There are also many local wealthy people in Zunhua who have invested in the downstream, that is, using open-hearth steel to produce various steel products.
After all, good steel needs to be made into tools, farm tools, weapons, and various daily necessities before it can be used. This has led to thousands of small family workshops and hundreds of metal processing factories springing up in Zunhua.
This time the Eight Banners captured many miners and iron smelting workers, and also seized a lot of pig iron. In fact, bringing these people back to Liaodong can greatly promote the development of iron smelting in Liaodong. In history, the balance of power in the Ming and Qing Dynasties completely changed.
