Zhou Yu acted as if he hadn't seen anything, and glanced at Gan Ning who was carrying a huge stone tablet excitedly. He saw dragons and phoenixes engraved on the stone tablet that he had picked up from who knows where.
Two large characters - boundary monument, and then a line of small characters in the lower corner - Gan Xingba, commander of the Han Dynasty Navy!
Well, the boundary monument. Then Gan Ning, who held the boundary monument high, suddenly exerted his strength and pierced the huge boundary monument towards the mine below. With a roar, the boundary monument was pierced by Gan Ning.
It is said that there is an area with iron ore, and it is very ugly.
"This guy Gan Xingba..." Zhou Yu, who was standing on the cliff nearby, said with a slight twitch in the corner of his eyes. This kind of behavior was really embarrassing in Zhou Yu's opinion.
At this time, a gust of wind and sand swept by, and a fishy rusty smell appeared in the smells of a few quarrelsome little old men who were squatting on the ground and suspected that there was something wrong with this place, and were conducting in-depth research.
His face was startled.
Several people looked at each other and saw the horror in each other's eyes.
"Brother, I think there's something wrong with this place, what about you?" Wang Heng looked at a few acquaintances around him and asked, "It's not just wrong. The smell of rust in the wind and sand is like an open-pit mine, and it must be a very large one."
Only open pit mines can do this.
"I'm afraid this place is just a block of iron." The old man next to him said with the same solemn expression. You can smell the rust in the wind and sand. Looking at the fine dust on the ground, you can see a red feeling at a glance.
Previously, this group of people thought that the soil environment of this place was like this, but after thinking about it for a while, everyone was shocked. I am afraid that this place is no longer a problem with iron ore, but should be put another way, this place is afraid of
It is a huge mine buried under sand and gravel.
Seeing the expressions on several people's faces, Wang Heng became very confident. If it was as expected, the iron content of this iron ore might not be as terrifying as usual.
"Bring Si Nan." Wang Heng waved to the boy on the side. The boy quickly took out Si Nan from the box on the side. And sure enough, Si Nan was killed on the spot.
"Hematite on top, magnet on the bottom?" The little old man on the side carefully picked off a layer of red dust from the ground, and then slowly poured it down from his hands. The fine dust naturally fell towards Sinan, and everyone looked solemn.
.
"This place is full of mines, and it is likely to cover hundreds of miles..." Wang Heng said with twitching eyes. Only in this way, those exposed open-pit mines will be blown away by the wind and sand over the years.
Scale of hematite powder.
"I'm afraid this is the only explanation." Wang Heng said to himself, and everyone else also looked shocked. Iron mines of this scale are simply rare in the region.
Wang Heng and others climbed up a high mountain with difficulty and looked around. The red reflection made them fully understand that what they were stepping on was not earth and rocks, but iron ore.
"Captain Zhou, please find a way to occupy this place." After Wang Heng and others confirmed the situation, they came to notify Zhou Yu immediately, and also took a lot of iron ore and iron ore that they knocked down from the open-pit mine with their eyes closed.
Crushed ore that fell down after being eroded by wind and sand.
"Uh, why do you want to occupy it, because of the iron ore?" Zhou Yu looked at a few young old men with a puzzled face. These are the older generation in Wu who understand Kanyu. Although they are not wealthy, they are the kind of people who are everywhere.
They can get along well with the family, so Zhou Yu will give them face.
"You can't plant fields, trees, or even grass in this place. But based on our experience, this place is full of iron, and this iron ore," Wang Heng said, taking out a piece of iron from a box on the side.
After weighing the ore, he said with an expression of disbelief, "With our many years of experience in mineral processing and forging, it can be cast directly by throwing it into the furnace."
Iron ore can be used without beneficiation, which is very difficult in the Central Plains, because the iron ore in China is basically poor ore, and the grade is not very good. It takes a lot of time to process the ore after it is mined, which is very difficult.
Spend energy.
However, here, Wang Heng picked up a piece of ore at random. With the influence of his family since he was ten years old and the experience of touching ores everywhere for forty years, the moment he got the hematite, Wang Heng knew that what he touched was
This ore is not so much a stone as it is iron, six percent iron!
Wang Heng peeled off more than 20 pieces with his eyes closed. It felt that the iron content was basically around 60%. The high ones were even close to 70%, and the low ones did not drop to 55%.
This is picked up casually with eyes closed, which means that the scumliest ore in this place can be thrown directly into the furnace for smelting. This is simply crazy.
It is completely different from the ore in the Central Plains that needs to be mined after being mined. The quality of the ore here is so good that Wang Heng and others can hardly believe it.
The more important thing is that several old men climbed mountains and estimated the scope of the mine based on their feelings. Finally, they came to a conclusion. The estimated value of iron ore in this mine is probably calculated in hundreds of millions.
Inside, almost all are in this color.
Although the value estimated by Wang Heng and others is 100 million kilograms, which is still hundreds of thousands of times different from the tens of billions of tons estimated by later generations, hundreds of millions of kilograms of high-grade iron ore is enough for these people to make up their minds. They understand
This, so they understand the importance of these ores.
After all, this is high-quality iron ore that can be stripped off without beneficiation and thrown directly into the steel furnace. What's even more frightening is that this is an open-pit mine, and the difficulty of mining is how to remove it.
To put it simply, just build an ironworks here, pick up ore on the spot and throw it into the furnace to make steel. As for technology, the iron content of the ore here has exceeded 60%. If you want a weird technology, basically
Pieces of iron oxide!
Zhou Yu was stunned when he heard this. Since the smelting technology has been improved to the point where it can cast iron, things like iron are very important in any era, so Zhou Yu also understands how high-quality the iron ore is that can be thrown directly into the furnace.
The problem is that no matter how high-quality it is, it is of no use. It is no joke that this poor place is thousands of miles away from the Central Plains. If it is near the South China Sea and does not cross the Strait of Malacca, Zhou Yu thinks that a casting point can be built on the spot and will be built after a while.
The significance of transporting finished steel back to this place is nearly 20,000 kilometers back and forth!
In Zhou Yu's opinion, this distance, not to mention the possibility of a Kushan fleet squatting in the middle, is not worth it even without this fleet.
Although it is indeed easy to smelt high-grade iron ore on-site to obtain finished iron, but with this terrible distance, it is of no use. Even if the iron is produced, there is no way to transport it back. The transportation costs have exploded.
All right.
Besides, even if iron is smelted on-site, blast furnaces and coal are still needed. This is the most sophisticated technology obtained by the technicians recruited from Chen Xi. It can easily smelt steel on-site. However, even so, coal is needed!
This is not a place like the Central Plains. You can pull out briquettes very close by just pulling twice. You can't play with the blast furnace without briquettes. If you can't play with the blast furnace, you can't produce steel on a large scale. You can't just transport the ore back.
It’s more of a trap!
Who is so stupid to transport ore back to the Central Plains? Don’t you know that most ships now have a carrying capacity of several hundred tons? Including drinking water, dry food and other things, the designer of this plan is simply transporting ore from a place 10,000 kilometers away.
He is mentally retarded!
Transporting hundreds of tons of hundreds of tons back is simply a sinkhole. There are no people in this miserable place. How can we transport people here? What a joke. The cost exploded instantly. Zhou Yu decisively rejected this mentally retarded plan.
As for the seventh-generation ship, the carrying capacity is calculated based on three to four thousand tons. Including smelting, it can barely cover the cost. The problem is that a seventh-generation ship costs 100 million. With such a large cost, such a low benefit, Zhou Yu said
Just take a shower, the costs will explode.
"But such a high-quality mine is wasted here, which is a kind of pain for those of us who are worthy of the land!" Wang Heng said, touching his conscience, it was really painful.
Although Zhou Yu was somewhat interested, he still refused after calculating the cost. In his opinion, even as he became more familiar with shipping and ships were traveling faster and faster, it would take nearly a month to get here from Jiangdong.
Drinking water and dry food required for a month's shipping, Zhou Yu said, just go to bed. Today's small boats cannot afford ocean-going ore transportation. Although Zhou Yu's mathematics is not very good, but with a rough estimate, he also understands that unless the carrying capacity
It can exceed 10,000 tons, otherwise if you want to transport iron ore from Australia to Jiangdong, you should just sleep.
Of course, if Lu Bu's move to tear apart the space can be done at a certain point, Zhou Yu would not mind occupying this place at all, but it is enough to think about opening a channel to connect the Central Plains and Australia.
In short, Zhou Yu decisively vetoed the proposal of a group of people who were in awe of the situation, but Gan Ning became interested. As the saying goes, thieves never leave the ship empty-handed, so Gan Ning decisively asked his pirates to disembark and move the ore.
After all, Gan Ning still has more than 30,000 pirates. The plan to annihilate the entire army failed. The Kushans only killed more than 40,000 pirates, and only about 200 of the more than 600 pirate ships were sunk. There was also some spare carrying capacity.
Several tens of thousands of tons.
What's more, even though half of the sixth-generation ships were sunk after the war, there were still more than a dozen ships left, which had a carrying capacity of just over 10,000 tons.
What Gan Ning has now is that he has a small number of people on board. A decommissioned warship that is equivalent to a fourth-generation warship has a carrying capacity of about one hundred tons as long as it is not loaded with anything.
So Gan Ning drove all the pirates off the ship and ordered them to dig out the open pit. Each of them needed to dig out two thousand catties, which was one ton in the new weights and measures.
Fortunately, there were many people, and the mine was open-air. Legions attacked everywhere, cutting open the open-pit mine, and without screening, more than 30,000 people filled the fleet's empty ships with iron ore in two days. Gan Ning was very concerned about this.
Zhou Yu expressed satisfaction with the speed, but Zhou Yu once again expressed helplessness to Gan Ning.
