Li Xuan personally promoted the internal combustion engine and engineering vehicles and transportation vehicle projects using internal combustion engines.
Its core purpose is not to let everyone in the Tang Dynasty own a car. This goal is unrealistic, at least not within twenty years or even longer.
Even though Datang has industrialized, the prices of various mechanical equipment are still very high. And mechanical equipment using internal combustion engines, regardless of whether it is a car, a truck, or an engineering vehicle, will be very expensive in the short term. Private cars
It would be difficult for anyone but the rich and powerful to afford it.
This is why Li Xuan promotes the application of internal combustion engines in engineering vehicles and transportation vehicles for industry, agriculture, and transportation production.
Of course, military vehicles can also be developed on this basis.
As for private cars, Li Xuan basically didn't care and let them do it themselves.
Anyway, as the economy grows year by year, people's incomes rise, the manufacturing costs of automobiles drop, and the selling prices drop, a market will emerge, and businessmen are always very sensitive to the market.
Even without Li Xuan's personal promotion, the private car business will be able to grow rapidly when the market matures.
As for now, it's too early.
According to the instructions of the Holy Emperor Li Xuan, the Empire's Ministry of State-owned Enterprises took the lead in establishing Songjiang Machinery Company and began pre-research on various types of construction machinery using internal combustion engines. Among the many sub-projects they launched, the most important one was the excavator.
Excavators are nothing new in the Tang Empire. Since the development of steam engines, especially the emergence of high-pressure steam engines that have been greatly miniaturized in size and weight, high-pressure steam engines are not only used in factories, trains, and ships. The above three
It only has a relatively large impact on the application fields of steam engines that people are more familiar with.
In fact, the application of steam engines has penetrated into all aspects of Tang Dynasty society.
Steam engine-driven cargo lifting equipment has long been available for loading and unloading operations at ports. When lifting various large parts in shipyards, steam engine-driven lifting equipment is also used.
In terms of land transportation, there are tractors powered by steam engines. It is worth noting that part of Datang’s local tractor business is used in agricultural production, while the other part is used for transportation, especially for transporting heavy goods.
Big advantage.
Many forest farms in remote areas use steam engine tractors to transport logs.
There are even construction equipment such as excavators powered by steam engines, which are used in railway construction, mining of large mines and even the construction of canals.
The Panama Canal is trying to introduce steam engine excavators, but the Import and Export Committee has been dragging its feet, neither approving nor rejecting them.
People in the Import and Export Committee are also waiting to see which direction the trend will take. There have long been rumors in Jinling that the empire is preparing to adjust its import and export policies.
People at the Import and Export Committee don't care about other adjustments. What they care about is one of them, which is the relaxation of restrictions on the overseas use of some engineering equipment.
Of course, this kind of relaxation of restrictions is not without restrictions, but it is planned to adopt special measures, one case at a time, and only some construction machinery and equipment will be used for some projects that are important to the empire's global strategy, and they will have to be pulled after they are used up.
Come back, even if it is scrapped, you have to bring it back.
This process will be supervised by regulatory officials from the Import and Export Commission.
When the project is completed, not a single screw will be left in the area!
This is not because of the lobbying of private capital, but purely out of Datang's need to build military bases around the world.
The Tang Dynasty had huge overseas territories around the world. Not to mention other places, the Tang Dynasty already owned 13 colonies in Europe alone (excluding North Africa including Ceuta). Most of these colonies were also
To serve as a military base.
As for the ordinary construction of military bases, there is no problem in using indigenous labor, but many projects cannot be completed even if they use human lives.
For example, the construction of military ports, especially the construction of deep-water channels and docks, would be impossible to complete without the help of engineering machinery and purely relying on manpower.
In addition, the restricted use of this special event can be regarded as opening a small opening for the construction of the canal.
The empire had already built a canal in Panama and was still negotiating with the Ottomans over the ownership of the Egyptian region.
These two grand canals are related to the development of the empire's overall global strategy, and their importance is self-evident.
However, the Panama Canal has been under construction for several years, and a lot of indigenous workers have been mobilized, but the construction progress has been very slow. According to predictions, if it continues like this, it will probably take more than twenty years, no matter how many workers die.
Twenty years was too long, and the empire could not afford to wait, so the canal construction company tried to introduce machinery and equipment to speed up the construction progress.
The same waters as the Suez Canal.
In order to build the Suez Canal, the Tang Empire had already transferred its fleet to Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, for exercises many times.
In October of the 1938th year, under the pretext of the Ottoman Empire's Suez garrison bombarding the merchant ships of the Tang Dynasty, they dispatched a fleet carrying a full mixed regiment of troops to bombard and land on Suez, and then actually took control of the Suez area.
Of course, this is not a war, just a small-scale local armed conflict.
In this small-scale armed conflict that was insignificant to the empire, the infantry of the mixed regiment composed of the Tang Dynasty Army and Marine Corps did not even meet the opponent's defenders.
Because before the mixed group launched the landing, the fleet's intensive artillery fire bombed the entire city of Suez to pieces!
At that time, the landing fleet only had one cruiser and two frigates, plus three offshore patrol ships, for a total of six battleships.
The naval guns carried on these six battleships are definitely very few if calculated in the smoothbore gun era. In the smoothbore gun era, a thousand-ton battleship can carry dozens of artillery pieces, and a two-thousand-ton battleship can carry
Hundreds of artillery pieces, six warships must have hundreds of artillery pieces at least.
However, these six warships of the Tang Dynasty only carried a total of more than thirty naval guns, including only two 150 mm naval guns.
There are still more 120mm and 75mm naval guns.
But these thirty-odd naval guns fired more than two thousand shells in a short period of time at military targets such as local military camps and fort facilities. These were all large-charge cylindrical high-explosive grenades.
.
The garrison had not yet reacted, and had not even noticed the arrival of the Tang fleet. Their barracks had been directly blown to pieces by intensive artillery fire!