At present, the construction progress of the No. 1 test ship has reached the upper deck stage, if it is not necessary to wait for the main mast to be processed in the Tiandu Industrial Zone, it is estimated that it will be able to enter the outfitting stage in the next few days, and only after the main mast is installed, the ship can adjust its center of gravity and make the final preparations before launching. (Baidu search update is the fastest and most stable)

Another important reason that slowed down the construction progress came from the military industry. According to the requirements of the Ministry of Military and Police, whether the new sailing ship is used for commercial freight or other purposes, it must be equipped with a certain number of marine guns, or have the ability to be equipped with guns after simple modifications, to put it bluntly, the new sailing ship must have the ability to be transformed into armed ships in wartime.

It stands to reason that there will be a big difference between the design and construction standards of merchant ships and warships, and this request of the Military Police Department sounds a little unreasonable at first glance, but it is also a helpless solution based on the current situation. The new sailing ship that the Ministry of Shipping has worked so hard to build, and when it begins to finalize mass production in the future, it is absolutely impossible to take out the drawings and order them in shipyards in other places, and it still has to rely on the Shengli Port Shipyard to build them one by one, and the speed of launching can be imagined not too fast. If there are not enough new sailing ships, it will be difficult to overwhelm the opponent with technical superiority at sea. Just like two catamarans, although the performance completely surpasses this era, after all, the number is too small and the tonnage is too small, most of the time it can only be used as training, reconnaissance and traffic ships, if there is a naval battle, these two ships must not be put into the battlefield.

How to make good use of a limited number of new sailing ships, the Executive Committee and the Ministry of Maritime Transport have also held several consultations and discussions on this matter, and the final general opinion is that these ships should still be armed escort and fast shipping as the main direction of use in the early stage of launching, and as for freight or migrant transportation, it is better to hand over more to the existing Fu Chuan and Guangzhou Ship.

And the question of the armament of the new sailing ship is also a big trouble that has plagued various departments for a long time. Although the first 6-pounder gun was built as early as May, due to the limitations of processing technology and materials at that time, the mechanical reducer became an unresolved problem, and the guide zhì marine artillery could not be finalized for production.

Of course, it would not be a big problem to reluctantly load the 6-pounder guns used by the army on ships, but due to the lack of effective control and retreat devices, the ships in the hands of the Ministry of Shipping at that time could not be equipped with a few guns at all. Moreover, these sailing ships are built according to the standards of civilian ships, and the sturdiness of the hull is still far from the requirements of equipping with artillery. The Ministry of Shipping also took the ship loaded with artillery and sailed to the Luhuitou Peninsula to conduct several sea firing tests, but the results made everyone feel very frustrated, these civilian ships were simply not enough to withstand the recoil of artillery fire, and after two or three shots, cracks began to appear in the load-bearing deck, and there was obvious loosening in the joints of the wooden structure. In this way, if a fierce naval battle breaks out, I am afraid that before the opponent is sunk, his ship will be shattered first. As a result, the development of marine artillery was temporarily put on hold, and the Ministry of Shipping could only strengthen the load-bearing structure of the new sailing ship while waiting for the military industry to make new progress in the manufacture of artillery reducers.

However, the sea test gun, which consumed a lot of manpower and material resources in the early stage, was not in vain, at least the Ministry of Shipping and the military industry department responsible for the development of the artillery realized the shortcomings in the work, and collected a lot of useful data from the test process, and various departments revised the original design scheme according to the conclusions obtained from these tests.

Although there are many talented people in the military and police department that crosses the group, Yan Zòng lacks personnel with naval qualifications, let alone an understanding of naval artillery warfare. To put it bluntly, everyone is a keyboard party, and everyone knows that the naval artillery battles of this era are often very close, and therefore also thought of the range advantage of the guò artillery to suppress the maritime opponents of the same era, but after really going to the sea to test the artillery, everyone found that the necessity of this kind of close-range artillery combat is not only limited by the range of the artillery, but mainly because the shooting accuracy of the front-loading guns on the ship is too miserable, and the large range does not necessarily have enough advantages. (.) Even if it is only at a distance of four or five hundred meters, the accuracy at sea is not even one-tenth of that on land, and just a little wind and waves are enough to make the discharged shell deviate from the target at this distance by tens of meters.

If you really want to trade range for firepower advantage in an engagement, there are only two ways to go. Either to improve the accuracy of shooting, and this obviously cannot be achieved by relying on the existing front-loading guns, but the rear-loading guns cannot be made in a moment and a half, and the existing military industrial departments cannot independently accomplish this goal, and the scientific and technological trees of the chemical, machining, metallurgical and other departments must be upgraded to a certain stage; or they can only rely on the number of artillery pieces to make up for the lack of accuracy like Western-style sailing ships.

In contrast, the latter solution is obviously easier to achieve, but there will also be many problems in the implementation, and it is necessary to build large ships with more guns, and with the current technical strength, to build gunboats with a displacement of more than 1,000 tons, I am afraid that no one will dare to fight this package of tickets if one is launched in a year. And even if it is built, the training of the existing artillery may not be able to keep up. Although the artillery has not yet been separately listed, if it is estimated only on the basis of the planned artillery establishment, an artillery company will probably be equipped with eight to ten guns, and a warship equipped with 25-30 guns will need about the number of artillery required to be the establishment of a battalion. In the future, some signs of competition for artillery resources between the sea and land can already be seen at this time, and this is precisely one of the important reasons why the Military Police Department is now anxious to expand its establishment and increase the scale of artillery training.

Of course, the Ministry of Shipping is not able to build such a large ship for the time being, and the current construction plan is still based on the No. 1 test ship, starting from a displacement of 200 tons, accumulating enough experience in ship construction, and then gradually increasing the tonnage of shipbuilding.

Led by Yue Zhiyun, Li Nai climbed the scaffolding made of bamboo planks and went up to the deck to see the construction progress. Li Nai was keenly aware of the small square windows on the side of the second deck, and this obviously did not look like a window for ventilation, the shape was exactly the same as the muzzle porthole on a Western sailing ship! Li Nai even saw a shipwright installing iron hinges for opening and closing these portholes, so that the portholes could be closed in normal times. There was no need to ask anything this time, and Li Nai was sure that the ship had been designed with a special cabin for artillery equipment.

Test Ship No. 1 is divided into three levels below deck, with the lowest level being the cargo hold for ballast and other supplies, and a two-foot-thick watertight compartment underneath it. The second floor is the cabin where the crew rests and sleeps, while the first floor adjacent to the deck is mainly the battle floor where the guns are arranged. Because the tonnage of the ship itself is not large, the actual space on each floor is very narrow, and except for the battle floor, people from other places can't get into it at all. And even in the relatively spacious battle floor, after leaving a gun emplacement for the gun, there is very little room left for the gunner and crew to move. If this kind of ship were to be used directly as an armed merchant ship, it would probably not be as much cargo as the supplies that could accompany it, because the deployment of artillery would more than double the number of crew members compared to a merchant ship of the same tonnage. Of course, given that this is only a test ship to verify the design, neither the Military Police Department nor the Executive Committee have anything to find fault with about it.

Also due to displacement constraints, the number of guns that could be placed on the second deck was extremely limited, with five 6-pounder guns on each side of the left and right sides, and a 12-pounder gun in the bow and stern. Compared with the Western counterparts who often carry dozens of guns out in this era, the firepower of this test ship is indeed weak, but if it is compared with ships of the same tonnage, it is difficult to find opponents who can match it in both the East and the West. The three-masted gunboat, the main warship of Zheng Chenggong's naval division, which had defeated the East India Company's fleet in history, had a displacement of more than twice that of this test ship, and was only equipped with eight Hongyi guns and some small-caliber Franc machine guns.

According to the design of the Ministry of Shipping, if necessary, the top deck can also be equipped with 10-12 guns, but if it does, it will greatly affect the center of gravity of the ship and reduce the ship's seaworthiness at sea, which is not suitable for ocean-going operations. There is another way to increase the firepower, which is to increase the caliber of the marine artillery, but this requires further efforts from the machining unit to upgrade and improve the control and withdrawal system of the marine artillery.

At present, although the military industry department has trial-produced the artillery mechanical retarding system required by the military police department, it is limited by the production capacity, and has not yet adopted a hydraulic retarding device, but a multi-mounted spring retarding device. Although the effect of this kind of retarding device is not as good as that of hydraulic reducing, it is better than the simple process, the difficulty and cost of making it are relatively low, and the only obvious disadvantage is that the service life is short, and it may not even be as long as the life of the gun itself. However, in view of the ease of manufacture, the Executive Committee decided that it would be a standard equipment for marine artillery in the coming years. If the military-industrial department can improve it in terms of materials and manufacturing processes, then in the future it is not a pipe dream to upgrade the artillery on ships of the same tonnage to 12 and 24 pounds.

Although Li Nai did not know how big the guns would be installed on this ship, it was clear that the Haihan people were not too comfortable with the current sea situation. You must know that although the maritime merchants of the Ming Dynasty in this era also had so-called armed merchant ships, they were often just a few small-caliber Franc cannons or homemade earthen cannons made of iron nails and porcelain pieces, and the power was fundamentally different from the artillery made by the Haihan people. Li Nai had seen the power of Haihan artillery shooting, and couldn't help but secretly guess in his heart that with such a firepower equipment, the Haihan people only needed a dozen ships to sweep away all the Ming Dynasty sailors on Qiongzhou Island.

However, judging from the current appearance of the Haihan people, they do not seem to regard the Ming army sailors as potential opponents, and the warships of Yazhou Shuizhai enter and exit in Shengli Harbor much more frequently than the merchant ships of "Fu Ruifeng", and the general of the Shuizhai is as comfortable as his own home when he arrives at Shengli Port, and this relationship obviously cannot be described as "hostile".

When Li Nai came yesterday, he also happened to see two small warships of the Ming army sailing out of the harbor, and during dinner, he took advantage of the wine to ask a few words, and Tao Donglai actually said that these ships were here to help transport immigrants to the new port in the west to colonize. The garrison is looking for local rich businessmen to ask for money, Li Nai has seen a lot of this kind of thing, and his own family has also contributed a lot of blood for this, but the garrison does things for the local magnates for money, this kind of thing is really rare, this is not half of the guards who have been reduced to private soldiers and peasants, but the real Ming Dynasty sailors!

Of course, why did the Yazhou sailor "corrupt **" to this kind of Cheng dù, Li Nai also knew in his heart, with Haihan's ability to make money, as long as it leaked out of his fingers, it would be enough for those stupid soldiers to eat for a year and a half. But if this kind of thing happened in Guangzhou, I am afraid that the general commander who took the lead would have been arrested and imprisoned by the commander of the capital, and only in a remote area like Yazhou would there be a matter of collusion between the sailors and the local magnates.

Li Nai thought of the Haihan people's arms sales strategy to Fujian, and vaguely felt that the Haihan people's current behavior seemed to be preparing for direct intervention in Fujian's maritime contention in the future. Imagine that after another two or three years of fighting on the Fujian side, both Xu Xinsu and Zheng Zhilong will be greatly injured, and under such circumstances, if an armed fleet equipped with Haihan arms enters the local waters, who else will be able to resist it? After returning to Guangzhou this time, I heard that the Guangzhou Consulate General is trying every means to inquire about the situation of the forces in the Pearl River Estuary, and this is probably not just to ensure the safety of their sea routes, but to try to set up a stronghold in the Pearl River Estuary, right?

The more Li Nai thought about it, the more he felt that his guess was justified, the last time he came to Shengli Port, he heard that the Haihan people had developed a coal port somewhere overseas, and this time he heard that a new salt farm had been built in a bay in the east. With these past deeds as a foreshadowing, if one day the Haihan people really occupy a place outside the Pearl River Estuary, then Li Nai will not be surprised at all. Moreover, the Haihan people have always planned and then acted, if they really look at any place, it is very likely that they have already begun to prepare for it now, such as the new armed sailing ship in front of them.

Li Nai's guess was not wrong in the general direction, but he still thought things too simply. It will take quite some time for the Crossing Group to truly expand its reach beyond Sanya. The two sides that are now fighting in the Taiwan Strait, whether it is Xu Xinsu or Zheng Zhilong, have far more population, territory, and ships under their command than the current crossing group, and such a gap cannot be made up by relying on a very small amount of advanced artillery and equipment. To put it bluntly, people have lost one battle or two battles, and even if they have lost for a year and a half, they can still bear it, but even if the current crossing group only loses once, it may affect the future development prospects. Therefore, the Crossing Group has always been cautious in formulating its foreign policy, and in particular, it has not dared to make a conclusion in vain whether it is necessary to use military means to solve the problem.

The crossing group is now concentrating all kinds of resources on the development of new sailing ships, although it is to prepare for the future expansion of power, but this expansion does not necessarily require a real knife and a real gun little by little to fight back the land, if it is just for the land, then Hainan Island is enough to cross the group for 20 years of development.

What the crossing group values more is the actual external influence, this influence is not a unilateral military strength suppression, but more importantly, economic and cultural penetration and influence, military means are ultimately only to play the role of escorting foreign expansion, I don't have to start fighting you, but I will use various ways to let you know that I am very capable of fighting, and I can fight ten in one go. The Executive Committee allowed Li Nai to enter the shipyard to see the latest achievements, in fact, there was a little bit of this kind of show of force.

And during Li Nai's visit here, he has also been thinking about why this group of Haihan people who came across the sea were able to create such a situation in just half a year. According to several members of the Haihan Executive Committee that Li Nai came into contact with, this is "the superiority of the system". From the proud look on their faces when they made their remarks, Li Nai could realize that their "superiority" was basically aimed at the Ming Dynasty, and it was obvious that the Haihan people believed that the Ming system had many problems.

Although Li Nai does not know what public knowledge is, in the hierarchical positioning of the Ming society by the Executive Committee, an intellectual like him with a certain amount of fame and net worth is clearly defined by the Executive Committee as "Ming Public Knowledge". This part also has considerable influence in the Ming society, and it is an important object for the Executive Committee to export culture and values.

In his contact with the Haihan people, Li Nai constantly explored the true purpose of what this group was doing in Shengli Port, and the Executive Committee also regarded the contact with Li Nai as an example of future contact with the Ming scholars. In terms of the scale of the existing educational institutions of the Crossing Group, it is difficult to achieve success within ten years, and if you want to gradually conquer the mainland region, you must have a large number of drummers who are waving the flag and shouting for the passage of the regime, and if you choose people with a more cultural foundation to carry out purposeful cultivation, the speed will definitely be much faster than training those illiterate indigenous children. A Ming literati like Li Nai, who is not disgusted with Haihan culture and has deep interests entangled with the crossing group, is a very suitable target.