Chapter 98 Deep Modification

Like the No. 2 lucky boat with less than 400 materials, the equipment volume is more than the No. 1 lucky boat, which belongs to the backbone of the marine fleet. In addition, there are smaller Haicang, winter ships, sentry ships and bird ships, which are auxiliary warships. In the fleet, they are mostly used as peripheral ships, or as assault forces.

However, the No. 2 lucky ship is a ship commonly used by sea merchants, with a large amount of maritime reserves. The reason is that this kind of lucky ship has excellent long-distance navigation ability, strong wind and wave resistance, strong sinking ability, stable driving and large loading capacity. Therefore, sea merchants in Fujian, including those in Guangdong, prefer to use this kind of sea boat. Business trip to sea.

And the sea wolf has now obtained a large number of such ships by various means. In addition to part allocated to the merchant fleet, the rest are left to the sailors as the main warships. After all, the number of flying fast ships is now more than a dozen, which is far from replacing the current main status of this kind of lucky ships among the sailors.

This lucky boat is the main ship that Yu Xiaotian will modify next. Although most of this ship has also been modified to carry six-pound and 12-pound cannons in the past, these guns are arranged on the top open deck, which is greatly affected by the weather, and there is no need to repeat the problem.

Therefore, Yu Xiaotian began to experimentally modify this kind of lucky boat last year. Several medium-sized lucky boats have been transformed and handed over to the main generals of each fleet.

This time, the ship he pulled into the dock is larger than the ordinary officer sailor No. 1 lucky ship, because the ship has three masts, which are built according to the specifications of 600 materials. When the ship's displacement is fully loaded, it can reach about 350 to 400 tons.

If this ship is placed on the sea of later generations, it is really not a big ship. Even if it is compared with the Galen ship now widely used in Western countries and the gradually obsolete Clark sailboat, it is not a good ship.

However, placed on the coast of China in this era, it is actually a big ship, and this ship used to be Chu Cai's boat. After the first battle last year, it was captured by a sea wolf and dragged back rags, but Chu Cai took a bird boat to escape.

After being captured by the sea wolf last year, the ship underwent a certain degree of repair in the boat house, but it did not make a deeper modification. At first, it was handed over to the merchant fleet for more than half a year. It went to Manila and pulled back a lot of saltpeter and canvas.

However, after the end of last year, the ship was diverted back from the merchant fleet by Yu Xiaotian to the fleet of naval divisions, preparing to make a deep modification to make it a gunboat with strong firepower. The ship has not moved in Nanri Island for the past few months.

Before being dragged into the dock of Nanri Island, the ship was first sailed to Tamsui City and stayed in the Tamsui River for a few days, completely removing the maggots at the bottom of the ship.

In fact, this kind of ship maggot was not found along the coast of China before, and this kind of ship maggot is native to be in the Americas. It mainly likes to eat wood in the sea water for a living. Until the beginning of the great voyage of the geographical discovery, it was first brought to all parts of the world by Spanish ships. It is an alien species, a wooden sail The damage of the ship is very large.

If you let it survive on the ship for a long time, if a good boat is not done well, the board at the bottom of the ship will be emptied, and suddenly cause the ship to collapse. Therefore, I don't know how many sailors have been killed.

But later it was found that as long as the wooden boat with the maggots are regularly moored in the fresh water for a few days, the maggots at the bottom of the ship will all die, because this thing is a sea creature and belongs to marine shellfish. It can't survive without salt water and will soon die in fresh water.

Therefore, before preparing to modify the ship, Yu Xiaotian sent the ship to the Tamsui River for a few days before returning to the Nanri Island Boat House towed it into the dock.

After emptying the water from the dock with a water truck, the ship sat on the dock's frame. After a few days of drying, the boatmen began to shovel off all kinds of marine life attached to the bottom of the ship until the wooden board at the bottom of the ship was exposed.

After the personal inspection of the craftsman of the ship and Yu Xiaotian, the workmanship of this old boat is quite exquisite, and Chu Cai always uses this ship as a warship. Unlike ordinary foreign merchants who pay attention to cost issues when building ships, except for the main structure using hardwood, the rest of the shipboards and so on. The wood mostly uses cheap pine and cypress wood to reduce the cost.

This old boat was built at no cost. In addition to the iron wood produced in Guangdong, the ribs and compartment plates are also made of iron wood. Many important components are also made of lychee wood, and the boat board is directly used in the Nanyang area of Malacca and Siam. The teak transported back from other places is very strong on the whole, and the workmanship is quite good. The original cost must be quite high, at least several times more than the ordinary No. 2 lucky boat.

When the ship was captured, it was hit by a lot of sea wolf's six-pound cannon shells and twelve-pound cannon shells, but the six-pound cannon shells basically failed to penetrate his hull, but smashed a pit on the board. Only twelve-pound cannon shells could penetrate its hull, which seemed to be beaten very much. Tragic, but in fact, the damage to the hull is not very serious.

After being captured before, the ship was simply repaired once. After careful inspection this time, Yu Xiaotian found that it was indeed a little uncomfortable to use this ship as a merchant ship.

So he made up his mind to convert the ship into a Chinese gunboat and give full play to the advantages of the ship.

The amount of modification work this time is quite large. Although the materials of the ship are exquisite and gorgeous, and many patterns are carved in many places on the ship, after all, the overall structure of the ship is still not separated from the structure of the Chinese sailboat. There are still many inherent defects on the hull, which makes it bearable for artillery, and Not very strong.

Therefore, if you want to transform this ship into a gunboat, you must carry out a large-scale reinforcement from the inside to the outside to improve the bearing capacity of the hull.

The ship itself is divided into eight compartments and divided into two floors. In the bottom cabin, it is used as a ballast stone, on which a board is laid to become a cargo warehouse and a member's cabin, which can be loaded or used for the accommodation of the ship's personnel.

After carefully observing the cabin structure, Yu Xiaotian and the craftsmen of the boat decided to add another deck to the ship, and to increase the ribs and improve the bearing capacity of the hull inside the hull. While adding a deck as an artillery deck, they removed the partition between the top decks and put it on The deck is opened and becomes a cabin.

In this way, the ship has the compartment of a Chinese ship, and the upper deck also has the cabin structure of a Western-style ship, which not only ensures the partition of the cabin below the waterline, maintains the advantages of strong sinking ability of Chinese ships, but also makes the ship have a large cabin. It is convenient to arrange and install various types of artillery.

This transformation method is different from the deeply modified lucky boats in the early stage. The amount of work is much larger than those, and the consumables are also much larger. Moreover, due to the later transformation, it is much more difficult to load ship ribs in the cabin. However, in order to obtain a powerful gunboat, Yu Xiaotian recognized It's worth doing this.

If it is in the past, I'm afraid that the sea wolf's boat house does not have the ability to carry out such a large-scale renovation project. However, after two years of operation, the boat house has trained a group of skilled craftsmen. When doing this again, there will not be much technical difficulty, but it will take some trouble. However, it is much more labor-saving than building a new ship.

In order to transform the ship, Yu Xiaotian and the craftsmen also carefully calculated the weight and leveling plan of the hull. After all, after the transformation of the ship, the weight of the ship has changed greatly, and the ballast must be readjusted to ensure the safety of the ship.

From the end of March to mid-April, Yu Xiaotian ran towards the boat for a long time almost every day to supervise the construction progress of the ship. In addition, he also personally participated in the solution of some difficult problems and discussed solutions with the craftsmen.

Although the transformation of this ship is very difficult, fortunately, they have made relatively sufficient preparations and made several sets of plans in advance before the start of construction. Therefore, after the start of the renovation project, the construction progress is still quite fast. All kinds of wood materials are prefabricated in advance in the boat shed and then sent to the ship. Install it.

And the craftsmanship of craftsmen is not to mention. They can use simple tools and methods to complete quite complex work, and even load large parts into the hull in a narrow space, which makes Yu Xiaotian have to marvel and once again experience the wisdom of the ancients.

The overall renovation progress of the ship is still satisfactory to him. After more than a month, the main renovation project of the ship was basically completed. After inspection, everyone believes that the overall structure of the ship has been unprecedentedly strengthened, whether it is carrying a 12-pound gun or a 32-pound caron. The cannon is not a problem. Even on both sides of the strongest ship's side, it can carry a new 24-pound gun. This 24-pound gun is different from the 24-pound cannon previously made. The gun body has been shortened, and the major auxiliary of the gun has been reduced by more than one-third, reducing the weight of the gun to about 2,500 catties.

Such a significant weight reduction does not seriously reduce the power of the artillery, but the effective range is slightly shortened. The key is that the internal mold water-cooled casting technology currently used by Sea Wolf makes the barrel strength of the gun greatly enhanced when casting, so that the thickness of the gun can be reduced when casting. , greatly reduce the weight of the gun body.

(I rushed to the hospital! Still doze off!)