Daming pirates

The No. 2 Fortune Ship, which has less than 400 materials, has much more equipment than the No. 1 Fortune Ship, and is the backbone of the naval fleet. There are also smaller Haicang, winter ships, sentinel ships, and bird ships.

, they are auxiliary warships. In the fleet, they are mostly used as peripheral ships or as assault forces.

However, the No. 2 Fu Ship is a ship commonly used by merchants in the sea, and there is a large number of them at sea. The reason is that this kind of Fu Ship has excellent long-distance voyage capabilities, strong resistance to wind and waves, strong anti-sinking ability, stable driving, and large loading capacity, so Fujian

Maritime merchants in the area, including those in Guangdong, prefer to use this kind of sea-going ships to conduct business at sea.

The Sea Wolf has now obtained a large number of such ships through various means. In addition to allocating part to the merchant fleet, the rest are reserved for the navy to use as the main warships. After all, the number of Feihao Clippers is now only ten.

A few ships are far from replacing the current main position of this kind of lucky ship in the navy.

This kind of Fu Ship is the main ship that Yu Xiaotian will modify next. Although most of these ships have been modified in the past, so that they can carry six-pound and twelve-pound guns, these guns are all arranged at the end.

The upper open-air deck is greatly affected by the weather, so there are no need to elaborate on the problems.

Therefore, since last year, Yu Xiaotian began to experiment with in-depth modification of this kind of lucky boats. He has already modified several medium-sized lucky boats and handed them over to the captains of each fleet for use.

This time, the ship he had people pull into the dock was larger than the ordinary Navy No. 1 Fu Ship, because the ship had three masts and was 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 were placed on the seas of later generations, it would really not be considered a big ship. Even if compared with the Galen ships now commonly used in Western countries and the Clark sailing ships that have been gradually phased out, they would be nothing.

What a good ship to get on.

But on the coast of China in this era, it is really a big ship, and this ship used to be Chu Cailao's ship. After the battle at the beginning of last year, it was captured by the sea wolf, beat up and towed

He came back, but Chu Cailao took a bird boat to escape.

After this ship was captured by Sea Wolf last year, it was repaired to a certain extent in the shipyard, but no deeper modifications were made. It was initially handed over to the merchant navy and took more than half a year. It took a trip to Manila to bring it back.

I bought a lot of saltpeter and canvas.

However, after the end of last year, Yu Xiaotian transferred this ship from the merchant fleet back to the navy's warship order, preparing to make an in-depth modification to make it a gunboat with strong firepower.

This boat has been on Nanyue Island for months and has not moved again.

Before being towed into the dock of the Nanyue Island Boat House this time, the boat was first sailed to Tamsui City and parked in the Tamsui River for a few days to completely remove the shipworms from the bottom of the boat.

Speaking of this kind of shipworm, in fact, it did not exist along the coast of China before. The native place of this kind of shipworm is in the Americas. It mainly likes to eat wood in seawater for a living. It was not until the Age of Discovery began that it was first discovered.

The Spanish ships were brought to all parts of the world and were an alien species that caused great damage to wooden sailing ships.

If it is allowed to survive on a ship for a long time, if the ship is damaged, the planks at the bottom of the ship will be hollowed out, causing the ship to collapse suddenly, killing many sailors.

But later, someone discovered that as long as a wooden boat infested with shipworms is anchored in fresh water for a few days regularly, all the shipworms on the bottom of the boat will die, because these things are sea creatures and are marine shellfish, and they cannot survive without salt water.

If you survive, you will die quickly in fresh water.

Therefore, before preparing to renovate the boat, Yu Xiaotian first sent the boat to the Tamsui River to soak for a few days, and then returned to the Nanyue Island Boathouse and towed it into the dock.

After the water was drained by the water truck in the dock, the boat sat on the frame of the dock. After a few days in the sun, the shipwrights began to shovel away various sea creatures attached to the bottom of the boat until the wooden planks on the bottom of the boat were exposed.

.

After personal inspection by the craftsmen of the boathouse and Yu Xiaotian, this old boat of Chu Cai was quite exquisite in workmanship, and Chu Cai always used this boat as a warship, unlike ordinary merchants who built ships.

At that time, we paid attention to the cost issue. In addition to using hardwood for the main structure, the rest of the wood such as ship boards mostly used cheap pine and cypress to reduce the cost.

And this Chu Cai Lao's ship was built with no expense spared. In addition to the keel, which is made of iron wood produced in Guangdong, the entire ship's ribs and bulkheads are also made of iron wood.

Many important components are also made of lychee wood

, the ship's planks are made directly from teak shipped back from Malacca, Siam and other places in the Southeast Asian region. It is very strong on the whole and the workmanship is quite good. The original cost must have been quite high, at least more than the ordinary No. 2 Fortune Ship.

No matter how many times it is.

When this ship was captured, it took a lot of six-pounder shells from the Sea Wolf, and was also hit by 12-pounder shells, but basically none of the six-pounder shells could penetrate his ship.

The plank only made a hole in the plank, and only the twelve-pounder cannon shells could penetrate the plank. It looked badly beaten, but in fact the damage to the hull was not very serious.

After being captured before, this ship had been briefly repaired once. After careful inspection this time, Yu Xiaotian found that using this ship as a merchant ship was indeed a bit unfair.

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

The amount of modification work this time is quite large. Although the materials of this ship are exquisite, the decoration is gorgeous, and there are many patterns carved on many places on the ship, after all, the overall structure of the ship still does not break away from the structure of a Chinese sailing ship. On the hull

There are still many inherent flaws that make its carrying capacity for artillery not very strong.

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

The ship itself is divided into eight compartments, which are further divided into upper and lower floors. The lowermost compartment is used as a ballast stone, and the ship's planks are laid on it to become the cargo warehouse and crew cabins.

It can be used for loading cargo or providing accommodation for people on board.

After carefully observing the cabin structure, Yu Xiaotian and the craftsmen of the boathouse decided to add another deck to the ship, and add ribs inside the hull to improve the load-bearing capacity of the hull, and add a deck as a

At the same time as the artillery deck, the partition board between the uppermost decks was removed, and the upper deck was opened to become a through-cabin.

In this way, the ship has the compartments of a Chinese ship, and the upper deck has the through-cabin structure of a Western ship, which not only ensures the partitions of the cabins below the waterline, but also maintains the advantage of Chinese ships with strong anti-sinking capabilities.

, and the ship has a large cabin, which can conveniently arrange and install various types of artillery.

This kind of modification method is different from the previous deeply modified Fuzhou ships. The amount of work is much larger than that of those few ships, and the consumables are also much larger. Moreover, it is due to the later modifications and the installation in the cabin.

The construction of ship ribs is also much more difficult, but in order to obtain a powerful gunboat, Yu Xiaotian believes that it is worth it.

If it were in the past, Sea Wolf's boat house might not have the ability to carry out such a large-scale renovation project, but after these two years of operation, the boat house has cultivated a group of skilled craftsmen who would be able to do this piece of work again.

When doing it, there is not much technical difficulty, it just takes some work, but it is still much less labor-intensive than building a new ship.

In order to renovate the ship, Yu Xiaotian and the craftsmen also carefully calculated the weight and trimming plan of the hull. After all, after the ship was remodeled, the center of gravity of the ship changed greatly, and the ballast must be readjusted.

, in order to ensure the safety of the ship.

From the end of March to mid-April, Yu Xiaotian would run to the boathouse almost every day and stay for a long time to supervise the progress of the ship's construction by the craftsmen in the boathouse. In addition, he also personally participated in some difficult problems.

During the solution, discuss the solution with the craftsmen.

Although the modification of this ship is very difficult, fortunately, they have made relatively sufficient preparations before starting the construction, and also made several sets of plans in advance. Therefore, after the modification project started, the construction progress was quite fast. Various

The timber is prefabricated in the shipyard workshop and then sent to the ship for installation.

There is no need to mention the craftsmanship of the craftsmen. They can use simple tools and methods to complete quite complex work, and can even install large parts into the hull in a small space. Yu Xiaotian has to say

I was amazed and once again experienced the wisdom of the ancients.

Overall, he was satisfied with the progress of the ship's renovation. After more than a month, the ship's main body renovation project was basically completed. After inspection, everyone believed that the overall structure of the ship had been improved.

Due to the unprecedented strengthening, it is not a problem to carry twelve-pound guns or thirty-two-pound carronade guns. It can even carry new twenty-four-pound guns on both sides of the strongest midships ship. This kind of two-pounder

The fourteen-pounder gun was different from the previously made twenty-four-pound cannon. The barrel of the gun was shortened, and the gun's main mate was reduced by more than one-third, reducing the weight of the gun to about 2,500 kilograms.

Such a substantial weight reduction does not seriously reduce the power of the artillery, but the effective range is slightly shortened. The key is because of the internal mold water-cooling casting technology currently used by Seawolf, which greatly enhances the strength of the barrel when the artillery is cast.

, so that during casting, the thickness of the gun barrel can be reduced and the weight of the gun body can be greatly reduced.

(I rushed to the hospital! I’m still sleepy!)