Please ask me to be the emperor

"Are you Zhang Zizhou? What is your current position?" Zhang Shun looked at the middle-aged man in front of him and couldn't help but ask.

"Yes, the subordinate is Zhang Zizhou, who is currently the head of the Battalion and Maintenance Department of the Ministry of Industry!" Zhang Zizhou replied tremblingly.

"Oh?" Zhang Shun looked Zhang Zizhou up and down, and couldn't help but said: I don't know if there are countless talents in the Ming Dynasty, but they are not employed properly.

It is a waste of money for someone with such experience in supervision to be placed in a small position in the Maintenance Department.

Thinking of this, he couldn't help but laugh and said: "I heard that you supervised the construction of a large-scale sealing boat with 5,000 materials a few years ago. I wonder what it is like?"

"Yes!" Zhang Zizhou perked up after hearing this, and couldn't help but said quickly, "This boat is twenty-one feet long, six feet wide, and five feet deep. It is equipped with five masts. It sails across the ocean as if walking on flat ground."

When he talked about the time when he supervised the construction of Fengzhou, Zhang Zizhou immediately talked non-stop. He must have been quite proud of this matter.

"I'd like to hear how Fengzhou is doing!" Zhang Shuncai didn't bother to listen to his bragging and went straight to the topic.

"He who seals the boat is sent as an envoy to Ryukyu to seal the ship of his king!" Zhang Zizhou stopped being verbose and answered directly.

"However, the sea area from Fujian to Ryukyu is very windy and unpredictable, so if you want to cross the ocean, you must build a large ship or a sea-going ship to be safe."

"The system of sealing the boat is seventeen feet long and three feet wide. It is called a stern, a rudder, and a mast. It is harvested from Guanzhong. It cannot be used unless it is hundreds of years old, and it cannot be transported unless tens of thousands of people are used. I heard that the ship was completed in the past or In two or three years, the cost of wood planting is no less than five thousand taels."

"In order to strengthen the country's prestige, this boat must first not be sinkable, secondly not be small, and thirdly not capsize when encountering big waves. The speed of the boat should be fast and the hull should be stable, and then nothing else can be expected."

"Oh?" Zhang Shun heard this and immediately understood that this was a requirement for Fengzhou's construction.

If the Ming Dynasty canonizes the King of Ryukyu and asserts its status as a suzerain, it must do something beautiful and not be underestimated.

First of all, the ship must be strong. Only strong ships can withstand strong winds and waves.

Secondly, the boat must have lateral stability to avoid being blown over by strong winds.

Finally, the boat must be stable, otherwise the crew members on the boat will be vomiting, diarrhea, and mentally depressed, and they will lose the style of the heavenly king.

If you want to fulfill the above requirements, the first point is that the ship must be large. European ocean-going sailing ships at the same time actually had similar requirements.

So when Zhang Shun heard this, he couldn't help but perked up and quickly asked: "In that case, how should this sealing boat be designed and how should it be built?"

"In the old days, the sealing boat was about fifteen feet long, nearly three feet wide, and one foot and four feet deep. They were all made of the lucky boat." Zhang Zizhou laughed when he heard this.

"A few years ago, this was not the case with the boat supervised by Wei Chen. It was twenty-one feet long, six feet wide, and five feet into the water. The hull was borrowed from the Far West."

"So although their structures are similar, their sizes are completely different."

"This boat is very different from ordinary ones. It is divided into five layers from bottom to top. The bottom layer is loaded with stone cargo, which is called ballast."

"The three floors in the middle are the 'official cabins', which are used to provide food and accommodation for the envoys. The stern of the ship is the helmsman's cabin, and next to it is the 'steer's secret room'."

"The upper plywood is equipped with ordnance, artillery and a pergola. At the end is a second floor of the yellow house. Below is the emperor's canonization edict and the concubine of Poseidon."

“There is a need for ‘ladders to go up and down’ between the upper and lower floors.”

"In the original system, Fengzhou is low and requires 'crouching down' between each level, which is very inconvenient."

Zhang Shun frowned when he heard this.

The space on the ship is small and low, so it is expected that the crew members will stoop to enter the cabin.

It's just that the original boat was no more than one foot four deep, which is about four and a half meters in later generations. If it were made into five floors, wouldn't each floor be less than one meter high? Could it be that all the missionaries went to sea lying down?

If it is replaced by "five feet", each floor is more than ten feet high, which is similar to the floor height of later generations of buildings, which is quite reasonable.

Thinking of this, Zhang Shun couldn't help but ask: "I wonder what the words 'one foot and four deep' and 'five feet into the water' refer to?"

"One foot four deep, which is below the depth of the 'Water Snake' when sealing the boat!" Zhang Zizhou responded quickly, "Fifty feet deep into the water refers to the height above the 'Water Snake'!

"Oh? What is a 'water snake'?" Zhang Shun became more and more confused after hearing this.

"The so-called 'water snake' refers to the lines drawn on both sides of the boat. When it is loaded with people, it must be aligned with the water surface!" Zhang Zizhou explained.

"Oh, it turns out to be the water line!" Zhang Shun pondered for a moment and suddenly understood.

It turns out that the number of feet "deep" mentioned by the Ming Dynasty is not the same concept as the "depth of a ship" in later generations.

The depth of a ship in later generations refers to the height from the bottom keel to the main deck; while the depth of a ship in this era refers to the normal load waterline.

If converted to the concept of later generations, the original Fuzhou-shaped sealing boat should be more than two feet deep, so the height of each floor is about 1.56 meters.

Zhang Zizhou built a new boat, five feet high from the waterline.

If you remove the two-story yellow house set up at the stern of the Fengzhou ship and add in the height of the "water snake", it would be about four to five feet.

Compared with the "shallower" Chinese sailboats, it is indeed a huge improvement.

Of course, these are not the most critical points. The most critical point is that this sealing boat has "five layers" up and down.

If the ballast and buildings above the deck are excluded, this is a three-deck warship with a full gun deck.

Thinking of this, Zhang Shun couldn't help but get excited, and quickly asked: "If we modify it based on this, can it be converted into a three-deck warship?"

"Ah?" Zhang Zizhou originally thought that Zhang Shun wanted to build a new Fengzhou, but he never expected that he actually wanted to change it into a battleship.

Fortunately, there are examples of this.

In the early years of Longqing, in order to deal with the increasingly rampant Japanese pirates, he followed General Li's suggestion and built twenty-four Feng Zhou as warships.

Thinking of this, Zhang Zizhou couldn't help but think for a long time, and then responded: "This plywood is not that plywood. If His Highness wants to change it into a battleship, it must be greatly modified!"

"Why is this?" Zhang Shun was curious and couldn't help asking.

"My Feng Zhou uses the Far West keel and ribs, and is divided into five upper and lower layers. In fact, the plywood of the two is different." Zhang Zizhou said seriously.

"That plywood goes straight to the top and is quite thick. My plywood is like building a building, with layers stacked up to create multiple rooms."

"If His Highness wants to open a gun hole and place the cannon in it, he must thicken the plywood and reserve a retreat passage for the Hongyi cannon laterally."

"Oh? That's it!" Zhang Shun suddenly understood and nodded.

No wonder European sailing battleships were relatively wide in history. In addition to being convenient for crossing the ocean, they also reserved space to buffer the recoil of heavy artillery.

However, thinking of this, Zhang Shun became more and more impatient.

Since there is no problem from a technical point of view, then I have to build a ship myself, a big ship!

So, he couldn't help but said: "I want to appoint you as the director of Tianjin Shipyard. What do you think?"

The draft issues of ships in the Ming Dynasty mentioned in this article are the author's speculations. According to the information the author checked, everyone swore that the Fengzhou boat in the dynasty was "one foot four deep" and then calculated the displacement based on this. Completely ignoring the "Bing Lu" record that the draft of the Dafu ship was 1.12 feet and the record of the sealing boat draft of "1.8 feet" recorded by Xie Jie, the deputy envoy to Ryukyu in the seventh year of Wanli, this completely underestimated the displacement of the Ming Dynasty ships. Based on the record of Fengzhou's "upper and lower floors", the author estimates that the depth of Fengzhou in the Ming Dynasty should be about three feet. As for the Feng Zhou in the fifth year of Chongzhen, the depth of the boat should be between four and five feet.