A large-scale fly-shelf ship with a load of 3,000 tons has four masts, but it uses coal as the auxiliary power for sails, lifting and anchoring. It only takes forty-five people to clean up. The transportation cost has been greatly reduced and it is a good vehicle for low-value goods such as coal. In fact, in the past ten years, large-tonnage transport ships traveling to and from overseas provinces of the Empire have been flying fly-shelf ships, large volumes such as wool, cotton, and large-weight but low-value goods such as grains, coal ores. They can only be used to fit.

The transportation of Hongji Port and Penang, Nanhua, Shenjing and other places can be done by flying scissors, but the transportation between them and Qiongzhou is not suitable. The Qiongzhou Steel Plant is built on the beach and has high-quality iron ore. It is also the largest customer of Hongji Mining. It transports 150,000 tons to Qiongzhou every year.

The speed of the clipper ship is meaningless for such short-distance transportation. On the contrary, because the product itself is coal, Hongji Mining proposed to use steam-powered ships from the beginning. In the early years, Hongji Mining even built unpowered barges and towed them to Qiongzhou by steam tugs. However, soon, United Shipyard took out a 3,000-ton steam paddle steamer, which was designed separately by United Shipyard. In order to have suitable steam power, it specially found the Imperial Nanyang Powerhouse and designed the ship steam engine, which also promoted the Nanyang Powerhouse to reach the most advanced level of the Empire in ship power.

The Giant Steam Engine had only 600 horsepower at the beginning, but with the advancement of design and production technology, the Giant C had already had 960 horsepower, which was also the power used by the Cheetah. With the technical investment of the United Shipyard, the propeller also obtained a paddle wheel, becoming a mature driving method and its efficiency was far beyond that of the paddle wheel.

Because the United Shipyard built large-tonnage transport ships and paid great attention to transportation efficiency, they found that the load capacity of iron-hulled ships is much larger than that of wooden-hulled ships, with a 200-drone load more than every twenty meters of ship length, so it was invested on a large scale in the construction of iron-hulled ships. Overall, the mature technology of United Shipyard has led to its victory in competition with traditional naval shipyards. Without policies, connections and financial advantages, United Shipyard was directly successful with its technology.

In the 23rd year of the empire, the news of the successful trial of the Cheetah was spread to Shen Jing. There was no such thing as "armor cannot float", "too heavy and unable to run", "propellers are easy to fall off, affecting the speed of the sail power". However, even with the success of the Steam Iron Armor, the top leaders of the navy were still stubborn, and Li Junhua adopted the easiest method to directly transfer the Cheetah to Shen Jing, and defeated some old immortals in the navy's misunderstanding of the Steam Iron Armor in front of the people of the world. But the result was that afterwards, the naval reform entered the second round, from equipment reform to organization reform, directing the naval bureaucrats.

In fact, the Cheetah also has shortcomings. For example, the armor is directly fixed to the hull, because it cannot isolate the chemical reaction between the metal and the wood, resulting in the wood being more prone to rot, and the ship is naturally not used for a long time. Because the propeller is placed between the rudder sheet and the stern, it will not affect the speed. The key is that under the sail power, the rudder effect will be reduced. As for the problems of axle sealing, the drainage machine must be turned on all day. The Navy even accused the Cheetah of being a serious leak than the civilian ship built by the United Shipyard, which is actually mainly due to the wooden shell.

Both the Coast Guard and the United Shipyard hope to show their faces during the Shin Kyung display, so they modified the Cheetah, mainly in terms of firepower and armor.

After arriving in Shenjing, facing the two broken merchant ships prepared by the navy, Qi Changjie, who led the project, chose to refuse. The United Shipyard directly bought a scrapped and dismantled third-level battleship as a target ship, and even strengthened the side of the battleship to the level of the first-level battleship.

First of all, the armor test. During the modification, the United Shipyard replaced part of the Cheetah armor with ninety-mm armor. This part of the armor was located in the middle and rear, and was used to protect the steam engine. It was also to balance the center of gravity problems caused by the ammunition depot in the front. The ninety-mm armor plus 300 mm teak blocked more than 20 shellings of the 32-pound short-heavy cannons of the empire, and the armor was loose, but it was not serious. Qi Changjie even ordered the Cheetah to approach the target ship and use the 32-pound cannon to shoot, but it still did not penetrate.

Next was the flowering bullet test. The thirty-two-pound flowering bullet was useless with the Cheetah. Not to mention the ninety-mm armor in the engine room, even the forty-five-mm armor version of the gun deck was useless. Until the Navy used the heaviest sixty-eight-pound cannon in service, the flowering bullet fired fell off several armor plates. This made the Navy furious and demanded to use 68-pound solid shells to attack, which was directly rejected by the emperor. The reason was very simple. The Empire's opponents did not have such artillery, and Britain's heaviest artillery was forty-two pounds, and it was too heavy and very little equipment.

Qi Changjie suggested that he could test it, but he could not directly hunt the Cheetah. Later, after testing, let alone the Cheetah, even the 120-mm armor used for the naval iron armor cruiser could barely resist it.

The defense of the ironclad ships has been proven from this, but the problem of the ironclad ships is also very serious, that is, there are few cannons, which is inevitable. The center of gravity of the ironclad ships will be high after using ironclads. Not to mention the three-layer artillery deck, even two-layer artillery decks will not work. In the next twenty years, except for the ironclad ships that France used two-layer artillery decks in the Mediterranean Fleet, the rest will be single-layer artillery decks.

But few artillery does not mean weak firepower. It is precisely to show firepower that Qi Changjie asked the United Shipyard to transform the Cheetah and turn the 32-pound short-heavy cannon into a ninety-pound wine bottle cannon.

In order to avoid naval interference, all the equipment on the Cheetah has nothing to do with the navy. Even the thirty-two-pound cannons were collected by the Coast Guard, while the ninety-pound wine bottle cannons were the product of the Army Ordnance Bureau. This was because Yu Wang obtained the land around the Black Sea through the western expedition, which made the shore defense artillery hot again. The West Jinban coastal defense belongs to the army, and the army needs a long-range and powerful artillery gun. Since flowering bullets can occur, solid artillery cannons can also be fired.

Some people later believed that the invention of the ironclad ship was directly related to the Russian Navy's use of flowering bullets to kill the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of Sinop. The influence of flowering bullets at that time was actually wrong. Flowering bullets were actually used very early. The Russians used it well not because of their skillful skills and tactics, but because of the fearlessness of reckless men. At the same time, the flowering bullets were also used on British and French warships, but they were not used in naval battles.

There are many problems with flowering bullets, and the primary problem is the fuse. The flowering bullet's fuse is a wooden pipe with gunpowder inside. It is ignited with artillery fire produced by the launching medicine and fired out. This is already quite common in the Imperial Army. Later, even field guns were used. This fuse can be set in a cutting manner, but it is very inaccurate. In a wet sea, fuses are prone to problems. The flowering bullet must break through the hull before it can explode, and the impact will cause problems with the fuse.

The power of the flowering bullet is also a problem. First of all, flowering bullets must be made of large-caliber shells, because they are filled with black gunpowder and the body is cast from iron. They are not thin. If there is less gunpowder, they may not be able to explode. Therefore, flowering bullets start at least twelve pounds, which is the standard of the army. The navy generally uses flowering bullets of more than thirty-two pounds.

The flowering bullet can only play a big role if it explodes inside the hull. The problem is that the flowering bullet has a good armor-piercing ability. The flowering bullet with a ninety-pound cannon weighs 60 pounds. If it gets closer, the flowering bullet will penetrate two layers of the ship's side to the other side. If the distance is far, it may not be able to penetrate one layer, and it is meaningless to explode outside the ship's side.

At the beginning, the Navy used timed fuzes, namely disc fuzes, navy cotton, linen fiber, paper, etc. to wrap gunpowder layer by layer. The last layer was metal leather, and five points were set at the burning speed, each point representing one second and five seconds at the latest. But the problem was that naval battles were all dynamic and the distance was not determined by itself at all. It was difficult to control the distance that only penetrated one layer of the ship's side. During the Sinop Naval Battle, the Russians bombed for more than two hours before they succeeded, and the solid shells in two hours were enough to destroy the enemy, and the price was cheap.

The flowering bullet has poor accuracy, and it contains gunpowder, which is not stable, and there is also a medicine injection hole and the iron shell is not uniform, which leads to the flowering bullet being actually an eccentric ball. The 32-pound flowering bullet has greater resistance than the 200-pound shell, and it is not far away.

The true power of the flowering bomb was after the invention of the rifled cannon that triggered the fuse. But at that time, everyone had iron armor, and using flowering bombs was still no one could do anything to anyone. They could only use solid armor-piercing shells. Even the trigger was very unstable at the beginning. Therefore, in history, the fuse would be filled with sand and used shells with explosive power as armor-piercing shells. This was also the origin of the filling of sand in the Qing naval artillery shells.

Therefore, it was correct for the Imperial Navy to insist on the triggering of rifled guns. Although bottled guns were once popular due to naval reform, they eventually returned to this route.

When the Cheetah was tested, it was full of situations. The ninety-pound wine bottle cannon did not explode. It was very common to explode outside the ship. Three cannons fired more than a dozen times, and only succeeded once. The efficiency was so low. However, the solid cannonball performed well. A ninety-pound cannonball shot was a hole the size of a washbasin. It was hit near the waterline and could not stand it at all. By the way, even the armor plate used for testing was smashed directly, which was much more powerful than the sixty-eight-pound cannon.

What changed the impression of Cheetah's weak firepower was that the shell invented by Qi Changjie himself was later called the Iron Watermelon Bomb, which was transformed with flowering bullets. Qi Changjie discovered that the Cheetah had six steam engines (including six-horsepower steam engines for power, exhaust and intake air, and winch machines), and these steam engines could completely drive blowers, so a small iron smelting furnace was installed, which could heat iron to 1,800 degrees Celsius. Later, the Imperial Navy warships had a special heating system.

The molten iron is poured into the shell of the flowering bullet. As long as you wait for a little three minutes, the surface of the molten iron solidifies and blocks the hole in the pouring. The shells can be loaded with wood and wet mud trays as barriers according to the rules and regulations of firing and melting bullets.

This kind of shell filled with molten iron will directly shatter on the hull. The splashed molten iron can almost ignite everything on the sail warship, and it looks like a watermelon falling from a high place and smashing it, so it is called an iron watermelon by officers and soldiers. Iron watermelon has three benefits: one is that it has considerable armor-piercing ability, and can deal with some ordinary merchant ships and even cruise ships, and can even ignite the inside through the hull. The second is that it is not easy to extinguish the ignition.

In fact, in the sailing era, no ship had ever been burned. It was common for the ignition of its own ship during wars, so sand and moist canvas were always on the ship for extinguishing fires. But the problem is that this kind of thing is suitable for extinguishing fires on the deck, while the iron watermelon ignites the outer side of the ship, which cannot be sprinkled with sand and water and canvas cannot cover it. The iron watermelon is the best ship to destroy the target ship and is quickly burned to death.

The Cheetah is not only powerful, but also advanced artillery. Although the ninety-pound wine bottle cannon is large in diameter, it actually weighs a little smaller than the sixty-eight-pound cannon. This kind of cannon is still cast artillery. It is just a new cannon casting method. Although the wine bottle cannon is narrow in front and wide in the back, it is very different, especially near the muzzle, which is very powerful, very much like a downed wine bottle, and of course it is more like a ball bottle that was hit by bowling balls in later generations.

Unlike other artillery empiricism and aesthetically manufactured artillery, wine bottle cannons are more scientific. The Army Ordnance Bureau cuts the gun barrel into the hole in segments, stuffs projectiles inside, and then tests the pressure the gun barrel can withstand at different charges and distances. The hollow casting method of wine bottle cannons is also more scientific.

In the past, the artillery of the Empire was directly cast with grey iron, and then cut, bored and polished the inside and outside of the gun barrel. However, this is contrary to metallographic, because the cannons cast in this way were first cooled outside and then slowly cooled inside, which would lead to cracks and even hollows inside. Of course, during the boring process, these would be eliminated, but the barrel outside is loose and tight inside cannot be changed. The pressure generated by the explosion of the launching drug will spread from the inside out, causing the artillery cracks to explode.

The hollow casting process of the wine bottle cannon is different. This process is to put a metal cylinder in a large mold. The metal cylinder is not completely sealed. It is like a teapot with cold water inside. During casting, the furnace is built outside the outer mold to keep the entire mold at a high temperature. After pouring in the molten iron, water is poured into the metal cylinder at the same time. The heated water flows out of the 'tea pot', allowing the flowing water to take away the heat.

The ninety-pound wine bottle cannon takes forty hours to cast, and during this period, the water used for cooling alone exceeded 200 tons.

The success of the Cheetah slapped the naval bureaucrats in the face. The navy was inevitable. Even the army was afraid. For this reason, it proposed to change the fire cap rifled rifled and conduct preliminary research on techniques such as firing guns and metal fixed ammunition. However, in the end, the flintlock rifled rifled rifled was replaced in a realistic manner.
Chapter completed!