Chapter 198: The Bopu Shipyard

Ultimately, the restart of the 854-modified project was approved. The Executive Committee agreed to immediately start construction on one 1630-class frigate, four 500-horsepower steam tugboats, twelve 200-ton barges, and six 500-ton sail-steam hybrid vessels.

In addition, following Wen Desi’s suggestion, the mass production of the Type II triangular-sailed patrol boat would continue, with the single mast being changed to a double mast, at a launching rate of at least two per month.

This shipbuilding plan became the first “Great Leap Forward” for Lingao’s shipbuilding industry. Before this, Lingao’s shipyards had only built light vessels with a tonnage of around 200 tons. However, through the previous large-scale construction of single-masted/double-masted triangular-sailed patrol boats, the Bopu Shipyard had accumulated considerable shipbuilding experience.

The Planning Commission had a detailed plan for shipbuilding in its five-year plan. According to Ma Qianzhu and Wu De’s thinking, large-scale shipbuilding was to begin in the year before the end of the first five-year plan. According to the timetable, it was in this year that the transmigrators would fully occupy Hainan and expand their influence overseas.

Fortunately, the Planning Committee and the subsequent Planning Commission recognized that shipbuilding was a long-term investment industry. From the first year of the five-year plan, the construction of the Bopu Shipyard began. This shipyard was greatly strengthened by the large number of shipwrights and materials captured from Baitu Village. The shipyard started with modifying ships, then successfully replicated the America, completing the first step in self-producing Western-style sailing ships.

Due to the lack of large keel timbers, the shipyard, after launching the Zhenhai, a replica of the America, firmly embarked on the path of iron-framed construction. Although there was some debate between the two technical routes—whether to leap directly to iron hulls or to transition with wooden hulls—there was also a proposal for large-scale construction of cement ships during this period.

Ultimately, wooden hulls were chosen mainly because the transmigrator group’s industrial base was still too weak. According to tests conducted by the navy in the water tank, wrought iron hulls corroded very quickly in seawater, and Lingao’s chemical industry could not yet produce paint to protect the ship’s exterior. In the 19th century, the solution was to sheathe the iron hull with a layer of wood, which was too labor-intensive. Although iron-hulled ships had many advantages over wooden-hulled ones in terms of manufacturing and use, this unsolvable practical problem ultimately made wooden hulls the mainstream of shipbuilding.

As for cement ships, they also had many supporters. As a cheap means of water transport, cement ships did have their advantages. Their materials were cheap and readily available, and they required almost no specialized shipbuilding technology. Construction workers could be trained to build them with little effort, and they did not require complex timber processing. Steel bars and wire mesh could easily form the skeleton, and a few masons could cast the cement, completing a ship in a few days.

The world’s first cement ship was built by the Frenchman J.L. Lambot in 1848. Early cement ships were small in tonnage and simple in craftsmanship, with a large deadweight, and were generally only used for small-tonnage cargo transport on inland rivers. During the two World Wars, due to the scarcity of steel, there were two booms in the construction of reinforced concrete ships.

China had built a large number of reinforced concrete ships and wire-mesh cement ships since 1958, which were widely used as pontoons, small and medium-sized motorized cargo ships on inland rivers and along the coast, inland river barges, agricultural boats, and fishing boats. China’s cement ship holdings reached several million tons, the largest in the world. In the 1960s, the United States, Canada, Norway, New Zealand, and other countries began to trial-produce wire-mesh cement ships. Because cement ships had a large deadweight, a small cargo ratio, and high fuel consumption, their economic efficiency never met the standard, so they were never widely used. China once built a 5773-ton coastal cement cargo ship in the 1970s, which ended its sailing career forever and was abandoned on the shore after its first cargo voyage.

However, according to the propaganda of the cement ship party, led by Si Kaide, cement ships had better impact resistance than wooden ships, seaworthiness comparable to wooden ships and superior to steel-hulled ships, were easy to repair, did not rust or rot, had a long lifespan, and were the best emergency shipbuilding solution for the transmigrators.

Si Kaide, the director of the Colonial and Trade Department’s office, was so enthusiastic about cement ships that he spent his spare time constantly promoting how “great, glorious, and correct” they were for the transmigration cause. He not only touted the various benefits of cement ships at the Executive Committee’s working meetings but also frequently went to the shipyard to talk at length about the technical issues of cement ships, baffling the shipyard’s native technicians. They all pestered the shipyard and navy elders, wanting to know what this “building ships like houses” was all about. Li Di, fed up with it, simply ordered the sentries to forbid Si Kaide from entering the shipyard again and declared cement ships to be “heresy.”

Li Di hated cement ships because they did not fit the glorious image of the navy. But Si Kaide was not discouraged. He specially submitted two of his own designs for so-called standardized ships to the Planning Commission, which would be easy to mass-produce. One was a 250-ton single-masted oared cement ship as a transitional model, and the other was an 800-ton two-masted steam-powered cement ship.

The cement ships would have a shallow-draft, flat-bottomed hull, equipped with sails—Chinese-style sails to simplify maintenance and reduce manpower.

For armament, one or two standard traversing gun carriages were designed, capable of mounting 20-60 pounder smoothbore cannons or 70-130mm rifled cannons. The small cement ships would have one gun position, normally unused, while the large ones would have 3-4 positions, normally mounting 1-2 cannons, fully armed in wartime.

Deck space would be reserved for mounting 12-20 pounder cannons or small rifled guns in wartime. The large ships could carry 8-12 light cannons, and the small ones could carry 4.

In the meeting room, Si Kaide enthusiastically showed Wu De his design drawings, explaining his ideas for manufacturing and use.

“If we have a fleet of 100 ships, and we mobilize half of them in wartime, we can have 500 cannons of various sizes and dozens of typewriters, with firepower exceeding that of the British fleet during the Opium War. When we have built a dozen or twenty, we can first hold a public joint exercise to intimidate the Guangzhou government and the Portuguese, letting them know that we can annihilate any fortress or fleet on the Pearl River even with cargo ships!” Si Kaide was spitting saliva as he spoke, and Wu De was gradually growing impatient. As a former navy man, he had no interest in these things that could hardly be called ships.

“…We will first design and build the first ship in Lingao, then move the casting and final assembly to Xiangshan Bay, with Lingao providing the raw materials. When we control the coal mines in the West River basin, we can move the cement plant to Xiangshan Bay. When we control the high-grade iron ore in Zhaoqing, we can build a steel plant, and then we can build iron ships…”

Wu De said, “I’ve never seen a cement ship on the sea.” He intended to use this to directly shoot down the proposal for cement sea ships. “Besides, I remember that cement ships are not resistant to collisions. And you want to install cannons on them? Won’t firing them crack the hull? And what about being cannon-proof! I took plenty of cement boats in my hometown as a child, and they were very afraid of collisions.”

“Actually, there have been,” Si Kaide quickly cited examples of France and China building thousand-ton cement sea ships, showing that it was not impossible. He went on to say that the construction period for wooden ships was too long, the timber for shipbuilding had to be hardwood, which had to be naturally air-dried for three to five years, and would rot quickly. There was also not enough copper to sheathe the bottoms of the ships.

As for the issue of firing cannons and being cannon-proof, a concrete hull should be more impact-resistant than wood. Wood has no transverse strength, while steel bars form a grid. If it cracks, it can be patched on the spot. The cannons of that time couldn’t hit below the waterline. At most, a layer of steel mesh could be added at the waterline to strengthen it. The impact of the cannons was not a problem; the gun mounts had foundations, with steel anchor bolts and thick wooden blocks for shock absorption…

Wu De patiently listened to his theory of “cement ship superiority,” a mixture of information he had found somewhere and his own conjectures, before finally speaking: “If cement ships are really so superior, why were they later eliminated?”

“No matter how superior, they can’t be more superior than steel ships,” Si Kaide said. “But they are definitely superior to wooden ships.”

However, this was not the case. Wu De consulted several elders who had some knowledge of shipbuilding technology, and almost all of them concluded that “cement ships are not worth developing.”

The impact resistance of cement ships was very poor, whether with steel bars or wire mesh. Wire-mesh cement ships only had slightly better crack resistance than reinforced concrete ships, but it was not a revolutionary improvement. Therefore, the claim that wire-mesh cement ships were more impact-resistant than wooden ships was untenable.

The main reason for the large-scale use of wire mesh in cement ship construction was to reduce cost, not to improve performance. Cement ships had the problem of small usable volume and large deadweight, which was almost unsolvable. A large deadweight meant high fuel consumption and low cargo capacity. Therefore, cement ships were only suitable for engineering vessels and pontoons that had low deadweight requirements and were stationary or moved infrequently, or as substitutes during periods of steel shortage.

In addition, steel bars and cement, in terms of quantity, could not be compared with the relatively abundant timber resources of this era. And the quality of the wire mesh and cement produced by Lingao’s industry was still quite poor.

Ultimately, the Planning Commission shot down all proposals to build cement ships and directly listed cement ship technology as an “obsolete project.”

Under the sunset of the late 17th century, two men sat on a rock on a small hill. Their pistols hung loosely by their sides. A plastic sheet was spread out in front of them, with a box containing a few bottles of kvass, Lingao’s latest beer, and ice, as well as a few pieces of beef.

A few plainclothes agents from the Political Security Bureau were vigilantly watching the surroundings. One person was roasting a leg of lamb and some fish a little further away. Below the hill was a construction site, its area comparable to a modern shipyard in the other timeline. Ship hulls of various sizes, both under repair and under construction, were lined up along the riverbank. Occasionally, one could see gleaming iron rails, rising steam, and hear the creaking of steam cranes rotating and lifting. From time to time, a sharp whistle would sound to remind the workers to be careful.

Crowds of people wearing rattan hats of different colors were busy at work. The only drawback was that even from a distance, one could still smell some unpleasant odors. The smell of wood tar and coal tar lingered, not to mention the steam engine boilers that spewed black smoke day and night.

The shipyard far surpassed most of Lingao’s industrial projects in scale. From the first year of the five-year plan, the Planning Committee and the Planning Commission had expansion and technical renovation projects for the shipyard every year. It had already become a shipyard of considerable scale. The mangroves in the Bopu estuary area had been completely cut down, and a large area of land in the estuary belonged to the shipyard.

The shipyard had successively built a thousand-ton dry dock, a large steam crane, and several hundred-ton slipways. For the 854 Project, a large forging machine had been installed in the forging workshop to forge the keel, ribs, and iron plates.

Other supporting workshops were also built one after another. The timber consortium had built a large timber steaming kiln here to process the shipbuilding timber. The “small” timber used for the hull was treated in a drying kiln for about 3 days, which was equivalent to half a year of natural air-drying. As for the large timbers for the keel and ribs, they could be processed within half a month. However, since the implementation of the iron-framed, wood-hulled policy, the supply of large timbers had been relatively eased. High-quality timber that could be used for keels and masts was already rare along the coast of southern China at that time, and the price was very expensive.

A wood processing workshop using a full set of large-scale woodworking equipment self-made by the Lingao Machinery Factory had just been completed. The equipment inside stunned even the shipyard’s native technicians, who were used to “Australian miracles.” This huge workshop was used to process specialized planks for shipbuilding. Large pieces of timber, treated in the steaming kiln, were cut by steam-powered circular saws and gang saws. In a few minutes, they could produce a large number of ship planks and mast timbers that would take dozens of workers a whole day to cut. The cuts were smooth and neat, with almost no waste. A few days later, they witnessed the inhumanly terrifying power of these machines when an apprentice had half his body sawn off by a circular saw while operating it. From the moment he screamed to the moment he was dismembered, it took less than half a minute.

Indian jute for making ropes was shipped from Goa by Li Huamei. This jute was mixed with local hemp in the rope and cable workshop and processed into huge ropes by machine rope-makers. Although iron anchor chains were more convenient to use and more resistant to corrosion, to save iron, the anchor chains of most of Lingao’s small and medium-sized ships were still made of hemp rope. These ropes were also used for rigging.

Sailing ships required a large number of pulleys. The shipyard’s dedicated pulley production workshop had 5 workers and used simple lathes to produce 80,000 pulleys a year, although the navy and the shipyard currently couldn’t consume that many. The pulley casings were made of elm, while the hubs and axles were turned from the best hardwoods like rosewood and evergreen oak.

The sails were made from canvas self-produced in Lingao. The cotton yarn came from India. Indian merchants, as required by the Colonial and Trade Department, had the cotton yarn custom-made to the required specifications by artisans and then shipped it to Lingao in bales to be woven into canvas at the textile mills. Of course, the Colonial and Trade Department did not give up the opportunity to purchase canvas directly.

The sail-making workshop was an iron-framed shed covered with reed mats. Some roofs would be lost during the typhoon season, but as long as the wrought iron trusses were intact, it didn’t matter; they could be repaired quickly. The workshop was half the size of a football field. Dozens of specially trained female workers used semi-mechanized foot-powered sewing machines to sew the sails. However, threading the sails with ropes was still done by hand by female workers sitting on long benches.

The entire layout and setup of the shipyard were largely based on the setup of British shipyards found in the reference materials. The shipyard employed over eight hundred workers, making it one of the largest enterprises in Lingao.

“With such a large shipyard, what’s the point of not mass-producing ships? Are we keeping it as a theme park?” Wen Desi smashed the glass marble on the beer bottle, tilted his head back, and took a few big gulps, letting out a satisfied sigh.

“Finally, it tastes a bit like beer,” Wen Desi said. “Although this is a typical rice beer, I’ll make do.”

“Governor-General Ma is just a dogmatist…”

“The navy, he doesn’t understand,” Wen Desi waved his hand. “Shipbuilding, he’s even more of an amateur. Hmph, if Wu Kuangming hadn’t told him that timber could be steamed and dried, he probably would have thought it all had to be naturally dried for three years. In a place like Lingao, it wouldn’t be dry even after thirty years.”

Chen Haiyang took a sip of beer. He didn’t want to comment too much on Ma Qianzhu’s rights and wrongs. He changed the subject.

“President Wen, what’s your meaning behind suggesting we build more patrol boats?”

“Divide the sea into many areas, use small and fast boats to patrol each area, and when an enemy is found, use the radio to notify nearby warships to solve the problem, and then use dedicated transport ships to send supplies and replacements. This is our countermeasure for our current lack of resources.”

“A wolfpack on the sea.”

“Similar, but not entirely. Our goal is not to destroy the enemy as much as possible, but to absolutely control this sea. Speaking of which, both Liu Xiang and Zheng Zhilong will have to make a move against us sooner or later.”

“If only we could find Liu Xiang’s lair, we could launch a Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack,” Chen Haiyang said. “Fighting them while they’re trapped in a harbor, we would have a big advantage.”

“That’s why we need to build more light patrol boats. These boats are fast and agile, and their endurance is decent. They are excellent for reconnaissance,” Wen Desi said, squinting at the shipyard. “The people in the Executive Committee are short-sighted! They only know how to calculate how to allocate the little resources they have to cover all bases. What’s the point of talking about whether we have enough resources now? Don’t they know there’s a chance to make a fortune next year? To make that fortune, we need ships, especially large ocean-going ships!”

“What chance to make a fortune?” Chen Haiyang’s interest was piqued.

“You’ll know when the time comes.” Wen Desi was unwilling to say more. He was still considering this proposal. Of course, he was not the only elder with similar considerations. A group of people from the Great Library, in particular, were actively searching for historical materials. And the success or failure of this action was directly related to the navy’s combat power, transport capacity, and endurance.

“When I’ve thought it through, I will naturally discuss it with you,” Wen Desi said. “For now, it’s not mature.”