Chapter 107 - The H-800 Type

“This is our designed H-800 type, which, as the name suggests, is an 800-ton ship. It is a pure sailing vessel with three masts and a Chinese-style sail rig.”

Shi Jiantao continued his introduction:

The H-800A had one mast removed, becoming a two-masted ship. A small boiler was added to the stern to drive a steam winch. The H-800A1 removed the boiler again and mounted a cannon on both the fore and aft decks. The H-800S was a steam-sail hybrid…

If classified by function, there were also different subtypes such as bulk carriers for agricultural and mineral products, liquid transport ships, standard cargo ships, and mixed passenger-cargo ships. The design followed a modular concept for easy modification and repair.

“Besides the most common H-800 series, there are also the H-500, H-1300, H-2000…” Shi Jiantao said as he placed the full series ship model manual for the Harmony-class, compiled by the Hong Kong shipyard, on Wu De’s desk. Each ship type had beautifully drawn line drawings, renderings, and technical parameters. This immediately caught Wu De’s attention.

He carefully flipped through the booklet. If they could really mass-produce transport ships like “launching dumplings,” as Shi Jiantao boasted, the Planning Department’s most pressing problem of transport capacity allocation would be greatly alleviated.

Wu De, having been a fisherman and served in the navy for many years, knew a little about shipbuilding. He saw that the common feature of these Harmony-class ships was the use of the same basic hull form. Many of them also had the same hull cross-section, which was convenient for standardized production, just as the A320, A319, and A321 airliners in this world only differed in length and had slightly different engine power.

The hull of the first-generation Harmony-class ships was designed based on a type of small wooden cargo ship built by Japan in the late stages of World War II. In the mid-stage of World War II, American submarines advanced into the Western Pacific and attacked Japanese merchant ships. In contrast to the British, who faced the U-boat threat by consolidating their merchant ships into escorted convoys, the Japanese broke up their fleets into smaller units. They built tens of thousands of wooden transport ships and scattered them across the ocean for the Americans to hunt.

Although most of these wooden ships were later shattered by American Catalina patrol planes and carrier-based aircraft, by the standards of Lin’gao’s industrial base, this was still a design with good practicality, craftsmanship, seaworthiness, and damage resistance. Moreover, the operating environment was the sea area between Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, and the cargo to be transported was also largely similar.

Of course, the Harmony-class ships designed by Shi Jiantao and his team were not exact copies of the Japanese design. Considering that there were almost no qualified ports and docks in this era, and the estuaries and bays used as ports often had shoals and hidden reefs, the ships’ draft could not be too deep. The ships they needed at present were mainly for coastal transport, with the furthest destinations being the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, Siam, and Japan. The ship type adopted a wide, flat-bottomed, shallow-draft design—similar in concept to the “flyboats” widely used by the Dutch on their trade routes. While striving to carry more cargo, they tried to minimize the draft to make maximum use of natural harbors and to be easily refloated in case of grounding.

In terms of power, as “Class B shipbuilding,” Shi Jiantao was well aware that the Hong Kong shipyard would not be allocated high-end items like high-horsepower marine steam engines and fire-tube boilers. The power source used by the Japanese back then was mainly the “hot-bulb engine.” Lin’gao currently could neither produce diesel engines nor had diesel fuel. Therefore, Shi Jiantao chose sails as the power source for the Harmony-class ships.

Considering that the Harmony-class ships would mainly be used in the Zhejiang and Dengzhou operations for some time, and also for some coastal trade, they still adopted the Chinese-style sails, which were more efficient for coastal navigation and required less manpower.

However, the “Chinese-style sails” used on the Harmony-class ships were designed according to the drawings provided by the Elder society “Junk Association.” These designs were actually based on the accumulated experience of British and American Chinese junk enthusiasts from the 20th century, combined with modern aerodynamics and structural mechanics, using canvas, winches, blocks, pulley systems, and modern craftsmanship. They had also undergone simple wind tunnel tests, making them more reliable, maneuverable, and efficient than traditional Chinese sails.

Shi Jiantao had found several books written by Westerners on the research and design of Chinese sails in Lin’gao. He had originally wanted to set up a dedicated sail laboratory in Hong Kong, but this was met with clear opposition from the Great Library, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Navy. The sail laboratory had to be located in Lin’gao. According to a resolution of the Council of Elders, no research and development departments involving technology were to be located outside of Hainan Island.

However, the Lin’gao shipyard, led by Zhou Ke, had no interest in setting up a sail laboratory. Although Zhou Ke was completely ignorant about sails, he was full of admiration for European rigs and scornful of junk rigs. Naturally, he would not be willing to take the lead in establishing a sail laboratory. Shi Jiantao went around looking for people and eventually found the Ministry of Science and Technology. The ministry had a central fluid dynamics laboratory in the Gaoshanling area, and in their view, a sail laboratory was essentially a wind tunnel laboratory.

Finally, based on the test results from the fluid dynamics laboratory, Shi Jiantao chose a suitable Chinese-style sail rig as the sail type for the Harmony-class ships.

Shi Jiantao used the opportunity of returning to Lin’gao to promote the Harmony-class ships to perfect the design of the Harmony-class ships and their Chinese-style sail rigs and control systems. With a full set of drawings and technical data prepared, Shi Jiantao was full of confidence, just waiting for the final approval from the Planning Department.

Although the Harmony-class ships followed the guiding principle of simple structure, their specific design and construction incorporated various new technologies promoted by the Transmigration Group in this era: iron keels and ribs, power-assisted manual steering wheels, improved Chinese-style sail rigs, hand-cranked winches… They also used a material that they had previously only used in the construction industry: “iron-clad wood structural material.” That is, for certain load-bearing structural members that previously required larger and harder wood, after using the “iron-clad wood” structure, they could be spliced together from multiple pieces of wood, or some lower-grade wood could be used. The iron skin could provide extremely high tensile strength. This iron-clad wood material was a very common building and shipbuilding material in the old world in the United States, Germany, Northern Europe, and Russia. Iron-clad wooden I-beams had also been widely used in the buildings of the Lin’gao General Construction Company. They were once criticized by the Lin’gao Times as “shoddy work of the new era,” until the architects of the General Construction Company stormed the newspaper office and gave Dingding a “loving popular science lesson,” which finally cleared their name.

“How long is the construction period for your ships?” Wu De asked after reading the booklet and technical data.

“For the standard H-800 type, if all the parts are manufactured, it will take no more than 60 days from assembly to launching and putting into use. It will be faster with more experience in the future; the final assembly time will not be more than 30 days.” Shi Jiantao had specifically gone to the Lin’gao shipyard to observe the construction process of the 901 project ships, which were claimed to be ready for use in 90 days. He believed that according to his plan, it would not be a problem to complete the final assembly and launching of a standard Harmony-class ship in 60 days.

“So where do you plan to produce these parts?” Wu De asked. He knew the production concept of the Harmony-class ships: the parts were manufactured in various branch factories and only assembled in Hong Kong. The claim of 60 days for construction was probably an understatement.

But in the 20th-century United States, this was possible—the Americans had the largest and most complete industrial system at the time. Although Lin’gao also had the largest and most complete industrial system in the world in this era, it was simply impossible to provide such a large production capacity.

Currently, the production tasks of the various factories in Lin’gao were already at full capacity, especially the main supplier of raw materials for wooden boat building: the timber processing plant. Their ship timber production line was already operating on a 24-hour shift basis, and it was unlikely that they could provide raw materials for the Hong Kong shipyard. It was clear that Shi Jiantao could only rely on Hong Kong’s own timber processing plant. But this factory was weak in both production capacity and technical level.

“I plan to use the local production capacity of Guangdong,” Shi Jiantao finally revealed his plan.

The first phase of the Hong Kong shipyard did not have a full set of supporting enterprises for parts. Apart from a timber processing plant, which was a major supporting facility, all metal parts, ropes, canvas, putty, grease, and paint had to be supplied by Lin’gao. Shi Jiantao’s plan was to gradually increase the proportion of parts supplied locally from Guangdong. Raw materials that did not require much processing or were difficult to process would be sourced locally from Guangdong first—for example, the putty used for filling, which was nothing more than lime, hemp fibers, and tung oil, could be completely outsourced for manufacturing in Guangdong. As for spare parts, they would start with the wooden structural components of the Harmony-class ships and have the local shipbuilding workshops in Guangdong provide them.

But this was not an easy task. Shi Jiantao conducted on-site inspections of several shipbuilding workshops near Whampoa and was almost disheartened after seeing the crude tools and components.

However, after carefully observing their construction process, Shi Jiantao found that although the shipwrights’ work was very rough and they had no drawings, they built ships strictly according to a certain pattern. The ships they built followed several standard ship types.

Obviously, patterned shipbuilding was not an alien technology to them but had long existed. It should not be difficult for them to mass-produce the same component. According to the Common Native Ship Types of the Guangdong Coast, compiled from information collected by the Foreign Intelligence Bureau, there were only seven or eight models of ships over 100 tons. The hull structures of the same model were almost identical.

But subsequent in-depth observation threw cold water on him again: the tolerances of the various ship parts made by the shipwrights were frighteningly large—or rather, they had no concept of tolerance in their eyes.

Of course, given the crudeness of the tools they used and their lack of a concept of specific numerical dimensions—it was all in their heads—it was impossible for them to mass-produce parts within acceptable tolerances.