After the war, the Ming army's job was to repair ships and equipment.
More than a thousand Spanish officers and soldiers were captured during this battle. After interrogation, Deng Ming found that the devil kite he designed had a very good effect, far exceeding his original imagination. Deng Ming immediately decided to carry forward this tactic - when he attacked Manila, Deng Ming felt that he should attack at night, redesign the grimace, paint it carefully, or simply draw a few more - if most of Spain After seeing the devil, the guards were busy making holy water or praying, which would definitely be of great benefit to the Ming army's attack.
Now students in Sichuan are required to study chemistry and physics. Deng Ming organized a group of people to specialize in the translation and compilation of teaching materials. All kinds of strange and novel ideas have sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain. Five years ago, out of the desire to protect inventors, Deng Ming persuaded the academy to set up a fund to support inventions and provide necessary experimental funds. A special department was also set up to review funding applications. But it didn¡¯t take long for a large number of private funds to be established. Many business houses felt that investing in promising inventions could bring huge returns. As long as one of the many investment projects was successful, investors could recover all their money. Invest in inventions and make money.
¡°After these companies share most of the required experimental funds, the Academy and Deng Ming¡¯s invention fund can invest in inventions that may be effective for a longer period of time and are unlikely to generate profits in the short term. However, even if he intends to guide, Deng Ming may not be able to get the results he wants. Take the development of steam engines, for example. After the Battle of Northern Sichuan in the fourth year of Kangxi's reign, Deng Ming described such a concept and then spent a sum of money to offer a reward for research. Then Deng Ming once again led his army to leave Sichuan in a hurry. Almost a year later, when Deng Ming returned to Sichuan, he found that there was almost no progress in this research direction.
Because Deng Ming could not draw a sketch of the steam engine, the research on the steam engine could only be explored from scratch, just like the original research on the generator. After studying the idea put forward by Deng Ming, the participants felt that this thing had no future - even if Deng Ming's idea was correct and could create a machine with huge power, how to use this power was still a big problem. Researchers believe that this huge mechanical force needs to be subdivided so that small machines can utilize it; and factories must be built around this huge steam engine, otherwise there will be countless problems that need to be solved in transmitting power over long distances.
All in all, the more researchers think about it, the more troublesome this thing becomes. However, Deng Ming's idea reminded them that by the time Deng Ming returned to Sichuan, they had already made an experimental model of a generator driven by natural gas. The transmission and utilization of electric energy are readily available, and many businesses have seen the potential value of this thing and have invested in it. By the sixth year of Kangxi's reign, Xuzhou, which was rich in natural gas, had established a power station that utilized natural gas and used high-temperature steam to drive a generator to generate electricity. As for the coal-fueled reciprocating steam engine concept proposed by Deng Ming two years ago, there is still no conceptual drawing.
As for those powerful commercial banks, their ideas are often bolder.
Now Anlesi's arms trading house is already the leading large trading house in Sichuan. The continuous introduction of new rifles and light artillery is an inexhaustible source of money for arms dealers - the trade-in operation of rifles has continued to this day. An's Arms The company has been recycling old rifles from fellow scholars and the army for many years. After exchanging new rifles for these old models that are about to be scrapped, An's Arms Trading Company gives them a new coat of paint and then sells them to militia and suppression groups in other provinces at high prices. Premier Deng's Yamen or other Manchu governors in need of arms.
Last year, Deng Ming convened arms dealers again. All arms dealers who undertook artillery orders, including Anlesi, attended the meeting. Deng Ming proposed that the imperial army needed artillery with faster firing rates, including land battle guns and naval guns. At the meeting, Deng Ming also proposed the idea of ??"rear-loading artillery shells." In order to point out the direction for arms dealers, Deng Ming even went a step further and proposed a series of concepts such as "rifling", "conical warheads", and "shell rotation". Before sending troops to Nanyang this time, Deng Ming was shocked by the idea of ??a cannon brought by Anles. The other party claimed that the power of gunpowder could not meet Deng Ming's envisioned requirements - alchemy was not advanced enough, and Anles and the others had no luck. However, Anlesi¡¯s men thought that they could consider building an electromagnetic-driven cannon, hoping to rely on coil acceleration or magnetic energy conversion to obtain a higher muzzle velocity and rate of fire than black powder muzzle-loading cannons, and even achieve the goal of Concepts such as "backloading", "taper", and "high-speed rotation of shells" were proposed by the name.
Although he was dubious about this idea, it was the arms dealer who funded the experiment anyway, and Deng Ming certainly did not object to the electromagnetic gun experiment. As long as the effect is better than that of black powder cannons and the price is affordable, Deng Ming is actually looking forward to sailing warships equipped with electromagnetic guns. When he thought of the scene of a sail battleship formation using electromagnetic guns to decide the outcome, he felt extremelyMove.
¡°More avant-garde than Anlesi¡¯s ideas is a shipyard owner named Xie Fa. He has always been the largest shipbuilder in Xuzhou and was one of the first people to land on Chongming Island and start building a shipyard there. A few years ago, although Xie Fa designed and tried to build a European-style sailing warship in accordance with Deng Ming's requirements, Deng Ming knew that this man's ambition was immeasurable. An alternative ship designer named Wang Xiaopeng funded by Shipowner Jie once described the "concept" of a turret to Deng Ming - Deng Ming was very sure he was talking about a turret, and it was electric.
In addition to the turret, Wang Xiaopeng also envisioned installing a power system on the ship. This also came from Deng Ming's creativity. After the concept of steam engine was rejected, Deng Ming came up with the concept of internal combustion engine. Although it is just a concept, Deng Ming said that if it succeeds, it can provide power to ships, and sailing in the future will not need to rely entirely on wind power. Deng Ming also proposed the two ideas of paddle wheels and propellers. However, designer Wang Xiaopeng asserted to Xie Fa that Deng Ming's idea was not feasible. He believed that if it was a paddle wheel design, it would be easily hit on the battlefield and lose combat effectiveness. Even if it encounters a storm, the ship may lose power. But if it was the propeller Deng Ming was talking about, Wang Xiaopeng believed that sealing and power transmission would be huge troubles. Therefore, the alternative solution proposed by Wang Xiaopeng is to design a vitality (energy) core for the ship, which is a generator, and then rely on wires to transport the vitality to the propeller or turret.
After learning about Anlesi's electromagnetic gun design, Wang Xiaopeng came to see Deng Ming again and further improved his design concept for a new generation of battleship: driven by the central vitality core, the battleship can be equipped with several electric engines, and there are One or several rotatable electric turrets equipped with electromagnetic guns and a central electro-energy core can solve all the needs of future warship navigation systems and weapon systems.
Deng Ming didn't know the principle of the electromagnetic gun. Although he didn't have much hope for Anlesi, he still had some hope in his heart - in his previous life, chemical energy weapons had a great first-mover advantage. Once electromagnetic weapons appeared, they needed to be very mature. chemical energy weapons competition. The competitor of Anlesi's primitive electromagnetic energy weapons is primitive chemical energy weapons-because Deng Ming is very looking forward to seeing the emergence of sail battleships equipped with electromagnetic cannons, so he always comforts himself this way. However, listening to Wang Xiaopeng's enthusiastic explanation of his idea, and looking at Boss Xie Fajie who kept smiling next to him, Deng Ming felt that the three of them had little chance to see this kind of device equipped with a fuel generator and an electric motor. An epoch-making warship with an engine, electric turret and electromagnetic cannon was launched.
What is particularly interesting to Deng Ming is that Wang Xiaopeng's warship design still uses a wooden structure - because of the impact of soft sails, hard sails have been ignored by people, which makes it possible for the propeller concept to be accepted; and the application of electricity, coupled with Wang Xiaopeng has never seen an internal combustion engine, so he can naturally abandon the illusory internal combustion engine and adopt an electric engine design; as for the weapon system, the European side gun window design has only been exposed for a long time, and Wang Xiaopeng also feels that electromagnetic cannons and black powder front chambers Cannons were all viable options. Since electromagnetic guns were more harmonious with his overall thinking, he naturally chose the former; but ships must be made of wood, which was still a deep-rooted thought among people. When Deng Ming casually asked if metal could be used to make a ship hull, Wang Xiaopeng subconsciously objected at first, thinking it was absolutely impossible. Then after pondering for a while, he asked Deng Ming: "Even if iron can be used to make a ship, an iron ship It's so heavy, it must sink, right? If a ship is made of wood, and if something happens to the ship, the sailor can hold a piece of wood and float to the sea to wait for rescue, but if a ship made of iron is like something, what should the sailor hold?"
Anyway, just like the situation at Anlesi, Wang Xiaopeng¡¯s design studio is not maintained by Deng Ming, so Deng Ming does not interfere with whether the other party insists on using wood to build his electric battleship.
Nowadays, most of the projects supported by Deng Ming¡¯s funds are meaningless in the eyes of others. One of the most typical projects is the electric abacus project. The reason is that the tax bureau has an accountant named Guang Huapeng. He feels that the government now needs The numbers being calculated are getting larger and more complex, and the traditional abacus seems inadequate. Especially when performing some huge multiplication calculations, each step requires manual manipulation of the abacus. Once a small mistake is made, all previous efforts will be wasted. Therefore, the tax collector wanted to create a more useful calculation tool that does not require manual input of each step. It is best to enter the numbers into the abacus, and the abacus can directly give the result.
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????: Use electricity to drive the abacus to calculate by itself, and people only need to be responsible for inputting and reading the results. But this idea is simple to think of, but extremely difficult to realize. Most people can understand and control the five-digit system of the abacus, but it is extremely difficult to let the machine operate by itself; later Guang Huapeng and several of his My companions reduced it again and again, and found that only by using binary, there was little possibility of execution. Translate decimal to binary comparable to fiveThe hexadecimal system is much more troublesome. By now Guang Huapeng's companions have understood that designing such a machine may be more laborious than using an abacus to calculate and check it ten times. Therefore, except for Guang Huapeng, everyone else give up.
After learning about this, Deng Ming quickly included the electric abacus in his invention fund support project. In the past two years, it not only made Guang Huapeng worry-free about food and clothing, but also provided him with all the experimental funds he needed. Guang Huapeng himself backed down last year because he found after calculations that even if the human brain is relied on to translate the binary that the machine can recognize, at least thousands of parts are still needed for the machine to be able to calculate it. This design originated from the abacus, so it also carries many of the genetic characteristics of the abacus. Hua Guangpeng naturally chose the same physical information carrier as the abacus. At first, he even planned to use wooden parts similar to abacus beads. It took a long time before I made up my mind to change to iron. Later, in order to further improve the strength, I had to apply to Deng Ming for the use of all-steel parts; the huge machine required precise control, and a slight negligence would lead to failure. And even if it succeeded, the electric abacus might not be used a few times, and the inside Parts will wear out and become scrapped, and most likely they won't be able to move at all.
In short, this kind of electric abacus seems to have no future or benefit at all. Even if it succeeds, the investment and harvest will not be proportional at all. However, Deng Ming still encouraged Guang Huapeng to continue his research and continued to provide experimental funds. Once while having dinner with Qin Xiucai, Deng Ming also mentioned that even if the abacus takes five or six years to make, even if it can only be run once, and even if it can only correctly calculate addition, subtraction, multiplication and division within a hundred, he They all think it is of great significance.
When the Imperial Navy was resting in the Babuyan Strait, Deng Ming couldn't help but think about the electric abacus that he strongly supported. Now Guang Huapeng has moved to Wuyi Pavilion and concentrates on studying his machinery. At first, Guang Huapeng wanted to use the concavities and convexities of wood to represent ones and zeros, but soon found that the original wooden parts were completely inadequate, and now they have been changed to all-steel ones - which are extremely expensive. Deng Ming felt that even with the most expensive steel components, Guang Huapeng's design would not be successful because the machinery was too complex. Deng Ming once went to see it and felt his head was spinning. He saw that no matter how much lubricating oil Guang Huapeng and his hired assistants applied to the parts, they could not guarantee the normal operation of the machinery-not to mention that Sichuan could not do it now. , even in the titanium alloy and high-precision era of the previous life, it should not be easy to make such a complicated abacus run at high speed.
¡°However, Deng Ming doesn¡¯t mind if Guang Huapeng continues to run into obstacles, and will continue to provide him with funding as always. In order to reduce the difficulty, Guang Huapeng has lowered the initial target of several million times several million to the current target of several hundred times several hundred, trying hard to make the machine run successfully at least once and give Deng Ming an explanation for his investment. Deng Ming comforted him, saying that their research was of great significance to Sichuan's machinery manufacturing. In fact, this was true, but in this experiment, Deng Ming was not most concerned about this, and Guang Huapeng also felt extremely uneasy. Every day They are all racking their brains to think of a good way to make the machinery operate.
Before Deng Ming left Sichuan, Guang Huapeng told Deng Ming that he and his assistants planned to adopt a new plan, which was to energize and de-energize the steel parts representing one and zero respectively, so that they could move separately rather than unify. Drive - Although Deng Ming greatly praised it, he felt that with Sichuan's current mechanical level and electric engine level, this plan had absolutely no chance of success, and it would not be possible to see the dawn of success within a few years. Even if Guang Huapeng lowers the goal to one hundred times one hundredif they can really do it, Deng Ming will continue to invest in them to try to build computers that can calculate a larger amount.
But this is still a good start. Now Guanghuapeng has begun to associate the status of zero and one with whether it is powered or not. Maybe in a few more years, the electric abacus research team will have an idea and realize that there is no need to use steel at all. The concave and convex parts of the manufactured parts are used as a carrier of information - maybe this inspiration will appear tomorrow, maybe Guanghuapeng will hit the wall for another ten years and still not find a way out, but sooner or later, the unfeasible electric abacus will evolve towards the electronic abacus. , abandoning the complex mechanical structure to obtain higher computing speed and feasibility.
Thinking about computers and information warfare in the age of the flintlock gun, or thinking that one day people in this world will use computers to develop more efficient black powder weapons and muzzleloader guns instead of jet fighters, Deng Ming There was an inexplicable sense of excitement. This scene made Deng Ming more excited and fascinated than the wooden warships with sails blasted by electromagnetic guns.
"What if after the battle, the cavalrymen put their blood-stained sabers and muzzleloaders back into their scabbards and holsters, and then they all took out their smartphones with LCD screens and called home to report to their wives and children that they were safe, or simply to Video" Deng Ming imagined a scenario in his mind: "Maybe one day the networked camera system will be used to help the mounted police hunt down the gangsters who robbed the wooden cash transport trucks; useThe ?? star detects whether the enemy has secretly developed a muzzleloader fortress gun exceeding one hundred pounds That would be a fantastic new world. "The technology tree of this world is already crooked, so let's make it crooked more violently.
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On June 10, the Ming army completed simple repair work on most of the warships. The imperial fleet once again set sail and crossed the Babuyan Strait into the western waters of the Philippines, heading towards Manila.
Before sending troops this time, for reasons of confidentiality, Deng Ming did not make it clear about the Chinese colonization mission in the Philippines, but now there is no reason to continue to hide it. After the naval battle, the Ming army sent a large number of ships to contact the colonization groups in various places, asking them to make all preparations to assist the imperial army in combat.
In addition to these colonization groups, there are also a large number of Chinese in the Philippines. Some of them have lived in Nanyang for twenty generations, about hundreds of years. Their ancestors immigrated to Luzon as early as the Yuan Dynasty or even the late Song Dynasty; other Chinese are mostly Most of the ancestors of those who came to Nanyang in the past hundred years were fishermen and farmers from Fujian and Guangdong. They went to sea because they were poor, had no land, or could not bear the heavy taxes. Now many of them are successful businessmen, or He is the owner of a small estate.
After the colonization regiments appeared in the Philippines, most of these old expats did not go there because in order to avoid the violent reaction of the Spaniards, the colonization regiments generally chose to settle in relatively remote places, and most of the old expat areas were still under Spanish rule. Down.
While asking the colonization regiments to send armed forces to prepare to help the imperial army take over the city, Deng Ming also ordered to write to the expatriate chambers of commerce in various cities, asking them to prepare to send representatives to meet with the imperial prime minister - the Spanish rule was about to end, and the empire The government designed a new future for the Philippines. As the expatriates who have the most affection for the empire and the most trust from the imperial government, they need to know these plans and assist the colonization groups to better control large areas of sea and land.