Chapter 880 - Model H-800

"This is our H-800 design. As the name suggests, it's an 800-ton vessel—a pure sailing ship with three masts utilizing Chinese-style rigging."

Shi Jiantao continued his presentation:

"The H-800A removes one mast to become a two-masted ship, with a small boiler installed at the stern to power a steam winch. The H-800A1 strips out the boiler and mounts cannons on both fore and aft decks. The H-800S is a steam-sail hybrid..."

Functionally, the vessels could be further divided into subtypes: specialized agricultural and mineral bulk carriers, liquid transport ships, standard cargo vessels, and mixed passenger-cargo ships. The design implemented modular concepts, facilitating both modification and repair.

"Beyond the most common H-800 series, we also have H-500, H-1300, and H-2000..." As Shi Jiantao spoke, he placed the complete Harmony Wheel series manual compiled by Hong Kong Shipyard on Wu De's desk. Each ship type featured beautifully rendered line diagrams, color illustrations, and technical specifications. This immediately captured Wu De's attention.

He leafed through the album carefully. If they could truly mass-produce transport ships like "dropping dumplings" as Shi Jiantao claimed, the Planning Commission's greatest headache—transport capacity allocation—would be substantially alleviated.

Wu De came from a fishing background and had served many years in the navy, lending him modest shipbuilding knowledge. He observed that these Harmony Wheels shared a common basic hull form, with many featuring identical hull cross-sections—ideally suited for standardized production. The concept resembled how the A320, A319, and A321 airliners in the original timeline were essentially the same aircraft with different fuselage lengths and slight engine power variations.

The first-generation Harmony Wheel hull was designed based on a small wooden cargo ship type built by Japan at the end of World War II. During the mid-war period, American submarines had pushed into the Western Pacific, systematically attacking Japanese merchant ships. Unlike Britain, which grouped merchant vessels into convoys to counter the U-boat threat—consolidating scattered assets—Japan fragmented its fleet, constructing tens of thousands of wooden transport ships to scatter across the ocean, forcing Americans to hunt them down piecemeal.

Though most of these wooden ships ultimately fell victim to American Catalina patrol planes and carrier-based aircraft, by Lingao's industrial standards, this remained a design of excellent practicality, manufacturability, seaworthiness, and damage resistance. Moreover, the operating environment was identical: the same waters stretching from Southeast Asia and China to Japan, carrying largely similar cargo.

Of course, the Harmony Wheel Shi Jiantao and his team developed wasn't a direct copy of the Japanese design. Considering that this time-space possessed almost no qualified ports and docks, and most river mouths and bays serving as harbors featured shoals and hidden sandbars, ship draft couldn't be too deep. The vessels they currently needed were primarily for coastal transport, reaching at furthest the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, Siam, and Japan. The hull form adopted was wide, flat-bottomed, and shallow-draft—similar in effect to the "flyboats" the Dutch used extensively on their routes. While striving to maximize cargo capacity, they minimized draft depth to maximize use of natural harbors and ensure easy refloating in case of grounding.

Regarding propulsion, Shi Jiantao understood that as "Class B Shipbuilding," Hong Kong Shipyard couldn't be allocated premium items like high-horsepower marine steam engines and fire-tube boilers. The Japanese had primarily used "hot bulb diesel engines," but Lingao currently could neither manufacture diesel engines nor had access to diesel fuel. Thus, the power source Shi Jiantao selected for the Harmony Wheel remained sails.

Considering that for some time to come, Harmony Wheels would mainly serve the Zhejiang and Dengzhou operations, plus incidental coastal trade, they adopted Chinese-style sails—more efficient for coastal sailing and less demanding on manpower.

However, the "Chinese-style sails" employed on the Harmony Wheel were designed according to blueprints provided by the elder club "Junk Rig Association." These designs actually derived from decades of accumulated experience by 20th-century Anglo-American junk rig enthusiasts, combined with modern aerodynamics and structural mechanics. They incorporated canvas, winches, blocks, pulley systems, and modern craftsmanship, and had undergone simple wind tunnel testing. Their reliability, maneuverability, and efficiency exceeded those of traditional Chinese sails.

Shi Jiantao had discovered several specialized European and American research studies on Chinese sails in Lingao. Originally, he had wanted to establish a dedicated sail laboratory in Hong Kong, but met explicit opposition from the Grand Library, Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Navy: the sail laboratory must be located in Lingao. According to Elder Council resolution, any research department involving technological development could not be situated outside Hainan Island.

However, Zhou Ke, who oversaw Lingao Shipyard, showed no interest in establishing a sail laboratory. Though completely ignorant about sails, Zhou Ke worshipped European rigging and sneered at junk rigs. Naturally, he was unwilling to lead any sail laboratory. Shi Jiantao searched high and low until he found the Ministry of Technology. The Ministry housed a Central Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the Gaoshanling area; from their perspective, a sail laboratory was essentially a wind tunnel laboratory.

Ultimately, based on the Fluid Dynamics Lab's test results, Shi Jiantao selected an appropriate Chinese sail rig as the Harmony Wheel's standard configuration.

Shi Jiantao seized the opportunity of his return to Lingao to promote the Harmony Wheel, perfecting the design of the ship, Chinese rig, and control systems. Armed with a complete set of blueprints and process data, Shi Jiantao brimmed with ambition, awaiting only the Planning Commission's final approval.

Though the Harmony Wheel followed guiding principles of structural simplicity, its specific design and construction concentrated various new technologies the Transmigration Group was promoting in this time-space: iron keels and ribs, assisted manual steering wheels, improved Chinese rigging, hand-cranked winches—it even utilized an "iron-clad wood structural material" they had previously employed only in construction. For certain structural members bearing high loads that traditionally required large, dense timbers, the "iron-clad wood" structure allowed splicing multiple pieces of wood together or using inferior wood types. The iron sheet provided extremely high tensile strength. This iron-clad wood material was common building and ship material in old time-space America, Germany, Northern Europe, and Russia. Lingao's Construction General Company had also extensively used iron-clad wood I-beams in buildings. The technique was once criticized by the Lingao Times as "new time-space tofu-dreg construction," until a group of architects from the Construction General Company stormed into the newspaper office and gave Dingding a "loving science education," finally restoring its reputation.

"What's the construction cycle for your ships?" Wu De asked after finishing the album and technical data.

"For the H-800 standard model, if all parts are manufactured, assembly to launch and commissioning won't exceed sixty days. With increasing proficiency, it will accelerate further—final assembly time won't exceed thirty days." Shi Jiantao had specifically visited Lingao Shipyard during this trip to observe the construction process of Project 901 ships, which claimed readiness in ninety days. He was confident that following his approach, completing final assembly and launching a standard Harmony Wheel in sixty days was entirely achievable.

"Then where do you plan to manufacture these parts?" Wu De inquired. He understood the Harmony Wheel production concept: components manufactured in satellite factories everywhere, with Hong Kong handling only final assembly. Claiming sixty days to complete construction probably already concealed some buffer time.

But in 20th-century America, this had been possible—Americans possessed the largest, most complete industrial system of their era. Though Lingao in this time-space also commanded the world's largest and most complete industrial system, it simply couldn't provide such massive production capacity.

Currently, production tasks at Lingao's various factories were already at full load—especially the main raw material supplier for wooden ships: the Wood Processing Plant. Their ship timber production line was already running twenty-four-hour shifts; supplying raw materials for Hong Kong Shipyard was highly unlikely. Clearly, Shi Jiantao could only rely on Hong Kong's own timber processing plant. But that facility was severely limited in both capacity and technical level.

"I plan to leverage local Cantonese capacity," Shi Jiantao finally revealed his strategy.

Hong Kong Shipyard's Phase I project lacked a complete ecosystem of parts-supporting enterprises. Aside from a timber processing plant as the major supporting facility, all varieties of metal parts, cables, canvas, putty, grease, and paint depended entirely on Lingao supply. Shi Jiantao's calculation was to gradually expand the local Guangdong parts supply ratio. Raw materials requiring low processing difficulty or minimal processing would be procured locally from Guangdong first—for example, filling putty was merely lime, hemp fiber, and tung oil, entirely outsourceable to Guangdong for manufacture. For parts, beginning with the Harmony Wheel's wooden structural components, local Guangdong shipbuilding workshops would provide support.

But this was no simple undertaking. Shi Jiantao had conducted field visits to several shipbuilding workshops near Huangpu. Upon seeing the crude tools and rough components, his heart had nearly sunk.

However, after carefully observing their construction process, Shi Jiantao discovered that although the shipwrights' work was primitive and they possessed no blueprints, they built ships strictly according to established patterns. The vessels they constructed followed several standard types.

Clearly, modular ship manufacturing wasn't alien technology to them, but something that had existed for generations. Requesting that they mass-produce identical components shouldn't prove difficult. According to Common Indigenous Ship Types of the Guangdong Coast, compiled by the External Intelligence Bureau, ships exceeding 100 tons came in only seven or eight varieties. Hull structures between same-model ships were virtually identical.

But subsequent in-depth observation poured cold water on his optimism: the tolerances of various ship parts manufactured by the shipwrights were alarmingly large—or rather, in their understanding, the concept of tolerance didn't exist.

Given the crude tools they employed and the absence of specific numerical dimension concepts—everything residing in their heads—manufacturing parts within allowable tolerances at scale was simply impossible.