Chapter 470 (1/2)

Release that Witch Er Mu 30550K 2022-07-20

Chapter 470: The New Warship

Translator: TransN Editor: TransN

As Roland walked up to the path leading to the North Slope Mountain, Nightingale’s remarks were still ringing in his ears.

He was suddenly enlightened. “That’s right,” he thought. “I’m no longer just a regular man who only interacts with blueprints all day, and this is no longer the world I used to live in. Now, I’m a lord of a great territory, and I might become a king one day, so if my situation ever changes, I can’t use my old approaches to hold myself back.”

“I just have to follow my heart,” he told himself. “If I force anything because of some insignificant ‘principles’, it could only result in continuing to hurt Anna and Nightingale.”

At this thought, Roland felt a weight had been lifted off his heart. He inhaled deeply and pushed open the backyard door.

Opening the steel door was just like opening his heart and he instantly saw a whole new world.

“Oh… Here comes His Highness!” Hummingbird and Lucia ran up to greet him.

“You’re here.” Anna smiled sweetly. Roland saw a faint red mark on her pale neck and couldn’t help but recall the passionate scene last night. However, since he already made his decision, he didn’t mind waiting a little bit more.

“Have you completed the model?”

“Of course.” Anna made a beckoning motion. When the two walked out of the yard, they saw a steel boat floating in the middle of a pond surrounded by snow. The steel boat was about one meter long and twenty centimeters wide, seeming much slimmer than those unwieldy concrete boats. The bow had a distinct thin point, its stern was flat, and the unique part of it was that the hull was covered with overlapping supporting bars as if it were pieced together with thousands of squares.

“This is exactly what I wanted,” Roland exclaimed. Compared to the concrete boats that were poured into steel molds, the pure steel boat had a unique delicateness, and the overlapping bars made it look like a work of art. He knew that every piece of this model was cut with Blackfire according to shrunken proportions, without a single junction missing. If this model were brought to the modern world, it would be worth tens of thousands yuan.

“Is this the new kind of boat you want to build?”

“Yes.” Roland nodded. “It’s also the town’s first regular warship.”

Originally, Roland planned to use the concrete boats as shallow water gunboats, but he realized that if the steam engines didn’t provide enough power, the concrete boats would be too slow. Even when only carrying fuel and crew, the fleet’s average speed during the journey to Longsong Stronghold was only eight to nine kilometers per hour. If the boats also had to carry 152 millimeters Stronghold Cannon, gunpowder, and other weapons, their speed could drop to as low as five kilometers. This was equivalent to even less than three knots per hour. This was due to the big dead weight of concrete, which wasn’t an issue in simple supply transport, but it was an undesirable feature in warships.

If the town was still suffering from a lack of steel like it was two months ago, Roland would have to put up with this flaw. However, with the production of Star of Steel, the current amount of steel inventory was enough to build a true steel-clad warship. Roland chose the simplest technique of module assembly, which meant soldering pieces of steel boards together with beams to form a large hollow unit, and then connecting these units together to form the hull bottom. This piecing method eliminated the traditional need for a keel, and since the enemy did not have any cannons, he did not worry about defense mechanisms. The sides of the hull were made almost entirely of thin steel plates, thus minimizing the cost and dead weight.

As for the propulsion, Roland decided to use the propeller technology instead of a paddle wheel. The power still came from a steam engine that turned the two propellers by rotating gears. In the blueprint he gave Anna, he also left room for it to be remodeled as a triple-expansion steam engine since he planned to invent a new type of steam engine more suited for boats when he began mass-producing the steel boats.

When they returned to the backyard, Anna began to cut the first steel plate.