manynovel #176 - New requirements for industrialization
#176 - New requirements for industrialization
According to Ren Zhong's plan, the development model in the frontier outside the Great Wall would be the same as in the border region: using indigenous blast furnaces to smelt pig iron and crude steel, and then transporting it back, which would naturally be much less troublesome than transporting ore.
However, Ren Zhong lacked experience of life in the frontier. In winter, the weather was so cold that it was impossible to mine and transport materials in the wild.
The indigenous blast furnace method, in a purely natural environment, was basically impossible to operate in freezing weather.
When the problem was raised by the front line, Ren Zhong realized that he was still too lacking in common sense.
Even the neighboring border region, the Ikezhao League, was a completely different world in winter.
Faced with this thorny problem, Ren Zhong pondered for a while, shook his head, and realized that he still needed to take it a step further.
If indigenous blast furnaces wouldn't work, then he could only move towards electric furnaces, using electric furnaces for steelmaking in a factory setting, which would solve the impact of seasonal changes.
However, this would mean that the new steel plant would trigger a series of issues.
The huge source of electricity required, as electric furnace steelmaking was no small consumer of energy. Smelting iron ore to obtain molten iron required at least 5,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per ton of molten iron, and the combined smelting of molten iron into steel required more than 600 kilowatt-hours. Adding the energy consumption of various auxiliary systems, the energy consumption from iron ore to qualified steel was easily 6,000 kilowatt-hours.
In the Ikezhao League, hydropower was out of the question, as it would freeze directly into ice in winter. Only thermal power plants could be used, utilizing the abundant coal resources for power generation.
Although Ren Zhong had also provided complete data for a 30MW coal-fired generator set, there wasn't yet a generator of that size to match the boiler design. The hydropower side had just conquered the core components of a 5MW generator, which meant that the turbine now had to reduce the size of its blades to match the generator core. Not only the turbine, but also the design of the boiler system had to be significantly modified, reducing the amount of steam produced and significantly reducing the thermal power output.
Next was the coal conveying system. The subsystems of thermal power were far more numerous than those of hydropower.
Ren Zhong didn't know when he could develop this set of units.
But no matter what, he had to start developing thermal power units now.
Fortunately, there were design references. Ren Zhong selected a group of researchers from the Electricity, Mechanical Research, and Electronics Research Centers to start designing a 5MW thermal power system.
At the same time, the electric furnace steelmaking side also began to design. For this aspect, Ren Zhong found a set of steelmaking furnace designs from the late 1950s from the main world, focusing on low technology and ease of implementation.
However, there were many subsystems involved, and it was also necessary to develop a large-scale ore crushing and transmission system to reduce the large amount of manual labor in the steel plant.
Not only the system, but also the factory buildings. Ren Zhong also had to start building the factory buildings from scratch.
This could no longer be crammed into a cave dwelling. Ren Zhong referred to the steel frame houses of the main world, adopting a modular construction method with steel frames and tin roofs for partitions, in order to minimize construction time.
Currently, there were no major problems with tinplate production. With the stamping machine, the processing and forming of galvanized iron sheets had become mature.
Ren Zhong planned to build a sample modern steel plant and thermal power plant 3 kilometers outside the core area of the Dawn Research Institute. However, this would add a very conspicuous building to the ground, with factory buildings more than ten or twenty meters high, which was indeed not easy to conceal now.
Ren Zhong outlined the blueprints for the steel plant and thermal power plant, dividing them into independent tasks and assigning them. He could only ignore the safety aspect for now.
After all, Ren Zhong didn't have a good solution for the threat posed by this new change for the time being. Although the 20mm anti-aircraft gun had been successfully developed, it was not only impossible to increase production capacity in the short term, but more importantly, it was not very effective against aerial threats. Without radar early warning and computer positioning, the possibility of hitting an aircraft in the sky by manual aiming was too low.
If the Japanese pilots had a little defense and made some maneuvering evasions, it would be too difficult to rely on this kind of gun with a firing height of more than 1,000 meters on the ground.
Perhaps to solve the problem of the Japanese aircraft, the only way under the current circumstances was to strike at the root, and destroy the Japanese aircraft at the airport first!
With the mass production of basic electronic components such as permanent magnets, transistors, resistors, and capacitors, Ren Zhong's Red Star walkie-talkie and Red Star radio finally got rid of their dependence on main-world components and began mass production on a large scale.
The border region had long been looking forward to the scaling up of this product, after all, this product was too useful for controlling the battlefield.
According to the plan of the Border Region Staff Headquarters, if the walkie-talkie was popularized to the company level, the combat efficiency would be increased by at least 20%, and even more for complex terrain!
The Red Star walkie-talkie not only eliminated the backward battlefield wired telephone, but also became the eyes of the artillery, constantly amplifying the power of the ever-expanding Eighth Route Army artillery.
From the 82mm mortar to the current S41 mountain gun, they all had the ability to strike beyond the line of sight, and the newly developed 107 rocket launcher had the ultra-long-range strike capability of this era. All of these were highly dependent on the walkie-talkie.
Based on the current needs of the troops, at least a thousand Red Star walkie-talkies were needed.
Such a huge number created a demand for storage batteries that Ren Zhong couldn't meet. Currently, the self-production of lead-acid batteries in the Bright Sword world was still lacking. It had just passed laboratory preparation success, but it was clear that the production efficiency of the laboratory production model could not supply such a huge demand.
Therefore, at this stage, Ren Zhong's suggestion was to equip each walkie-talkie with two personnel, one carrying a hand-cranked generator for manual power generation, and the other for observation and reporting.
Although this increased the risk to the front-line walkie-talkie personnel, it had to be overcome. Ren Zhong returned from the main world fully loaded each time.
Necessary technical data, silver dollars, rare metals that could not be obtained in the Bright Sword world... Ren Zhong's haul had now developed into a general store, so that before each crossing, Ren Zhong had to plan his haul and confirm what he had to bring back next time.
As the business expanded, Ren Zhong was almost never free when bringing goods back each time.
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Ren Zhong's response to this was very simple: temporarily avoid any contact on the dark web.
He now used different VPNs to collect public information. Each time he connected, he used a different VPN provider, and even built his own VPN service on anonymously purchased cloud servers for multiple network transfers.
Then, after using these virtual servers for a few days, he would cancel them, trying to increase the difficulty for any suspicious opponent to track him.
However, he was now searching for early thermal power units, diesel units, and practical design data for early electrical equipment to make up for the shortcomings of the Bright Sword world's primary industrialization of electrification, and to verify and compare them with the unit designs that Ren Zhong brought back to the Bright Sword world. Just like the diesel unit that Ren Zhong brought back, even if it was designed at the level of the 1970s and 1980s, it was already far ahead of the times, and it was necessary to compare it with early designs in order to understand the context of development.
As for the 30MW thermal power unit, it was already considered a very advanced unit design in the 1940s, and the materials and manufacturing level required for the boiler, turbine, and generator were very high.
It was like giving someone at the elementary school level advanced mathematics at once. Even if the answer was given to you, you wouldn't understand it.
Traveling between two worlds was the most painful thing for Ren Zhong. Now he understood many things, but it was normal that those experts might not understand them.