I've been working with two construction teams and the mechanical team to get the nitrocellulose pnt built over the st 3 months. Three construction teams are working with many of our craftsdemons getting the nitroglycerin pnt back up to full production as well. Thankfully, other than exactly two steps in this whole smokeless powder process, we've done all of this before. From making pulp to forming pellets, we've done it. The only steps that I've had to really tinker with have been the scaled up nitrocellulose reactors, and the ether mixing and recovery sections.
There have been a few stretches where I haven't been needed during construction, and have started doing work on shipbuilding methods and designs. The good news is that certain techniques that I wasn't looking forward to trying to remake are known to dwarves, like riveting metals together. There are a few other hurdles we'll need to cross when it comes to the full design of these ships. I say ships plural, because ideally these ships, while designed to be combat ready to a degree, will function as merchant vessels in the future.
The main idea with any steel ship is that you want to develop a production line to produce them repeatedly. For an isnd like ours, we can't really afford to produce multiple different kinds of ships, just getting one working design will have to st us at least a decade, possibly longer. We also don't have a rge enough popution to operate or construct a rge number of ships, so that's something else to consider. The upshot of any design we come up with is that it should be so advanced compared to any other ship I've seen that it really shouldn't matter. There are many design problems we'll have to solve along the way, but we actually have almost all of the basic techniques figured out.
We've started producing smokeless powder after 2 months of startup troubleshooting. The most upsetting problem we actually have is that we don't have any sort of stable bullet primer materials, meaning that firing any artillery we make still requires an ignition source. If we had primers, then guns and artillery could operate at significantly faster paces than we're currently limited to. The smokeless powder is so much more powerful than bck powder that we have to redesign our artillery pieces and shells to handle the higher compression. That also would mean retiring our old pieces alongside their shells. Since I also want to make rger naval guns for our ship, that's actually not too much of a problem. Ultimately, it should be an improvement all around. If we can double or triple our range, it'll make us that much more effective.
I've transitioned to ship design now as well, and I'd say it'll be about a year, maybe a bit less, until the sea around our isnd is actually safe to travel. I doubt we can actually assemble the kind of ship I have in mind by that time, but that's fine, since the pn is to retake our other isnds with smaller boats that can easily reach the shoreline. Any rger ship I build is going to require a port to actually load or unload, though the cannons would probably be useful for attacking the beaches.
The current project that I have two construction teams working on is a drydock designed to handle what I have in mind, along with expanding our existing lock system to better handle rge ships. For the drydock, I'm having them build out the area a little bit above the high-tide mark, and they're digging out and reinforcing a unching area so that when high tide comes, there is about 40 feet of water to lower the boat into directly. This involves digging a channel all the way out to the low tide mark at that depth to ensure that the ship can actually make it to sea.
I did some basic weight calcutions and some dispcement measurements, and I've settled on a basic idea for our first ship, though I'll need to do some research into the actual feasibility of such a thing. I'm aiming for the ship to be 350 feet long by 50 feet wide at the widest point. Such a ship would outcss even the capitol ship that Rathnd brought to attack us, and should be able to haul a few hundred tons of cargo for trade even with a few sets of artillery cannons.
The st four months have been very busy. The first thing I went to go do before I started thoroughly drafting designs for a ship was to go an inspect the roller mill we'd made to make foil and steel pte. I ended up making a few adjustments to some of the machines to allow a more robust production. Then I spent about two months coming up with an I-beam production system. The remaining time was mostly spent on the various smaller necessary components like rivet production, fin ptes, and various machining tools to help with processing.
One of the big things that I've had to do was develop a hardened steel. I've had to get stoneshapers to start recovering more of the crystal material. Whether it's chrome, molybdenum, or tungsten, at about 5% alloy with steel, the sorts of bits and bdes we make easily cut through the regur steel we've made for ptes. That's been vitally important as we needed something capable of reliably being used for further machining. I feel bad about utilizing crystal material for this, but it needed to be done. We've been very careful to recover any broken bits or bdes for recycling, since it's so valuable.
After I'd made sure that I had almost everything we'd need to make a steel boat, I started the actual drafting of the design in earnest. There are a few important things to consider when making a boat. Arguably, the two most important are the center of buoyancy and the center of mass. The best hull designs generally use an inverted bell shape with a heavy keel. That helps ensure that the center of mass is low, and that any tipping will increase the buoyancy on the downward side while also bringing the center of mass opposite the tilt, causing the boat to right itself.
Through a bit of an iterative process, you can make adjustments to certain aspects of the ship design, then recalcute how that will affect things before making your next adjustment to try to keep things in line. For example, I did some testing with some of our old bck powder artillery pieces against various thickness of steel pte with water at different angles. After getting that data, I started pnning out the thickness of the hull in various pces while adjusting angles. After calcuting hull thickness, that told me how much weight the hull would have, which gave me an idea of the amount of water I'd need to dispce.
The main idea is that the most vulnerable portions along the waterline and along where the engines and magazines of ammo will go, need to have thick armor, I've gone for 3 inches. The bottom-most portion of the ship will be made with 2-inch steel to add weight to the bottom and provide protection. Above the waterline, the steel is only going to be 1.5 inches thick. Internally, the walls to the magazines and engine rooms will also be sloped as compared to the ship hull to maximize the chance of deflection should something actually penetrate that far.
I'm estimating about 1600 tons of machinery, components for the ship including the superstructure and keel, and the steel frame. Then, I pnned for it to be able to carry up to 1000 tons in both ammunition and cargo total. If it can potentially carry 1000 tons of ammo and cargo, that would imply that it will float at about 3.2 feet of difference between when it's empty and when it's full if the ship was full width all the way down. Realistically, it'll be tapered downward in the bell shape, so we'll assume 4 feet of verticality between fully loaded and empty. That means that the 3-inch pte will need to take up about 7 feet of the total height of the ship, to encompass the full range of the waterline plus a foot below and two feet above. That section of pte alone comes out to about 300 tons.
The height of the deck above water is pnned at 8 feet when fully loaded, meaning that whole stretch of pte comes out to about 130 tons. Those amounts would lead to a total draft depth of about 9, or considering the bell shape, closer to 12 feet. After adding in below the waterline weight, minus the 600 tons I've opted to put in the keel for stability, the total height from the bottom of the keel to the top of the deck comes out to be about 22 feet, with the ship sitting at between 10 and 14 feet in the water at any point in time. Given that total height, I pn on dividing the inside of the ship into two decks. The lower deck will contain as much of the machinery and heavy components as I can fit to keep the center of mass of the ship as low as possible. If there is space, the first cargo hold will also go there.
Before we even consider actually building out things like steel pte and I-beams in the shapes necessary, I'll need to prototype the main pieces of machinery that will be going on the ship. Namely, the dual steam engines and boilers along with the water purifiers to make fresh water for the boilers in addition to making drinking water.
