Struggle in the Steam Age

In preparation for inland development, in addition to preparing two fortified advance territories, the manpower is also limited to about 100 people, and young and middle-aged people are selected as much as possible. Only in this way can we ensure that the people in these territories can buy enough time for the arrival of support in the event of plague or goblins.

Out of consideration for territorial expansion, the two territories Lawrence chose were both some distance away from the hills where the tauren lived. But every territory is within half a day's time for the tauren to arrive. In this way, once there are police officers, they can quickly get the support of the tauren tribe.

In addition, Lawrence also used Aunt Mia's relationship during this period to sell a batch of jewels seized in previous adventures in Ilysia, the capital of Elysion. Then, the money was used to order eight unarmed 75-level pure steam inland river and port patrol boats at the Golden Horn Bay Shipyard in Elysia. With these patrol boats, Lawrence and the others will be able to support these two pioneering territories located on the upper reaches of the river from Port New Sauer at any time.

Of course, Lawrence couldn't just use these 75-ton boats as troop carriers. According to the plan, these ships will undergo a simple modification after arriving at Sauer Island, and a hand-cranked multi-barreled machine gun will be installed in the front and rear of the ship. In addition, two parallel 82mm mortars will be installed on a small platform that can turn 360 degrees in the middle of the hull.

In this case, the whole ship can not only transport a fully armed squad to various fortresses on the river at a time. At the same time, it can also be used as a firepower point to take advantage of river activities. Considering that the next batch of settlements are all distributed along the river, these boats should be able to play a very good role.

Although it is basically impossible for such ships to be used for surface combat, according to the records of various churches, goblins can use canoes to fight on water only in rare cases, and most of their only means of water warfare is to swim over Finally, use all the tools in your hands, even claws and teeth, to try to destroy the ship, so it is not too difficult to deal with.

The dinghy was particularly quick to build for Elysium's Golden Horn shipyard, as Lawrence needed a vessel that could be seen as a variant of the 75-ton multipurpose barge commonly used in the port, and this The small boat shipyard has mass-produced a lot, and it only needs to spend more than a week to make a targeted modification and leave the weapon access port before it can appear.

It's just that Lawrence didn't receive the goods until nearly a month later. Compared with the rapid construction speed, how to pull these ships to New Sauer Island is an important issue. Considering that ships need to operate in the shallow waters of offshore and inland rivers, and will not go to far seas, the ability of these ships to resist wind and waves can be said to be extremely flawed. In this case, they can only try their best to find routes along the coastline with better conditions.

These ships had come with the Viscount Doropia's ship which had been contracted to transport cotton textiles to the island as part of an agreement that Lawrence had made to deal with the pests in their cotton fields. As for why it took so long to come, the main reason is that although Lawrence and the others cleared up the divine power pollution, the real insect plagues still kept them busy, so now they have solved the problem and spared manpower to deliver the goods to New Shaw Island.

Moreover, Viscount Doropia, as an old-fashioned nobleman, has his own moral bottom line. For example, he is rarely willing to promise anything, but once he makes a promise, he will definitely do it well instead of perfunctory. Under such circumstances, in order to ensure that this textile market can continue to operate for a long time instead of a flash in the pan, he sent people to visit the island and some surrounding settlements to investigate the market situation.

During their investigation, they unexpectedly discovered that selling textiles to Nova Sauer and the surrounding islands was actually a profitable business. Because there is neither textile industry nor cotton cultivation in this area. The only plant that can be used for weaving is the palm, but the coir raincoat that can be worn on the body is made of that thing, so all local textiles can only be purchased from those irregular liners, so not only the price is high but also There are also few styles.

On the other hand, from the perspective of market demand. The dispatched investigation team found that at least on New Shaw Island, because of Lawrence's profit-sharing policy, those people under his rule had accumulated part of their wealth and had an extremely strong desire to buy textiles.

Therefore, during this period of time, they also need to deploy various goods according to the results of the investigation, so that they can open the market as soon as they arrive on the island, so that this business activity can have a good start. So they naturally spent a lot of time carefully preparing the goods according to the content of the previous investigation.

And when they prepared all the goods and were ready to go to New Sauer, they happened to meet the batch of small steamers that were about to be shipped, so they came together. At this time, Lawrence just completed the next step of planning for the island and the material preparations for some pioneering operations. So I simply took Safiel and Nala to the pier to greet them.

But when they arrived at the pier, they found that their group of ships did not arrive alone. I don’t know if it was because of luck. There was another munitions ship that he had been looking forward to for a long time at the same time as their ships. On board were a series of weapons Lawrence ordered from his own Bofors munitions factory and invited engineers.

Although there are some engineers on the island now, those professional military engineers and ordinary mechanical engineers are completely different concepts. To give the simplest example, installing weapons on a ship still requires some more professional personnel, otherwise it will be difficult to solve just a problem of center of gravity.

Since the weapons and the ship arrived on the island at the same time, after a simple greeting and a welcome banquet they started the refitting work immediately. Fortunately, after a while of hard work, Lawrence and the others built a simple ship repair yard by the river. Although there is still no way to repair the steam sailboats like the Enterprise or those captured before, those slipways can already provide simple maintenance services for three ships under 100 tons at the same time.

So after a simple reception, Lawrence and the others pulled half of the new ships onto the berth in the afternoon and began to remodel them. Thankfully, the boats are doing very well on their first voyage. Although the difficulty of this journey is completely beyond the upper limit of the design of these offshore vessels, due to the caution of the drivers and the correct choice of the route, the condition of these small boats is very good, and only a simple routine maintenance is enough.

It took only three days, and all eight ships were armed as planned. This is mainly because various upgrade spaces were specially left on the ship during construction, so they only need to install those weapons in the various empty slots left as designed before.

At the same time, another engineer belonging to the Bofors factory directed the workers to build a mine slide and a mine storehouse in the fort at the entrance of the port. According to his partner, the dwarf Eugene, Huguang City has ordered a batch of light mines to defend against murloc invasions. Not many people ordered large mines.

Therefore, he now sends all the large mines produced to Lawrence. I hope that his island can find an actual combat opportunity as soon as possible.

Sure enough, even dwarf arms dealers are also arms dealers. There is nothing dwarven about honesty in this respect. But this is a good thing for Lawrence, because only in this way can he make better profits from his investment in the munitions factory.