Chapter 117 Overseas Investigation (4)
After a preliminary inspection of the terrain here, members of the Military and Police Department generally believed that it is best to pray that no hostile forces will launch a large-scale attack from the sea in the future. Once this happens, the coastal terrain here will be difficult to defend. One side is an absolute nightmare. It is certainly unlikely that the Crossing Group will send heavy troops to station overseas in the foreseeable future. In view of these circumstances, the Crossing Group needs to carefully consider what attitude it should take towards the current Annan regime.
Of course, the inspection team will not make a conclusion just after looking at this place. In fact, Hongji’s mining area is very large, and there are far more places where freight terminals can be built. Many specific geographical environments It is difficult to tell the advantages and disadvantages just from the map. You must conduct on-site inspections in person to get the most intuitive feeling.
When the expedition team contacted the base camp through the radio that night, they learned good news. The first trial-produced steam engine had been installed in the Tiandu Iron Mine and passed its trial operation. Due to the limitations of the processing technology, the thermal conversion efficiency and stable working time of this steam engine are still at a relatively low level, but the investment in mechanical power undoubtedly means that the production efficiency of Chuanchuan Group will reach a new level.
This news made the expedition team members happy, but it also brought a lot of pressure. The commissioning of steam engines means that fuel demand will increase rapidly, and whether there is a stable coal input channel will most likely become a bottleneck restricting the development speed of Chuanchuan Group. From this perspective, the success or failure of the expedition team will directly affect the future development route of the Cross-Travel Group.
Early the next morning, the expedition team, in high spirits after resting, left the anchorage of the previous night and slowly headed west along the coastline. Because the information on each mining site is relatively detailed, the task of the mining exploration team is relatively simple. When the time comes, they can just go ashore and collect ore samples from the places marked on the map. The real difficulty of this inspection is to find a port location that satisfies all parties. Although there is information from later generations as a reference, the executive committee still must combine the conclusions of the on-site inspection to make the final choice.
The main task of the expedition team today is to find the next port suitable for development. The selection of this location needs to comprehensively consider the local coastal water depth, water environment, distance from the mining site and the difficulty of land transportation, etc., and of course Including the difficulty of military defense, which the Military and Police Department attaches great importance to.
The location of this mining area is actually a huge peninsula that extends into the sea. Opposite it is another peninsula. The tips of the two peninsulas are less than a kilometer apart, and the two peninsulas are surrounded by The fan-shaped bay is the key area of today's inspection.
This fan-shaped bay is actually an outlet shared by several rivers, so the coast is almost entirely covered with large tidal flats. The expedition team tried to go around the inland side of the peninsula, which contains coal mines, to see if there are any A suitable site for mowing large freight docks.
After arriving at the other end of the peninsula, the expedition team docked the ship and sent out team members to survey and sample the land conditions here. What makes the mineral exploration team happy is that the mineral spots here show no signs of being mined by humans at all, which means that the possibility of attracting hostile forces to covet them will be greatly reduced. But at the same time, they also discovered another depressing reality - this place is completely deserted. If the Executive Committee wants to carry out large-scale mining of coal mines here, then how to introduce local immigrants will still be a difficult problem. trouble.
After investigating along the way, there were several locations that seemed suitable for building docks, but they were successively rejected by the Ministry of Shipping and the Ministry of Military and Police. The Ministry of Shipping’s reason is that these places are either too far away from the planned mining sites, which will cause greater trouble for future logistics and transportation, or they are located within the river estuary, with poor water depth and width. It is very limited and not suitable for cargo terminals where a large number of heavy cargo ships will frequently come in and out in the future.
This is also due to the fact that there are some contradictions in the previous orders issued by the Executive Committee. On the one hand, it requires a "long-term perspective" when inspecting the location of the terminal, and the scale of cargo transportation in five or even ten years must be fully taken into account. On the other hand, it appears to be eager for quick success and requires the future terminal address to be "as close as possible to the mining point" in order to reduce the amount of engineering required to open up land transportation channels in the early stage. It's no wonder that several alternative locations along the route were shot down by the Ministry of Shipping.
The reasons given by the Military and Police Department were similar to the locations rejected the day before. The places inspected today basically belong to the coastal plain terrain. The fact that there is no danger to defend is enough for the Military and Police Department to reject these places. According to the opinion after internal discussion within the Military and Police Department, these places today are not even as good as the anchorage where we spent the night yesterday. At least there are several commanding heights out of the port that can be used to build fortifications. The coastal plain areas we are inspecting today are completely undefendable in the event of war. Should the miners be allowed to dig trenches along the coastline?
The commissioner of the Ministry of Agriculture is very satisfied with these places. In his opinion, these alluvial plains near the mouths of rivers and seas have fertile soil and are very suitable for large-scale planting of food crops. However, this view was quickly refuted by others - the Red River Delta, one of the largest grain-producing areas in Vietnam, is only a few dozen nautical miles to the west. The conditions and scale of grain cultivation there are both in this era and hundreds of years ago. The latter is quite astonishing. If the Crossing Group wants to reach that level, I'm afraid it will have to wait until the entire coastal plain on the west coast of Hainan Island is reclaimed to grow food. When opening a base in such a place, there is basically no need to consider the problem of food shortage. Moreover, this is an overseas base, and manpower is always a problem. The executive committee probably wants to turn everyone here into a miner, so how can it allocate manpower to engage in agricultural development.
Seeing that it was already afternoon, the members of the expedition team became less interested because they had not been able to find a suitable target. Upon seeing this, Wang Tom simply ordered to stop today's inspection operation and organized the members to conduct a wild hunting activity before dark.
The members immediately cheered after hearing the news, and some even shouted the slogan "The King is wise". After all, most of the members are young people in their twenties and thirties, and are naturally very interested in activities such as hunting. However, due to the domestic conditions before crossing, not many people had real hunting experience, so it was not an easy task to temporarily organize a wild hunting.
Tom Wang asked Old Morgan and Bearded Johnson to stay and guard the ship. Although they had hunting experience, their Chinese proficiency was limited and they were probably not good enough to serve as instructors. Then the remaining fifteen people were divided into three groups, led by several experienced people. As for the weapons used for hunting, Wang Tom would not be bold enough to let a group of rookies start shooting with guns. He took out two compound bows and an MP9 military crossbow from the cabin of the "Speed" and distributed them to the three teams. These items are all his personal collection, and this is the first time they have been shown since time travel.
There are some knowledgeable people among the members. The knowledgeable Xie Chun took the bow and shouted: "HOYT's carbon spider! This is a rare good thing in China." Then he grabbed another bow and clicked his tongue. He kept saying: "Chill-R produced by Matthews, rich man, please be my friend!"
Tom Wang smiled and said: "You also like to play with bows and arrows?"
Xie Chun shook his head and said: "I can't say that I like it, I just know a little bit about it. I have played it in the archery hall before, but this is my first time hunting in the wild."
Tom Wang said: "Then give it a try. Both of these bows are 70 pounds."
Xie Chun said in shock: "There are no 70-pound bows in the archery hall. I remember that if it exceeds 60 pounds, it will be banned from the competition. I have only played with 50-pound bows before."
Roger next to him interjected: "We always play with 70-pound bows. Be careful, don't get to your waist."
After hearing this, Xie Chun was naturally dissatisfied. He put on the finger protector Wang Tom handed him, took a deep breath, and pulled hard. He couldn't pull the bow open the first time, but when he tried again, he could barely pull the bow open. , but Xie Chun's face was already red from holding back, and it seemed that he had almost reached his limit.
Roger shook his head and said: "You'd better go play crossbow. A 70-pound bow is not suitable for you. Even if you can draw it, you won't be able to shoot a few times. It will be difficult for you to hit the target."
The MP9 military crossbow that Wang Tom took out was not a fake. It was a weapons-grade crossbow that was actually used by special forces. In addition to being equipped with an optical sight, the crossbow's thickened steel wire and eight-wheel force-splitting pulley set make the range and power of this crossbow much greater than that of ordinary hunting crossbows. The effective range exceeds 150 meters. When hunting wild beasts, Crossbow arrows can directly break the bones of animals instead of being blocked by the bones, and their lethality is very powerful.
Wang Tom didn't want to waste the limited bullets and let these rookies get addicted to hunting, so he designated three cold weapons as the main weapons for hunting. Of course, perhaps the use of cold weapons will make this hunting more fun. After all, this kind of weapon can make the sport of hunting feel more like returning to nature.
In addition to all personnel carrying walkie-talkies to report directions at any time, Wang Tom also asked everyone to take off their camouflage jackets and only wear conspicuous white T-shirts on their upper bodies. This was done to avoid confusion among members due to blurred vision in the woods. accidental injury. Of course, for safety reasons, the members of the military and police assigned to the three groups are also equipped with four guns, two long and two short. However, unless there is a situation that endangers the lives of the members, the gunmen will shoot.
(End of chapter)