Bigger Is Better!
Clang! Clang!
"Is it really okay to go like this?"
"We barely got the cart out—that much is fine, trust me!"
"Ugh!"
Deok-bu wasn't worried about that at all. It was the mess of a courtyard, the pavilion, and above all, that pot over there...
I've got a feeling today is going to be a long one...
Unaware of Deok-bu's inner turmoil, Mu-seon was too busy rushing him along.
"Come on, let's go!"
"Fine, fine..."
The two of them loaded the model onto the cart and hurried toward headquarters. If they could show it in person and explain it directly, they might secure large-scale support and actually build the real thing.
Clop clop clop.
"We're here!"
"Hurry, this way!"
Anyone could see they were in navy uniforms, so not a single person stopped them. Besides, to cause any trouble inside, they'd have to push past crowds of people, so security was a bit lax.
"Over there! Let's go to the lake!"
"Oh, right—we can float it over there!"
The two wheeled the cart toward the center of the courtyard.
A lake sat at the heart of the headquarters, with models of Dolphin and Orca-class ships floating on its surface, and the plan was to set their own model afloat among them.
Rustle, rustle.
As the two busied themselves unloading their cargo in the middle of the courtyard, someone approached.
"What are you two up to here?"
It was their captain, Yi Seong-gye.
He had been on the same Dolphin 1211, but the ship had sunk, and he'd come out to find out when a new vessel would be assigned. All he got was wait, so out of frustration he'd been strolling along the lakeshore.
"Oh! Captain!"
"Good to see you, sir!"
"Mm. So what's that thing you're hauling around?"
Whatever it was, it glinted and looked like some kind of metalwork, but it seemed so shoddy and battered that it looked worse than a child's toy.
"This is the iron ship that will become Daehan's future!"
"That's right! This thing is going to be remarkable!"
"Looks like a toy to me..."
They'd made it by hand-hammering iron plates in a cottage-industry fashion, so the plates were lumpy and the frame crooked. It really did look like some defective toy.
"Watch this!"
Plop.
...
...
...
The three men fell into silence.
Mu-seon and Deok-bu wore triumphant expressions, as if the thing's true worth should be self-evident.
"So what is it?"
How could someone seeing it for the first time possibly understand its value without an explanation?
"Ah! Yes, this is a model of a ship made of iron."
"And?"
"It may look like a toy, but if we build this ship at full scale, it could withstand cannon fire. And since it wouldn't be wood, we could install a steam engine too, couldn't we?"
"Hmm..."
Yi Seong-gye sank deep into thought. Something about it sounded plausible, but one thing puzzled him.
"But it's small enough to join by hand. How exactly do you plan to connect the plates when it's full-sized?"
"That's what we need to research! Please help us get the navy behind a proper research program!"
"Ha..."
The ranks of the Daehan navy ran from Grand Admiral down through General and Captain, with everyone else divided into four tiers of seamen. In finer detail, years of service were appended to each rank, but it was usually omitted for convenience.
Yi Seong-gye's rank of Captain stood just one step above these two men.
I suppose I'll have to go see General Choe Yeong...
Securing research funding was a hard task even for him.
"All right. I'll look into it. You'll have to give me the full story."
"Yes, sir!"
Choe Mu-seon, buoyed by the sense that something might actually come of this, began explaining everything about the ship.
"The plates are thin now, but running the numbers, we could use iron plate anywhere from five to ten chi thick!"
"What!"
Even five-chi plate couldn't be punched through by a cannon fired at point-blank range—and now they were saying ten was possible? The moment he heard it, Yi Seong-gye felt as though something enormous had just arrived on his doorstep.
"Is that really true?"
"Yes! We could go even thicker, but we accounted for the added weight as the ship grows, so we settled on that range!"
"Kuh!"
Even thicker than that? It was more astonishing than the news that iron could float at all. Thin plates would be light enough to float somehow, but ten chi was enormously thick.
"And! More importantly—we'll install a steam engine, so the ship can travel at constant speed whether there's wind, no wind, or even a headwind!"
"Oh! Right! I'd forgotten about that!"
The navy's long-cherished dream: a steam-powered warship, researched in the past and failed, now quietly under unofficial development.
There had even been a minor crisis when the Intelligence Bureau discovered steam engine manpower draining out of the Artisans' Bureau—only for the investigation to reveal, absurdly, that the leak led straight to the Navy Department.
Relations between the two bureaus soured for a while over that incident.
"Then you two—go find a way to join those iron plates! I'll gather the budget and research staff!"
"Thank you, sir!"
"We'll be on our way!"
From there they parted ways—Yi Seong-gye to write his report, and Deok-bu and Mu-seon heading for Moda.
If a method couldn't be found in Moda, it couldn't be found anywhere.
A month had already passed. Mu-seon and Deok-bu had divided the territory between them and were canvassing every artisan they could track down. After all, they needed a way to join iron plates together.
"Ha! If I knew a trick like that, don't you think I'd have told you already?"
"There's nothing besides melting and hammering?"
"You could try soldering it with lead!"
They had met tens of thousands of people over that month, and every answer was the same: nothing but talk that no usable method existed.
Joined like this, a full-sized ship would split clean in two and sink the moment it hit water... We need a different way.
Leaving them behind, Mu-seon stepped into a new smithy in the same alley.
"A way to join iron plates?"
"Yes, elder!"
"Heat them in the fire and hammer, and they'll stick well enough."
Exactly the same answer he'd gotten from every artisan so far. Melt and pound until the pieces merged into one.
But how were they supposed to heat and hammer a colossal warship? It was impossible.
"Is there no other way?"
"Other than that, you'd join it with a different metal. But it comes apart easily—and you want it to be practically one piece, don't you?"
That too, he'd heard before. Nothing but melting another metal to stick plates together, like the lead he'd used on the model.
"Phew..."
Bang, bang, bang! Screeeetch.
In one corner of the smithy, the old man's sons and grandchildren were working alongside him. Perhaps they were making plate armor—they were bending iron sheets and pinning them together with nails.
"Hmm..."
Mu-seon, watching the scene intently, fell deep into thought. As if he couldn't hear a single sound around him, he stared without so much as blinking at the work in progress.
"Nothing else, I'm afraid."
...
"I say there?"
The old man, flustered by the silence, tried calling out, but Mu-seon's mind had already left the building.
Bang, bang, bang!
Where Mu-seon was looking, a man who appeared to be the old man's son held something like a sharp skewer against an iron plate and hammered it through, punching a hole.
"Don't bring it over here!"
"Careful."
And beside him, handing over a small iron rod glowing cherry-red, was apparently the man's own son.
"One or two strikes is all it takes!"
Thud, thud, thud!
Hammering against some kind of form, the rod took on a rounded shape in just a few strikes—and then it was used to fasten the armor plates together!
"Ha!"
Choe Mu-seon's eyes went wide. Instead of actually bonding the metal—if they pressed the plates tight against the frame like that, wouldn't the water stay out?
"Elder!"
"Goodness! What is it? You nearly gave me a heart attack!"
"What is that thing?"
"What?"
"That—those pins you use when making that armor!"
"Those? What was it called again... it was an unfamiliar word."
They just called them pins, but in truth the old man had heard a different term somewhere once.
"Father! It's called a rivet!"
The son, working a little way off, must have overheard, because he supplied the answer. A rivet, apparently.
"Ah, right! Haneul-nim called it a rivet."
Ah. So someone had overheard one of the modern words she let slip and written it down.
Haneul carelessly tossed around hanja and even English words alike—thankfully, hangul's freedom of spelling and pronunciation saved the day.
"Thank you so much!"
"Hm? What exactly got solved?"
"Thank you, truly! Well then, we'll be off!"
Leaving behind only a bewildered old man who had no idea what had been solved, Mu-seon headed straight for Sinsi. His friend Deok-bu had already been forgotten.
Back in Sinsi, Mu-seon went straight to find Yi Seong-gye. He had to report what he'd discovered today.
"Captain!"
"Hm? Mu-seon, is that you?"
Yi Seong-gye, out for a walk by the lake after another day of report-writing, had been studying the iron ship model they'd floated there a month ago when Mu-seon found him.
"We found the method!"
"What? Really!"
The thing tormenting them most had been the joining method. The Grand Admirals, too, had welcomed the idea of building these men's iron ship.
How could hearts not stir? A warship larger than a Horned Whale! And crushing defensive power that could shrug off cannon fire!
There was just one problem: how on earth did you join plates into so vast a hull?
Now that the answer was finally in hand, Yi Seong-gye could have jumped for joy.
"We can join them with rivets!"
"Rivets?"
"Yes!"
For Yi Seong-gye, who had no idea what a rivet was, Mu-seon followed with a simple explanation.
"Won't there be plenty of gaps?"
"No large ones—and for the small gaps, we can waterproof them, can't we?"
And though they didn't yet know it, the joining method of hammering red-hot rivets was more powerful than they imagined.
Iron's volume changes considerably with temperature—and that means as a rivet cools, it clamps down with tremendous force.
"Excellent! Come with me!"
"Yes, sir!"
So they went to Yi Seong-gye's office, worked through the night on the report, and that report was received with such enthusiasm that it began climbing upward—and then further upward.
And one month later, the assignments of Yi Seong-gye, Choe Mu-seon, and Shim Deok-bu were formally changed to researchers. The serious development of the iron ship had begun.
On one side of the naval headquarters, an enormous shipyard was taking shape.
A harbor for building and repairing iron ships—crews were in the thick of filling in the sucking mudflats and driving in foundation pilings.
Meanwhile, in a warehouse built ahead of schedule, experiments were already underway.
Vrrrrm.
"Pull it harder!"
"Got it."
The experiment they were running now was to determine at what depth and spacing rivets could bear the greatest load.
In the modern world, shear and bending are calculated with formulas—but where would they find such things here? They were conducting thousands, tens of thousands of trials by hand.
Creeeeak.
"Hmm. At this thickness, it holds up to about this much?"
"What do you think? We've gathered plenty of data by now, haven't we?"
"Time to start for real, then."
In the three years since this laboratory was founded, they had run precisely one experiment: the proper size and spacing of rivets.
With the shipyard still unfinished, the most they could manage was a small boat fitted with a small-scale model steam engine.
"It should carry at least a few people, don't you think?"
"I hate to say it, but let's start at that scale."
"We'll bring in the artisans."
"Leave it to me."
Yi Seong-gye was busy shuttling back and forth between the construction site and reports to the higher-ups, so the hands-on research was directed by Mu-seon and Deok-bu.
When researchers from the universities and artisans from Moda were first recruited, there had been plenty of fights over the soldiers trying to round everyone up themselves.
But once everyone had gathered and understood the plan, they threw themselves into the research—perhaps even more passionately than the original three.
"How does it feel, with it all finally beginning?"
"No! This is still practice. We will build a warship greater than the Horned Whale—that's where it starts!"
Having come this far, everything was ready for building a real ship.
Treating the small boat as the final checkout—mere practice—Mu-seon was already sketching the great ship in his mind.
"Heh heh. And you call that the beginning? Your dreams are something else, my friend."
"Let's build a ship that won't capsize even in a typhoon!"
"Deal! Let's do it together!"