Daming Yuanfu

Gao Pragmatic is a busy man, and he obviously won't do meaningless things, such as today's riding and shooting competition. He arranged this riding and archery competition. The competition itself was not of much significance. At most, it was to accompany Meng Guzhezhe to have fun, and to let the emperor know that he was not a person who was greedy for power. You see, I actually have a lot of fun in my free time.

So, what is his real purpose? In fact, the purpose is to select the Wanli Type III rifle and lance through this competition, and if the emperor is present, the effect will be better.

The Wanli Type II rifle has been around for several years. In fact, it has undergone some minor changes over the years. It even gave birth to a derivative model, the Wanli Type II rifle, due to Gao Pragmatic's transformation of the Ming Dynasty cavalry.

However, these minor modifications are really just "minor" modifications worthy of the name. Most of the time they just adjust the style of the gun stock to make it more ergonomic. The biggest improvement over the years is just an adjustment to the aiming system, while the main structure of the firearm can be said to have remained unchanged for more than ten years.

Of course you can say that this is a limitation of current technology, but Gao Pragmatic prefers that this is because the Wanli II lacks competitors. Without competition, it is difficult to make progress. This truth is not only highly pragmatic, but everyone knows it. However, the current situation is that Wanli II really has no competitors.

From a global perspective, compared to other contemporary firearms, the technological span of the Wanli Type II firearm is not large, because as early as 1547, the flintlock gun had been manufactured by a French gunsmith and watchmaker. Han invented it. However, it takes time for an invention to become popular. The European army's batch equipment of flintlocks was delayed until a century later, that is, around 1650.

The Wanli Type 2 obviously made a time lag. Driven by Gao Pragmatism, the Ming army basically equipped the Ming army with flintlock muskets in batches 70 years earlier than the European armies in the original history. However, with the Spaniards importing them from southern Xinjiang, For muskets, this technological lead may not last long.

After all, the matter of "Suifa" is not difficult in principle, and its manufacturing process has no technological barriers. European technical craftsmen can imitate it as long as they see the Wanli II.

Because of this, although the vast majority of people in southern Xinjiang were opposed to exporting the Wanli II to the Spaniards, Gao Pragmatic still approved it without hesitation - there is no point in cherishing this thing. If you don't export it, it is nothing more than forcing others to do so. Why bother if you research and manufacture it yourself? It is better to sell more money. Anyway, the Spaniards are deeply involved in the European war and cannot come to fight the Ming Dynasty or southern Xinjiang.

As for the spread of technology to the entire European continent, this will of course be a little more troublesome, but the impact will not be great - as mentioned earlier, the French had this technology decades ago. They don't have a large amount of equipment, so they must have problems they face. As for the specific problems, Gao Wushi is too lazy to think about it now.

Of course, in addition to fusiliers, the Wanli Type II also has some other advantages, the most critical of which is the paper shell fixed charge. However, this is the same as Suifa. In essence, it is just an advanced concept. The manufacturing difficulty is almost zero. It is the kind that can be seen and understood. There are also no technical barriers.

Technical barriers, this is what high pragmatism pursues. Only with technical barriers can we ensure our lead for a long time and ensure that we will not be easily matched by our opponents.

However, it was very difficult to build technical barriers in the era before the Industrial Revolution. After all, the technological levels of Eurasia were not much different - needless to say in Europe, the Ottoman Empire in West Asia has not declined yet, and East Asia has the Ming Dynasty, and everyone's military Although technology has its own emphasis, overall it is still at the same level, and there is no generational gap.

Therefore, even though Gao Jingshi had already ordered the development of the Wanli III type when the Wanli II type had just been installed, it was not until nearly twenty years later that Jinghua Ordnance Industry came up with a new product - this was Gao Jingshi's personal instruction from time to time. It was completed under certain conditions, which shows the difficulties involved.

So why did the Wanli Three Styles remain difficult to deliver for twenty years? The answer is: This is a true rifled gun, and a new projectile is used to solve the problems caused by the rifled gun. In other words, this is a systematic project, not just building a gun.

In the view of Gao Pragmatic, a time traveler, "rifling" is undoubtedly the soul of the gun barrel. Since rifling can give the warhead the ability to rotate, when the warhead shoots out of a rifled barrel, it will often achieve a longer range and higher accuracy due to the rotation of the warhead.

This principle is actually the same as the top played by children. Because the warhead rotates, the stability of the warhead is greatly improved when shooting.

This is also the main reason why modern armies basically use "rifled" weapons except for some that have their own tail fins, or ammunition that does not need to be rifled and fired in "smoothbore".

But there is a problem here. In Europe in the seventeenth century (1601-1700), there were clearly "rifled guns" with longer range and higher accuracy, that is, "rifles." However, Europe at that time The army still prefers unrifled "muskets". Why?

You must know that since the mid-seventeenth century, flintlock muskets have been assembled on a large scale by many European armies, which can be subdivided into "flintlock rifled muskets" and "flintlock muskets." However, the European armies have But the vast majority of them are "flintlock muskets" without rifling.

Moreover, this situation lasted until 1848, that is, in the middle of the th century, after nearly two centuries, the "flintlock musket" without rifling was replaced by the "flintlock rifled gun" with rifling. gradually replaced. What is the reason for this?

Perhaps many people will think that it is because rifled guns appeared relatively late and did not catch up with the trend of European armies updating their weapons?

It is true that the rifled gun appeared a little later than the "smoothbore gun". After all, the "rifled gun" was also derived from the "smoothbore gun". But the problem is that as early as 1420 AD, that is, in the early fifteenth century, a blacksmith in Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire (Germany), had invented the world's first rifled rifle. However, the "rifled gun" of this period was "It's just straight.

Because what the blacksmith considered at that time was not to improve the stability of the projectile when it came out of the chamber, but to reduce the "friction" when loading the projectile, thereby increasing the loading speed. After all, "breech-loading guns" that load ammunition from the back of the firearm only appeared in the 18th century. Before that, ammunition was loaded from the front of the barrel, and the gunpowder and projectiles had to be compacted with a "feeding stick". The operation was extremely cumbersome. After the whole process is completed, it can be considered efficient if it can be fired once per minute.

It was not until 1476 that spiral rifling appeared in Italian documentation. This means that since the late fifteenth century, the characteristics of "rifling" in improving range and accuracy have begun to become prominent.

However, as I just said, the widespread assembly of flintlock muskets in Europe had to be postponed to the middle of the 17th century. So in the nearly two hundred years from the late 15th century to the middle of the 17th century, it is difficult to say that no army used "rifled guns" "?

Of course that is impossible, but naturally it is possible. The Danish army had assembled "rifled guns" in the early seventeenth century, but in the end they did not popularize "rifled guns" on the battlefield.

According to common sense, rifled guns clearly have the advantages of long range and high accuracy, so they should quickly become popular in Europe and even the world. Why were they not gradually accepted and popularized by European armies until the middle of the 19th century?

Although compared to the "smoothbore gun" with a simpler barrel structure, the essence of the rifled gun lies in the barrel structure. The spiral "rifling" also makes it more demanding on the manufacturing process, and regardless of time, Both costs and labor costs will increase significantly.

So what is ultimately reflected is that the cost of a "rifled gun" is more expensive than a "smoothbore gun".

But this does not really explain the problem, because throughout the history of war development in Europe, these European countries never seem to care about how high the cost of a weapon is. What they care more about is actually the performance of the weapon, or in other words, they seek refinement rather than more.

This is like the "knight" trend in Europe in the Middle Ages. Is it really the so-called knightly glory and chivalry that Europeans pursue?

No, because whether it is knight's glory or chivalry's spirit, they are actually products derived after the emergence of knights. The birth of "Knight" is a real product of war.

In order to pursue the so-called "absolute crushing" and pursue higher defense and higher attack power, the nobles of the European Middle Ages vigorously implemented the "vassal system" and the "fief system" and spared no effort to create an individual system. A "heavy knight" that is expensive to build but is truly armed to the teeth. Another example is the "Paris Cannon" developed by Germany at the end of World War I. It was huge and extremely expensive, but these were secondary after all, because the "Paris Cannon" perfectly demonstrated its range with its nearly 120 kilometers. This reflected the Germans' pursuit of "ultimate range" at that time. At that time, ordinary artillery had a range of 20 kilometers, which was considered a very good achievement.

In this case, the cost disadvantage of the "rifled gun" is really not a big problem in the face of its range and accuracy that far exceeds that of the smoothbore gun. At least in Europe, which has been in various wars for a long time, the efficiency of killing must be more important than the price of weapons.

After all, the projectile can have a longer range and higher accuracy after being discharged from the chamber, which means that its actual "effective range" must also be greatly improved, which will also increase the "destructive power" after hitting. This is not what a simple "farthest range" can bring.

Therefore, the real reason why European armies preferred smoothbore muskets from the 17th century to the 19th century was that in addition to the relatively higher cost of rifled muskets, there must be other reasons. Otherwise, it is just a matter of processing a few rifling lines on the barrel. How high can the cost be? Even if the smelting level needs to be improved for this purpose, it will not lead to unacceptable prices.

So the real problem starts with the flaws of rifled guns. Strictly speaking, it is not actually a defect, because this defect does not come from the rifled gun itself, but from the rifled gun's good partner, that is, the "projectile".

There is one thing that everyone knows but often doesn’t pay much attention to. That is, before the emergence of modern “pointed bullets”, in the era when matchlocks and flintlocks were popular, the shape of bullets was round, which is what I mentioned above. "Projectile".

However, under the influence of rifling, the muzzle of a rifled gun is not a complete "circle" like a smoothbore gun, but a circular gear-shaped muzzle divided into "yin lines" and "yang lines".

The so-called "yin line" is the bottom of the concave part of the rifling, while the "yang line" is the top of the protruding part of the rifling.

This means that if the caliber is calculated from Yang line to Yang line as we do now, there will inevitably be a problem of "energy leakage" of black powder, resulting in a loose seal on the muzzle, thus affecting the range of the rifled gun. . As a result, the caliber of the rifled gun was actually judged based on the distance from the negative line to the negative line.

In other words, the projectiles used in rifled guns are actually slightly larger than the actual caliber. As a result, when soldiers load ammunition into a rifled gun through the muzzle, it is often more laborious than loading ammunition into a smoothbore gun, and they have to keep hitting the projectiles with the projectile stick repeatedly, otherwise There is a risk that the projectile will not reach the bottom of the barrel.

After this back and forth, the already slow reloading speed of the flintlock gun naturally became even slower. But this is not the end, because there is a bigger problem: under the back and forth knocking, the projectile made of lead is bound to deform, and even get directly stuck in the groove of the rifling, then there is The risk of "exploding the chamber" - after all, the caliber itself does not match.

On the other hand, a smoothbore gun has a rounded muzzle, and the caliber is whatever it is. As long as the projectiles are not selected incorrectly and the barrel is not deformed, there is basically no risk of the projectiles not being loaded or the chamber exploding due to deformation of the bullets.

So in this case, the rifled gun has a long range and high accuracy, but is slow to load, and is more likely to explode than the smoothbore gun; the smoothbore gun has a short range, low accuracy, and although the loading is slow, it is faster than the rifled gun, and Not easy to explode. If you were the leader of an army, what would you choose?

Isn't it obvious? Of course it's a musket! After all, war is a group war, and it is true that the range has an advantage, but the lives of your own soldiers are more important! As for accuracy, in the context of large-scale war, does "accuracy" matter?

It's still important, but it's actually not that important. After all, with the accuracy of a musket, although it may not be able to accurately hit the intended target, as long as the firepower density on the battle line is high enough, is there any guarantee that it will hit the enemy next to the target?

So, how did the rifled gun replace the smoothbore gun? In fact, after experiencing troughs in the 17th and 18th centuries, rifled guns ushered in a new life in the 19th century. The main reason is that Claude Adirne Migne, captain of the French Orleans Chasseurs, improved the "projectiles" of rifled guns and invented a new type of "projectile" called "Migne bullets".

This projectile, which appears in many novels of later generations, is sometimes mythologized and sometimes vilified. Those arguments aside, it’s just about technology and construction here.

Judging from the shape alone, it is actually infinitely close to the modern pistol "round nose bullet". The difference is that the gunpowder and warhead are still separated. However, the characteristic of the "Mine bullet" is that the caliber of the projectile is slightly smaller than that of the rifled gun, but it does not suffer from "energy leakage" and is easier to load.

Because there is a cone-like groove behind the warhead of the "Mine" bullet, and it is also matched with an oak plug. After the gunpowder is ignited, the instantaneous pressure generated by the gunpowder and the impact of the oak will cause this The grooves are expanded to match the rifling on the barrel to a suitable shape.

It is precisely because of the improvement of projectiles that the "Mine-type front-loading rifle" equipped with "Mine bullets" also achieved excellent shooting results with a maximum range of 918 meters and accurate hits within 500 meters.

You know, the range of the musket at that time was still about a hundred meters. As for modern muskets, they have become synonymous with shotguns, hunting rifles, and anti-explosive guns or signal guns and other firearms that do not pay much attention to range and accuracy. Of course, the "smoothbore" of the "smoothbore cannon" does not count. These are completely two properties.

Let’s put aside the myth of Minerta in later generations, let’s just talk about slander. The main reason for slandering the Minie bomb is that although it was very popular for a while, it did not last long - isn't this nonsense? It didn’t take long for us to enter the era of breech-loading guns. Of course, the Minie bullet as a muzzle-loading gun projectile would also decline accordingly.

But it is obvious that Gao Wuchen does not need to consider this issue now - why, in the 1601th year of Wanli, in AD, Gao Yuanfu was ready to ascend in the daytime and develop a breech-loading gun?

When it comes to technology, it’s enough to be one step ahead, as long as this step can create technical barriers. If you really want to be two or three steps ahead, not to mention whether Gao Pragmatic has the ability to guide you, even if he does, there is no need.

The "Wanli Three Types" presented by Jinghua Ordnance Industry this time include two types and four types. Two types means that they are divided into infantry and cavalry types, and four types mean that each type has two types to choose from.

Gao Pragmatic asked Meng Guzhezhe to choose the bow and arrows she wanted to use, while she watched the two long, two short and four guns accompanied by Gao Jiong, the president of Jinghua Ordnance Industry, and several important technical backbones.

The name Gao Jiong has not appeared for a long time. Here is a brief introduction: Gao Jiong is the son of Gao Mo, so he is the son of the sixth family of the Gao family. As early as when Gao Jingshi had just obtained Sanshenyuan and planned to start preliminary research and development on firearms, he was recommended to Gao Jingshi by Gao Mo, who "does not avoid relatives when it comes to promotion".

He has been immersed in firearms over the years, especially the area of ​​light weapons that he has been in charge of for a long time. Together with Gao Yi, who is in charge of artillery, he has become Gao Jingshi's "left and right guardian" in the firearms industry.

Jinghua's artillery has been upgraded several times over the years, and even the regulations have been adjusted. Therefore, Gao Yi is basically "electronically commended" by Gao Jinghua every few years, and the pressure naturally comes to Gao Jiong. On the head.

This time, Gao Jiong has spent ten years sharpening his sword...er, twenty years. How good this sword is depends on its performance today.

He is very nervous and looking forward to it now. He himself also knows that with the retirement of his father Gao Mo, the most critical battle is about to come as to whether he can continue to hold a firm position within Jinghua in the future.
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