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Chapter 145 Quietly Surprising Shen Daotai

After Zheng Chenggong received Shen Shuren's instructions, he only stayed in Wuchang for a few days to ask for advice, and then obediently returned to the mouth of Poyang Lake to continue his Lijin tax inspection and economic blockade tasks.

In addition, he also greeted his family members, 30 taels of silver, 15 taels each in the north and south, and handed them over to the Shen family to prepare for opening joints at any time.

The Zheng family was really quick to give the money, 30 taels, it was just a matter of a word from the young master.Randomly approve a note, sign Zheng Chenggong's name, seal it with wax seal, and send a confidant housekeeper to hold it, and pay upon seeing the letter.The Zhengjia Shanhai Wulu business in the northern and southern capitals can basically move around and get it done.

There is no way, whoever asked the Zheng family to collect the flag silver every year, there are three or four thousand big ships, each ship is 3000 taels per year (a small half is self-operated, and the other half is operated by another family, and the Zheng family collects protection fees). The income is more than 1000 million taels per year.

The water transport merchants who pay protection fees to the Zheng family will pay the money to the five port cities on Shanwu Road, and the northern and southern capitals are originally one of the Zheng family's Shanwu Road import and export bases.

Now it's almost the end of the year, and each of the Zheng family's firms in the five major commercial cities received at least 200 million taels of silver, so it was too easy to withdraw 15 taels each.

……

The effect of the economic blockade cannot be seen immediately. Compared with direct military strikes, it will definitely be much slower.

Now that winter has just entered, the lack of supplies in the mountainous area is not yet obvious.The real desperate situation will be when the winter is the coldest, and even when the spring is frail.

Therefore, Shen Shuren was not in a hurry to make an emergency landing immediately, there was still a wait-and-see period of two or three months.

During this window period, he had nothing else to do, so he naturally devoted his energy and attention to the industrial construction of the territory.

From mid-November, Shen Shuren left Jiangxia County, Fuzhi, and went to live in Daye County for a period of time to rectify and inspect the mining of Iron Mountain, as well as the construction of military technology and production capacity.

In addition, when Shen Shuren first took over Wuchang at the beginning of last month, he ordered his confidantes and family servants to relocate all the military bureaus and workshops previously built in Huangzhou, as well as the craftsmen and management personnel. It is convenient for unified management.

Now, more than a month has passed, and the relocation work has been successfully completed.Anyway, the house can be rebuilt in Daye and Wuchang, as long as the people and equipment are brought in.

Shen Shuren's deployment in this way is also in consideration of moving the most confidential military industry under his nose for unified management.

In the future, he will definitely continue to develop technology in military production. If metallurgy and machinery manufacturing are deployed on the north and south banks of the Yangtze River, transportation will be too troublesome, and it will not be conducive to keeping secrets.

Moreover, Huanggang is a remote mountain valley after all, and its conditions, environment and transportation convenience are obviously incomparable with Wuchang, a later provincial capital.

After the relocation was completed, Shen Shuren also inspected it immediately to understand the latest situation, so as to know the current situation.

The last time he personally asked about military production was in April this year.

At that time, the Bingzhang Workshop in Huangzhou had just completed the supporting production of hoop-type bayonets and long-handled gun battle axes for the 200-[-] musketeers.Then began to switch to the production of Lumi guns and turtledove guns, and reversely pondered how to imitate the original Dutch Hongyi cannons sent by the Zheng family.

It's a pity, just after the trial production of a few, Erhe attacked successively, and Shen Shuren came to the front to supervise the battle in person, and for the next six months, he basically kept the Bingzhan Workshop in a state of stocking.

I haven't seen each other for half a year, and the craftsmen and management staff are also quite nervous when they meet Daotai for inspection again.After Shen Shuren arrived, chief craftsman Zhou Tiedan took a copy of the accounts that his apprentice and Shen's housekeeper had just calculated a few days ago, and handed it to him for review in person.

Shen Shuren also took advantage of the situation to go through the accounts first. According to the accounts, from April to October, the production capacity of Lumi guns and turtledove guns in Huangzhou Bingzhan Workshop has gradually matured from the initial more than 100 per month. It has grown to more than 300 per month.

The various foot-operated boring machines, grinding machines, drilling machines, and coiled pipe forging machines that were promoted at the beginning also worked well.Two to three hundred craftsmen who are used to new machines have been trained—compared with the beginning of this year, the number of blacksmiths has not increased significantly, but the skill training has improved a lot.

It's not that these blacksmiths were not good at the original skills, but that they mainly mastered the skills of manual blacksmithing. Now at least everyone is proficient in several simple machine tools, and their work efficiency is much faster.

The doubling of the production capacity of muskets is the best proof of the improvement of craftsmen's proficiency.

Of course, considering the slow running-in in the early stage, an average of 1800 light and heavy muskets have been produced in the past seven months.Combined with the 1200 muskets owned by Shen Jiajun before the war, the total number of self-produced muskets reached as many as 3000.

In addition, in the past half a year or so, Shen Shuren also got some firearms from other channels, first of all, the thieves from various families that were wiped out, more or less hundreds of them were seized from each family.

It's just that the firearms of the thieves are poorly made. There are no turtledove guns, and there are very few Lumi guns. The main ones are bird guns and old-fashioned fire guns.

The old-fashioned guns are almost worthless to today's Shen Shuren. If the guns are seriously rusted and in poor condition, they can only be returned to the furnace and remade to be used as steel.

Guns that are in better condition cannot be used by field troops, because they are too unreliable and slow to fire, and cannot keep up with the training rhythm of the troops.However, Shen Shuren will not blindly seek perfection and waste.These guns are in good condition but poor in performance, and they can still defend the city for the second-line troops.

Previously, Shen Shuren's bases were all in mountainous areas, the terrain was dangerous, and there were few enemies who could directly attack the city, so there was no need to consider the city's defense force.

Now only half of Shen Shuren's territory is in the mountainous area, and the remaining half has extended to the Jianghan Plain. The defense of the city must also be taken seriously.He gathered all the old-fashioned firecrackers that were picked out and reloaded cumbersomely, and they were all concentrated in Wuchang and Xiangyang, two important plain towns.

In the end, he sent one part to Fang Kongzhang, so that he could use it to guard strategically important places such as Yiling and Jiangling. The land is the key to prevent Zhang Xianzhong from returning to Huguang.Helping Fang Kongzhang to defend the strong city to ensure that he does not lose it is helping Shen Shuren himself.

If in the future Zhang Xianzhong dared to bypass Jiancheng and attack, relying on robbery to maintain logistics.Then the existence of Fang Kongxuan can also threaten Zhang Xianzhong's rear at any time.Shen Shuren must have teamed up with him, beating Zhang Xianzhong so hard that he couldn't look at each other from head to tail.

Apart from the firearms from the thieves, Shen Shuren's last source of firearms income was the three military guards left in Wuchang and Hanyang after Zuo Liangyu moved to the town.

The Ming Dynasty guards had a full quota of 4000 people, and there should be at least 700 firearms.

But the soldiers in the guards are more than half out of pay, and the firearms will of course be missing.In fact, each battalion only has more than 200 roots, and the three battalions together only have 800 roots, which is a little more than a battalion with full quota.

The thieves and the local guards provided Shen Shuren with 1700 firearms of various types.

After screening, 200 rusty guns were scrapped and returned to the furnace, 900 were turned into old-fashioned guns for defending the city, and only 600 could be directly equipped with the Shen family's new army and reached the quality of standard bird guns and Lumi guns.

Including the previous 3000, Shen Shuren can equip his field troops with 3600 muskets above the blunderbuss level.

Moreover, Huangzhou Bingzhan Workshop has been assigning manpower to produce bayonets during this period. Anyway, the manufacturing cost and manpower consumption of bayonets are much less than firearms, and it doesn't cost much to equip more than 2000 bayonets.So these 3600 people are all equipped with bayonets.

Of the 900 firecrackers defending the city, Shen Shuren kept 300 in Xiangyang and Wuchang each, and the last 300 were given to Fang Kongxue.

When this batch of firearms was delivered to Jiangling, it was less than half a month since Shen Shuren visited Fang Kongzhao for support last time.Fang Kongzhang was really happy when he received the gift, thinking that Shen Shuren was reciprocating for his support last time, so he was immediately assigned to the city defenders.

There is no way, Fang Kongxuan has never fought such a rich battle as Shen Shuren.The Fang family are traditional scholars, even if they are enlightened scholars, they have a lot of knowledge in science and engineering, but after all they don't know how to do business and produce.

Fang Kongxuan, the governor, has been serving as the governor for several years, and has been relying on his superiors to allocate ordnance. Even if he has a certain production capacity for military battles, he still buys some cold weapons and armor, and basically has no self-produced muskets.To him, getting 300 city defense goods at once is quite a lot.

……

In addition to muskets, in the past six months or so, Huangzhou Bingzhan Workshop's cannon-making business has also begun to take shape.

Although there is no large-scale mass production, at least I understood the samples I got before, and tried to produce 5 samples one after another. However, these 5 guns are not standardized at all, and the actual combat effect may also be lacking. .

After all, it was for the purpose of accumulating experience. The first two of the five guns were not practical at all, and they had a record of bombing, and their calibers and sizes were also different.

Because Shen Shuren asked them to try everything, don't be afraid of making mistakes.So Zhou Tiedan not only tried to build a 12-pound gun, but also bravely tried the 18-pound gun together.There are more projects opened, and naturally more mistakes are made.

Fortunately, the security of the live ammunition test environment in the workshop is relatively tight. During the test, the people who ignited the fire were far away, and the craftsman was not killed by the explosion, which is a blessing in misfortune.

After one of the 12-pound and 18-pound models was scrapped, the following three doors were finally able to achieve a similar shape. Two 12-pound doors and one 18-pound door were able to launch smoothly.

It’s just that the charge and ammunition weight must be reduced by 10 to 15 percent compared to the original Dutch product to ensure absolute safety, that is, only [-] pounds and [-] pounds are actually loaded respectively, and the maximum range can only be guaranteed to be about two miles.

Zhou Tiedan was afraid that Shen Shuren would blame him, so he specifically emphasized in the report that the dimensions of these cannons, and even the surface of the inner chamber, can be the same as the original Hongyi cannons, and there are no obvious trachoma and cavitation, but they are not too big. Can withstand heavy charges, for unknown reasons.

Of course, Shen Shuren knew that it was all about the quality of raw materials. The metal quality of copper and steel itself was not good, and it was useless if the craftsman of the cannon caster was good.

Previously, there was no iron ore in Huangzhou, and the raw materials were purchased from outside. The Huangzhou workshop was only responsible for processing and casting at the mechanical level.

Now that the conditions are met, we still have to start from the bottom, starting from the upstream metal smelting, in order to hope to achieve a decisive breakthrough.

(End of this chapter)