national surname chiming

Chapter 412 Peace Doesn't Mean No War at All

Under Zhu Shuren's preparation, within a month or two, the "Magnetism Research Institute" in Jiangning Town was established.

Countless craftsmen produced magnetic materials by using the local method of hot forging and rapid quenching recorded in "Wu Jing Zong Yao" and "Tian Gong Kai Wu", and actually put them into mineral processing production.

On the other hand, researchers are slowly climbing the long-awaited technological line of electromagnetism, which can be regarded as a first deployment.

The iron and steel plant in Ma'anshan has also been steadily launched. With the release of the first batch of high-quality steel and copper smelted in Ma'anshan, Wuchang and Daye also sent technical backbones to copy the original arsenal of the Huguang army to the surrounding areas of Nanjing. Built in Jiangning Town.

In the fall of July, Jiangning Town has assembled the first batch of science and engineering research talents who are interested in "unique skills and ingenuity". They are all hired by Prince E with a lot of money. If you have a skill, you can get a good salary.

In August, the first batch of guns from the Jiangning Arsenal also officially rolled off the assembly line, announcing that the second military system of the Ming court had sprouted.

Perhaps it is the ore and coal refined by the magnetic separation method, and the quality of the high-end steel refined is a little better than before. The quality of the first batch of guns and forged steel breastplates in Jiangning Town is also slightly improved compared with those made in Wuchang.

In particular, the water hammer forging breastplate, which has obvious feedback on steel toughness and quality, has obviously broken through the level of cuirassiers in the Western Napoleonic era-the overall forged breastplate in the Western Napoleonic era, the steel used is also without magnetic separation. There is no way to screen mines in advance, and that thing basically won’t be launched until after the second industrial revolution, that is, after electricity is available.

After the latest water-forged breastplate came off the production line, Song Mingde had someone test it with a musket. When the thickness of the steel plate was one and a half minutes (about 4mm), it could withstand the slugs of the new "made in Wuchang" musket!
This "attacking the shield with the spear of the son" can be regarded as the end of the shield side's complete victory.

Fortunately, the Qing army on the opposite side still couldn't make such a high-quality overall forged steel armor, so they could only put up to two layers of iron-coated cotton armor on the iron cavalry. This level of defense can still be alone in the face of "Made in Wuchang". Head shot through.

……

Because Jiangning Town is not far from Nanjing, just outside the city, Zhu Shuren can of course inspect it at any time.

Knowing that there are so many new developments, he often goes to the scene to learn about the latest situation as soon as possible.

Jiangning Armory never let him down. Every time he inspected, in addition to the results reported in advance, he was also able to find some unexpected small surprises and small discoveries.
Maybe it's because there are too many achievements. Some people below don't bother to report their achievements in the first place, and want to do more solid work before reporting.

For example, this time in August, Zhu Shuren was originally going to inspect a new batch of "Made in Wuchang" and water-forged breastplates made in Ma'anshan, but he saw the prototypes of two new gadgets at the Jiangning Arsenal.

First of all, the flowering bomb artillery that was developed and put into actual combat last year has finally made new optimization progress-at that time, the Ming army artillery used flowering bombs, mainly relying on low-pressure mortars. With flowering bombs, there is also a problem of relatively low reliability of the fuze.

Now, after more than a year of silent development of warm water boiled frogs, the reliability of the fuze of the flower bomb has been improved. The most important thing is that after the technicians of the arsenal understand the safety of the fuze, they can use it in a relatively small and lightweight On the cannonballs, there are also blooming bombs with time-delay fuzes, which greatly lowers the threshold for using blooming bombs.

The shell of the original blooming shell must be at least one inch thick cast iron to isolate the internal and external gunpowder, so as to avoid the violent shock, high temperature, and overload brought by the external propellant when firing the shell, and detonate the blasting charge inside the shell in advance.

Today, after improved technology and repeated tests, the thickness of the iron shell of the shell can be barely reduced to less than one inch, and the cast iron used has also been slightly improved.

In this way, under the condition of the same shell weight, the heavy artillery can pack more explosives inside to increase the power and damage radius. It can also increase the number of fragments of the shell itself after the shell explodes, killing more soldiers.

This is not the most important thing. The most important thing is that when the quality of the fuze of the original explosive ammunition was poor, the bulky and thick casing made it impossible for the high-mobility artillery of the six-pound cavalry gun level to use the explosive ammunition.

Because the caliber of the six-pound gun is too thin, and the iron casing is so thick, there is no room for gunpowder and iron slag shrapnel inside.So even in the last battle against Duoduo, when Jiang Shoude and Lin Chengcheng bombarded Li Chengdong's troops across the Hengtang River, the cavalry artillery deployed at the front fired iron balls.As for the small number of flowering bullets on the main battlefield, they were all fired by mortars.

Now that the fuze shell has been double-improved, it is finally enough to allow the cavalry cannon to fire explosive bombs. Although the charge is still small and the number of fragments formed after the explosion is also very small, this is a qualitative change from scratch after all. milestone.

Anyway, it is still in the farming period of the truce with the Tartars, and Zhu Shuren still has plenty of time to continue iterative improvements.

After he learned of this breakthrough, he immediately issued another heavy reward, requesting to continue to optimize the technology of cavalry cannon equipped with explosive ammunition. As long as the killing radius of the high-mobility artillery shell can be increased by one foot, he can offer an additional reward of 1000 taels of silver. gold.

If the killing radius can be increased by one foot, why not directly reward the R&D personnel with 1 taels?There is no upper limit to this number. Of course, the safety and reliability of the artillery must be ensured. It is the bottom line not to blindly force the charge to cause the chamber to explode.

……

In addition to the improvement of the stability of the flowering shells and the success of lightweighting, another new achievement in military farming that caught Zhu Shuren's eyes this year is the "rifled gun" that he had previously confessed as a leisurely move.

After all, Zhu Shuren is not the protagonist of an online novel, so there is no need to consider the problem of "reverse cheating to suppress the protagonist's upgrade speed, so as not to grow too fast, the plot will not conflict and the rhythm will collapse, and the writer will make less money".

He is a real and real traveler, of course it is beneficial to him!All the benefits that can be obtained should be eaten dry and wiped clean, and try to obtain as much as possible!
It wasn't that he didn't want to install a rifled gun before, it was because the industrial base couldn't do it, and he didn't understand the technical details.

Therefore, since Daye started to build a military factory two or three years ago, he just casually mentioned a sentence as a casual move, asking the craftsmen to think about the problem of "how to make the conical projectiles fly stably",

And as a kind of thinking inspiration, I casually mentioned a sentence "through rifling to make grooves on the tail of the projectile to stabilize the airflow". It is not necessary to do this specifically, and let the craftsmen do their own experiments.

Rifled guns are really not easy to make. Zhu Shuren only asks for requirements and pays for it, but does not provide ideas for craftsmanship. The first things craftsmen make are naturally very different from the models that have passed the test of history.

For example, this time, Song Mingde swears that after more than two years of leisure debugging by Zhou Tiedan, he finally created a gun with straight rifling lines on the inner wall of the barrel and can carve grooves on the tail of the tapered lead bullet to stabilize the airflow. projectile.

It is also said that after test firing, the range of this kind of projectile can reach three or four hundred steps!It directly doubles the maximum range of the current round projectile smoothbore gun!Although the accuracy is not good, it is barely acceptable.

When Zhu Shuren heard about it, his first reaction was astonishment: Aren’t rifled guns all spiral-rifled?Isn't the purpose just to make the projectile rotate and achieve self-stabilization?What's the use of straight rifling?

But this is actually because he didn't learn history well. In real history, in the early days of rifled guns, there were really straight rifles.Any technology has a relatively primitive and clumsy stage in its infancy.

In the West until the War of Independence in the United States, the British army still used straight-rifled rifles to shoot long-range projectiles to kill French officers. The "Kentucky Long Rifle" of the Mi Army also had a straight-rifled version.

This kind of straight rifling is really useless when launching spherical projectiles, but when launching conical projectiles, at least a few grooves can be carved on the tail of the projectile to form a stable airflow similar to the fletching of arrows when flying. The effect is just not noticeable.

The number of rifling lines in the early rifle guns in history is also varied, and the version produced by Zhu Shuren's craftsmen is obviously influenced by Zhu Shuren's description. Four symmetrical rifling lines,

When firing, it is equipped with a lead bullet with a slightly hollow bottom and a cork plug. The cork pushes forward to squeeze the soft lead into the rifling, ensuring that the tail of the bullet is pressed out with four symmetrical grooves when it is released from the chamber.

To put it bluntly, it means adapting to tapered ammunition similar to Mini bombs. This kind of projectile structure is not difficult. Zhu Shuren also instructed in advance, and the craftsmen have already made it.

After Zhu Shuren inspected the effect of live ammunition shooting, he could only admit that with the straight rifled and tapered Minie ammunition, the shooting range has indeed increased and the flight stability is slightly better, but the accuracy still needs to be found.

However, he also knows that the twist pitch of the spiral rifling is a big problem, and the craftsmen can only try and improve it slowly.Anyway, there is still time before the next large-scale war, and it should be done in a year or two.

Compared with shooting accuracy, when Song Mingde reported this achievement, he said that there is another technical indicator that cannot be greatly improved at all, and that is the loading speed of this rifled gun.

After all, with rifling, it is much more difficult to load ammunition from the muzzle.Moreover, rifled guns are all high-pressure firearms. With the level of technology at the time, it was impossible to carry out post-loading like pistols and short-barreled spray guns. Otherwise, the leakage of gunpowder gas could directly burn the gunner seriously.

The use of Minie bullets can only solve part of the problem of "lead bullets sticking too tightly to the tube wall when stuffed in", but it cannot solve the problem of cleaning up the black powder residue in the rifling line after firing. After five shots, the residue inside can prevent subsequent ammunition from being filled to the bottom and reloaded in place.

Fortunately, Daye Arsenal produced the earliest version of nitrocellulose last year, that is, gun cotton, but the cost was still very expensive at that time, and no particularly suitable application scenarios were found, only a small number of elite revolver cavalry Ammunition equipped with nitrocellulose propellant.

Until the previous battle against Duoduo, the mainstream revolver cavalry of the Ming army still used black powder ammunition.

If rifled guns can make progress in the future, Zhu Shuren can consider spending more on cost and expanding the production capacity of "indigenous sulfuric acid and then nitric acid", so as to expand the production capacity of gun cotton, popularize smokeless propellant for rifled guns, and reduce the cleaning work of brushing the gun chamber quantity.

But no matter how it is optimized, Zhu Shuren made an assessment. In the future, when the war against the Manchus is launched again in the future, the rifled gun with black powder will probably only fire three or five shots in a battle. The reloading speed of each round will also be faster than the current smoothbore. The gun is several times slower.

The current "Made in Wuchang" rifles of the Ming army can already achieve a rate of fire of three to four rounds per minute, and the breech-loading nozzle can even reach six to eight rounds per minute.

As for the black powder rifled gun, it can only be fired every two to three minutes, and after five shots are fired, the chamber must be cleaned slowly and carefully, that is, it will withdraw from the battlefield 3 minutes after the start of the battle.

If you switch to nitrocellulose smokeless powder, you can only guarantee one shot every 2 minutes, and you have to send it back to the rear for maintenance after firing more than a dozen shots.

The rate of fire and reusability are so poor, it is definitely not suitable for aiming and shooting as a large-scale army, and ordinary troops do not need such high precision to line up and shoot.

Therefore, the future positioning of this weapon can only be used as a pre-sniper attack on the battlefield, and strive to concentrate a dozen or even dozens of sniper rifles at a distance of three or four hundred steps, and cover the important generals of the Qing army.

In fact, during the American War of Independence, both sides also used rifled guns in this way. How could they be willing to use them to line up with lobster soldiers? It was not just a general, but at least a lieutenant colonel or something.

Originally, before the arsenal in Jiangning Town was launched, Zhu Shuren assessed that the arsenal in Daye alone could produce at most [-] to [-] "Made in Wuchang" within two years.

Now Jiangning is also getting up. Although the initial output is definitely not as good as that of Daye, by the end of the third year of Longwu, the two sides together can produce at least [-] new smoothbore rifles.

The production capacity occupied by rifled guns will be several times higher than that of smoothbore guns. With the current technological maturity, it takes at least seven or eight smoothbore guns to produce manpower and equipment man-hours in exchange for the production of one rifled gun.It may be more efficient after running-in in the future, but if you want to pursue the problem of spiral rifling twist, there will still be repetitions.

In general, when Zhu Shuren goes to war again in the future, the construction scale of the rifled army is estimated to be in the hundreds or even thousands, which is at least an order of magnitude lower than that of the smoothbore.

……

The industrial and military sectors were farming in such a steady and steady manner, and the time soon entered September of the first year of Longwu.

During the busy autumn harvest season, the expansion and construction of the Ma'anshan Iron Mine also slowed down for a while, reducing the use of migrant manpower and sending those seasonal workers back to harvest crops.Only wait until winter is slack before speeding up the progress.

Anyway, the truce may last at least two years, so there is no need for Zhu Shuren to rush.After many years of catastrophe, agricultural production has always been the most important.

In the land of China in the first year of Longwu, although the successive years of disasters have not yet passed, and the north can continue to suffer from famines for at least two or three years, the south has relatively eased ahead of schedule.

After all, disasters mainly caused by cold are always alleviated first by the south, which is a natural reason.

At least there have been no locusts or major plagues in the south this year. The sanitation work in various places is doing well. After the previous wave of severe epidemics, most people have a little immunity.

The main way of causing disasters due to cold is mainly floods and droughts, especially droughts.However, years of restorative water conservancy construction in the southern region has greatly alleviated this problem.

In contrast, in areas controlled by the Qing government in the north, the agricultural water conservancy system has almost completely collapsed. Some provinces, such as Shanxi and Shanna, have not repaired water conservancy for decades.

So after the autumn harvest was over, Zhu Shuren had a glimpse of the situation reported by the provinces. The famine in Nanming was basically relieved, and the work of raising military rations was still a little more than enough. up.

As for the north, the population decline this year is estimated to be on the order of at least one million. Starvation, plague, and self-organized resistance against the Tartars were killed. The three items add up to at least one million.There are also hundreds of thousands of additional civilians in the north who will continue to flee south into the Ming-controlled area.

According to Dorgon's current fishing frequency, it is estimated that in the second to fourth year of Shunzhi, the population in the north will drop by at least 300 million more than in the first year of Shunzhi.At that time, the total population under Dorgon's control is estimated to be just over 500 million, and the enslaved Han Chinese will be squeezed down to at least 200 million.

After the Ming court in the south had some surplus food, Zhu Shuren would naturally not be idle.Although the large-scale use of troops against the Qing will not resume now, the troops must strengthen training, and the newly reorganized Nanzhili, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang soldiers must be honed to develop combat effectiveness, and there must be opportunities for actual combat exercises, even if it is good to suppress bandits .

So Zhu Shuren thought, taking advantage of the coming winter and next year's winter, it might be possible to carry out a small-scale purge of the areas in the south that have not yet been naturalized. By the way, it will also eradicate internal troubles, further unite and strengthen the control of the court.

It is acceptable to engage in small-scale combat training similar to the old mountain rounds of later generations, as long as the cost is not much higher than the daily off-duty training of the army——

Of course, Zhu Shuren was definitely not determined enough to attack Vietnam in this kind of year. That thing was a quagmire. How much manpower and financial resources Mongolia and Zhu Di had spent in the past is by no means what Zhu Shuren should consider now.

What Zhu Shuren thought of was to take advantage of the cool winter to further integrate the Yunnan-Guizhou area that has not yet been fully controlled, and by the way, to further integrate Li Dingguo and Sun Kewang, the generals and troops who had lost their lives, with the genuine Ming army.

In the southeast, perhaps taking advantage of the winter, Zheng Chenggong can regain the Dayuan area that was completely occupied by the Dutch the year before last.

Historically, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming court had never been able to control the officials, but the Dutch did not always have complete control.Until the 15th year of Chongzhen, Dayuan Island was dominated by Spanish and Dutch forces, occupying important seaports in the south and north of the island respectively.

Fifteen years after Chongzhen, the Dutch used force to expel and force-land all the Spaniards on the island. They have only gained a foothold on the island for two years now, so it is definitely much easier to fight now than at the same time in history.

Historically, it took another 16 years for Zheng Chenggong to plan to regain the top officials. At that time, the Dutch had been operating the whole island for nearly 20 years, and the western-style castle fortresses in places like Chixian City and Dagou Port had also been built for more than ten years. It was much more difficult to attack by force, so that Zheng Chenggong could only besiege and run out of food. The last defenders of Chixian City surrendered because they were too hungry.

If we went to fight 16 years in advance, where would there be fortresses such as Chixian City on Dayuan Island?Nowadays, they are still some simple fortifications of wooden fences. (The Spaniards built the "Santo Domingo City" on the island in 1628. It was a Western-style stone fort fortress, but when the Dutch attacked and wiped out the Spaniards in 1643, they only attacked by bombardment. In 1644, the Dutch People tried to rebuild it on the original site, which was the "Fort Antony" in history, and it is only the second year after the Dutch started construction.)

Considering these favorable factors, in September, Zhu Shuren decided to convene the main confidants and staff to discuss the winter operations in the past two years, and set a timetable for the integration of Yunnan, Guizhou and senior officials.

Moreover, cost savings must also be taken into account, so that the national treasury must not be empty, and the great cause of fighting against the Qing Dynasty must not be affected in the future.

(End of this chapter)