Chapter 550
Coming out of the [Praying Silver Building], Ouyang Shuo turned and left Wangcheng, walking towards the Nancheng District.
Nancheng District is the expanded military industrial zone.
Research Institute No. 7 is located here.
It has been a month since the Black Snake Guard found the "Ming Dynasty Firearms Manufacturing Technical Manual" from the Tianwang Palace, and I don't know how Liu Mo and others are doing with this manual.
Back in Shanhai City, Ouyang Shuo naturally went to inspect it.
Firearms represent the highest level and main direction of the territory's future technology.
There are two main categories of firearms in the Ming Dynasty: the first category is fire blunderbuss and bird blunderbuss, which are fired by hand. Two hundred steps.
Converted into meters, the farthest is two to three hundred meters.
Among the firecrackers, the more representative ones include the three-eyed blunderbuss, Lianzi blunderbuss, kidnapper blunderbuss, Thunderbolt blunderbuss, Wulei Shenji, Lumi blunderbuss and so on.
Among them, I have to mention the Kidnap Gun.
The Kidnapper Gun is a continuous-firing matchlock gun with a crank, 37.5 cm long. It uses a loading method similar to the Francophone. It can be fired three times in a row and has a range of 150 meters. It was called "Wansheng Francophone" in the Ming Dynasty.
It can be said that the Kidnap Gun is already the closest fire gun to Western muskets.
The second category is the cannons with large caliber and shape installed on the frame and fired. Most of the barrels are filled with stones, lead, iron, etc., commonly known as "solid bullets", and a few are filled with explosive pellets. The range is generally several The distance from one hundred steps to two or three miles is mainly used for defending villages and sieges, and is also used for field battles, water battles and naval battles.
It was the second type of artillery that Hong Xiuquan mainly conquered before.
Tianjing City's cannons have all been transported to Shanhai City for physical research by No. 7 Research Institute.
Among the artillery pieces of the Ming Dynasty, the more representative ones include the Tiger Crouching Cannon, the Franji Cannon and the Hongyi Cannon.
Among them, the Hongyi Cannon, known as the General Cannon, was manufactured by introducing Western technology at the end of Ming Dynasty. It has ears and sights, and the range can be adjusted. The cannon body has a long life.
In addition to firecrackers and cannons, there is another type of firearms, namely rockets, including cluster rockets, divine fire flying crows, fire dragons out of water, and so on.
The sacred fire flying crow is filled with gunpowder in the crow shape, and the gunpowder line is passed out in the gunpowder, and is connected in series with the gunpowder in the take-off rocket powder cartridge.
When launching, first ignite the gunpowder line of the rocket to make the rocket fly to the enemy, and detonate the gunpowder in the crow's body, killing and burning the enemy's troops, which is a sharp weapon for breaking the formation and attacking the city.
The fire dragon comes out of water, as the name suggests, it is a sharp weapon for water warfare.
It is a multi-stage rocket in the Ming Dynasty. The first-stage rocket is tied outside the paper paste tube, and the second-stage rocket is inside the dragon mouth. After being shot, the range is increased to hit the enemy ship. It is used for water attacks. The range can reach 1.5 kilometer.
It seems that the firearms of the Ming Dynasty were extremely developed and comprehensive, and could be used in actual combat. However, compared with the West at the same time, it is more than one grade worse.
First of all, the guns.
The three-eyed blunderbuss was the mainstream blunderbuss of the Ming Dynasty, but its real killing range was less than ten meters, and it was only powerful within a distance of two feet, and it was not accurate at all, only one shot missed It can also be used as a mallet for melee advantages.
Let’s talk about the kidnapper gun mentioned above. This is a musket imported from the West in the Ming Dynasty. Unfortunately, it was basically impossible to imitate due to the technological level at that time.
Even if the imitation is successful, both safety performance and power will be greatly discounted.
The first one is the material.
As far as metallurgy is concerned, the Chinese use very little pig iron and wrought iron, and the barrels of muskets must be forged with wrought iron or steel, which made the Chinese extremely embarrassed, and finally had to give up.
And this point has already been resolved by Shanhai City.
Before Ouyang Shuo left Shanhai City, he had already started to arrange the steel industry. So far, the ten steelmaking plants he planned have all been constructed and put into operation one by one.
The Ministry of Finance spends a huge amount of gold coins every month and buys millions of tons of iron ore and coal, which is enough to support the production needs of the steel plant in the early stage.
Let's talk about artillery.
The so-called tiger squatting cannon, because of the tragedy of metallurgical technology, made the barrel so thick that it can only shoot a stone pellet the size of a billiard ball 100 meters, and there is no way to adjust the distance, and it doesn't even have a wheel.
The magic weapon, the Francophone, is a small naval gun on a small Western merchant ship that has been eliminated. It is called "a toy for sailors who have no actual combat ability", but this thing became a great firearm when it was passed down to the Ming Dynasty.
For the Ming Dynasty, the Frang machine was an ultra-high-tech product that exceeded its national technological capabilities. Without the guidance of foreigners, it could not even be produced.
Moreover, domestic Langji often exploded, and the number of people killed by the bombing far exceeded the number of enemies killed by the bombardment.
It can be described as a complete tragedy.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Western technology was introduced, and the counterfeit Hongyi cannon was the most powerful firearm in the entire Ming Dynasty. In essence, there is no difference between the Hongyi Cannon and the Dafo Langji, except that it is longer and bigger.
However, the quality of casting large cannons in the Ming Dynasty was very low, and the quality was very bad. The large cannons cast were often cracked waste products, so it was necessary to ask foreigners for help to gradually cast them successfully, but the quality was still low, so the cannons were extremely thick. The cast red cannons were mostly more than two meters long. They were giant cannons in the Ming Dynasty at that time. They were said to have a range of ten miles, but they were actually only about one mile.
In contrast, the super mobile artillery cast by the Mongolian Mughal Dynasty is three meters high, the barrel is 20 meters long, weighs 50 tons, and has a shooting range of more than 20 kilometers.
There is simply no comparison between the two.
Therefore, after Ouyang Shuo got the "Ming Dynasty Firearms Manufacturing Technical Manual", he never thought about manufacturing all kinds of firearms in the manual one by one.
Although it is actually not difficult at all for the current Shanhai City to achieve this.
What Ouyang Shuo wanted was to use the "Ming Dynasty Firearms Manufacturing Technical Manual" as the model, combined with Shanhai City's existing scientific research strength, to upgrade and transform the firearms again.
His goal in the first stage was to develop a firearm that could catch up with the average western level, and a new matching artillery piece.
That's all.
As for other things like firecrackers and rockets, Ouyang Shuo really didn't have the time to think about it.
Only in this way can Ouyang Shuo lead the China region. In future national wars, he will not repeat the humiliating tragedies in history because of the vastly backward weapons and equipment.
To achieve this, Shanhai City must establish a complete set of relatively complete industrial systems. Building a steel plant is just the most basic step in the industrial system.