There is no fixed study address in the officer academy, and the main classroom is temporarily in the barracks, and a few tents can be set up. The first batch of cadets were all soldiers recommended by the commander-in-chief of the barracks, and the number was not large, only fifty-five people. However, these fifty-five people are also carefully selected, and most of them can read.

The Academy is taught in four main areas:

The first is to improve the cultural literacy of the students, which is naturally to let them read and write; the second is to teach the chapters of "The Art of War", not so that they can understand the meaning, but so that the students can know the meaning of the various chapters of "The Art of War", to put it bluntly, it is just a translation of "The Art of War";

The third aspect is political edification, which instills in officers some principles of "loyalty, righteousness, faithfulness, and courage." This aspect is to invite old masters from official schools to give lectures; as for the fourth aspect, it is actual combat exercises, which usually allow the students to freely exert their leadership ability, and also let the experienced generals of the Yuejia Army to guide them.

For the time being, the Military Academy only offers a crash course, and the first phase lasts for four months.

When the conditions are ripe in the future, the officer academy will add regular classes and advanced classes-

After another half a month, the first textile factory of Guanghua military and civilian enterprises was established. This is a factory set up by the people of the Guanghua Army themselves, and of course it is also in response to the government's call to prepare winter clothes. Although the textile factory is relatively simple, most of the raw materials have to be purchased from Xiangyang City, and then hand-sewn a set of ready-made garments.

Because autumn is coming, winter is not too far away.

The common people of the Gwanghwa Army are in need of winter clothes. All the clothes produced by the textile factory were sold to the common people on credit for the time being, and of course, the government naturally came forward as a guarantee. All the clothes on credit must be repaid by the beginning of the next spring, otherwise the government will take back the land as a punishment.

In fact, the price of a shirt is not too expensive, and Zhou Bo believes that in the next few months, all the ordinary people of the Guanghua Army will have more or less income, and it is still not a problem to repay debts.

In addition, the black caravan also approached Zhou Bo during this time and asked to immediately buy a piece of land in the Guanghua Army to build a warehouse and caravan stronghold.

After some negotiations, the black caravan reached an agreement with Zhou Bo to allocate an area of 100 acres of vacant land in the suburbs north of the Gwanghua Military City and sell it to the black caravan in the form of a one-time sale. At the same time, in this hundred acres of idle land, the black caravan has absolute sovereignty, and whoever dares to trespass can cut it first.

After hearing this request, the first impression that came to Zhou Bo's mind was that the concept of the black caravan was very similar to that of the United States for hundreds of years, with such an emphasis on land ownership. Of course, the black caravan has its own reasons for doing this, which he can understand, after all, the smuggling business carried out by the black caravan, many commodities that cannot be seen in public must be kept strictly secret, and no horses must be exposed.

This 100 acres of black caravan was sold for 3,000 taels of silver, which was quite a huge amount. In a border city like the Guanghua Army, the land is actually worthless, and at a price of 3,000 taels, you can even buy a hundred acres of high-grade fertile land in Lin'an City.

After Zhou Bo received this money, although he felt a little strange in his heart, since the black caravan was rich and willing to give so much, and he happened to be short of silver, why not do it?

In addition, the construction of the warehouse by the black caravan was also to recruit manpower from the Guanghua Army on the spot, which temporarily solved the employment problem of some of the ordinary people of the Guanghua Army.

By the end of July, all iron ore operations were completed.

After 10 days of exploration, the mine has collapsed several times, and several veins have been buried, leaving only two less wealthy veins to continue mining. But these are not problems, the steam engine has been converted into an excavator, and it can open up the few buried veins at any time.

After the ruling of the craftsmen, the mine can accommodate 150 people at the same time, and the number of miners recruited has reached more than 500. However, the Ministry of Mines did not screen these craftsmen, but hired them all. According to a team of 150 people, it is divided into three teams, and one team only works for four hours a day, rotating to mine, twelve hours a day.

The surplus 50 workers were transferred to take charge of the logistics of the miners and the transportation of ore.

Before the official mining, the Academy of Sciences gave all miners a simple training for ten days, including the use of tools (steam engines, hoes, etc.), as well as self-rescue measures in the event of an emergency in the mine. Of course, if a mining disaster really happens, I don't know if these methods will work, just for a comfort.

Once everything is ready, the mining of iron ore begins.

At the end of June, he called on the people of the Guanghua Army to open some smelters or something, but obviously the smelters are not so easy, not only need special tools, but also require a certain amount of craftsmanship. So to this day, there has been no response from the people.

As a last resort, Zhou Bo had no choice but to take out all the 3,000 taels of silver he earned from selling the land to the black caravan, purchased a lot of raw materials from Xiangyang City, Ezhou City and Jiangzhou City, and set up twelve furnaces and kilns in the small county town outside the Guanghua Military City. At the same time, he also asked the Academy of Sciences to immediately start training apprentices to learn smelting and blacksmithing!!

The order requiring the training of apprentices in smelting and forging was originally only an order issued internally to the Academy of Sciences, but I don't know what happened, and the news spread throughout the Gwanghua Army. Spreading the news is not a big deal, but the consequences of this news are enormous.

Now that the Guanghua Army has basically recovered, the common people are eager to live and work in peace and contentment. However, the purpose of "living in peace" has been achieved for the time being, but "happy work" has not yet been expected. Many of the idle labor forces in the city are waiting to be used and mobilized. Therefore, when the common people heard that the government was in urgent need of blacksmiths, they immediately followed the trend and began to learn the blacksmith craft.

For a while, the Guanghua army immediately set off a blacksmith craze.

But this matter is not a bad thing, at least Zhou Bo understands it this way.

Because in his vision, when the resources of iron ore are sufficient, the livelihood of the Guanghua Army will also develop steadily, and he will inevitably vigorously provide for the development of industry.

In his plan, he already intends to build the first arsenal within two months. Iron and copper are smelted to produce steel, which is then used to make weapons.

When industry is booming, it is natural that a very large number of workers are needed to support the production line. In ancient times, there was no automatic mechanical production, let alone any streamline production mode, and all mass production required manpower-based.

In the following time, Zhou Bo would draw some drawings of new weapons every night in the house. He had wanted to try his hand at some advanced weapons, such as thermal weapons such as muskets or cannons. It's a pity that I haven't been exposed to many things of this kind in the 21 st century, and I don't understand the principles of firearms at all.

Naturally, he could not take out the drawings without any basis and let the Academy of Sciences develop them, which would only waste materials, manpower and time.

Although muskets and cannons are not good at inventing the earth, he still remembers the physics class he took in middle school and clearly understood the principle of bomb explosion. The explosion principle of the bomb is actually to use gunpowder to explode in a limited space, causing the expansion of power and causing the space to burst.

If the outer skin of the explosives is a glass jar, once the gunpowder is ignited, the force of the gunpowder expands rapidly inside the glass jar, and the glass jar can be shattered, and the fragments of the glass jar fly everywhere, which can cause lethality.

Of course, this is just a ********. During the Xinhai Revolution at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, the bombs made by the revolutionaries were almost of this type, as long as the raw materials were sufficient, one person could make hundreds of such bombs in one night. However, the safety of this ******** is low, and the power of the explosion is not considerable.

In fact, during the current Song and Jin wars, the Jin people had already invented the bomb as a weapon.

It is said that at the beginning of the 13th century, the Jin people learned to make firearms and invented iron bombs, which the Jin people called "earth-shaking thunder" and the Song people called it "iron artillery".

This kind of bomb is launched with a stone thrower, and the shell is made of pig iron, and there are four types: jar-shaped, gourd-shaped, round-shaped, and bowl-shaped. Among them, the canister-type earth-shaking thunder, with a small mouth and a thick body, a shell thickness of 2 inches, contains gunpowder, and has a fuse. Thrown or launched, the explosion is like thunder, and the shrapnel explodes, which can penetrate the iron armor, and the lethality is quite large. In 1221, when the Jin soldiers attacked Qizhou, they bombarded the Song army with earth-shattering thunder.

In 1232, the Mongol soldiers attacked Jin Nanjing (now Kaifeng, Henan), and under the cover of the siege equipment "cowhide cave", they dug the city wall, and the defenders of the city began to counterattack with arrows and stones, but to no avail. Jin Bing then used a "earth-shaking thunder" to hang down with iron cables along the city wall, and after the fire, "its sound was like thunder, and it was heard hundreds of miles away." The Mengshi soldiers who were besieging the city and digging the wall under the city, along with the "cowhide hole" for protection, were blown to pieces. At that time, the explosion power of the "earth-shaking thunder" was very amazing.

And in 1277, the Mongol Ali Hague attacked Guangxi, the Song general Ma Ji led the troops to guard Jingjiang (now Guilin, Guangxi), three months later Jingjiang fell, Ma Ji's general Lou Zhan led 250 people to retreat to Yuecheng, the Mongol soldiers surrounded Yuecheng for more than ten days, Lou stubbornly defended and did not surrender. At this time, due to the lack of food in the city, it was difficult for more than 200 soldiers to continue to hold on.

Lou Chan stood on the city wall and shouted, "We are too hungry to go out of the city and surrender, if we are given something to eat, we can obey our orders." The Mongols believed it and sent some cattle and some rice, and Lou's men took the food and closed the gates. The Mongols climbed high to lookout, only to see that the Song soldiers were busy cooking rice and slaughtering cattle, each doing their own thing. After eating, the Song soldiers were full of strength, so they blew their horns and beat the snare drums, and the Mongol soldiers thought they were going to fight, and they were ready to fight. I saw that the Song soldiers rushed out of a large artillery, lit the fuse, immediately exploded, the sound was like thunder, deafening, the smoke of gunpowder was filled, the city wall collapsed, the Mongolian soldiers looked closely, more than 200 Song soldiers were killed, and even the Mongolian soldiers guarding outside the city were also killed. This shows the power of this iron artillery.

Of course, the reason why the Song soldiers were killed first was most likely due to improper operation of the artillery, and the situation of exploding the chamber occurred.

The so-called "iron artillery" in ancient times was completely different from the cannons equipped by modern armies, and the artillery at that time was now nothing more than a large landmine, with a bulky shape and strong explosiveness, but it did not have the ability to fire. At that time, with the help of a stone thrower or manual throwing, the throwing distance was limited, and the target was difficult to be accurate, so it was mostly used to blow up the enemy's city defense facilities, and was most used in the battle of attacking and defending the city.

Although it is said that the Jin people invented such powerful firearms, all the gunpowder used by the Jin people was made by the Han people who surrendered, and the Jin people themselves did not produce gunpowder.

Moreover, the biggest role of such "iron artillery" is not to kill and injure the enemy, but to use people to deter the enemy.

In ancient times, people were all lonely and unheard, and they were superstitious, and the loud noise produced by the explosion of the "iron artillery" made people who did not know anything mistakenly think that some gods, demons, and monsters were at work, and it was very easy to hit people's hearts and morale.

Zhou Bo is not worried at all that the Jin people will use these things against him, and it will be almost seventy or eighty years before the Jin people learn to have firearms. As long as he can make firearms in advance and use them on the battlefield against the Jin people first, it will inevitably make the Jin people panic.

Therefore, although he can't improve the ********, as long as the bomb can make a loud noise, it doesn't matter if the killing effect is not ideal-

Two months have passed, and the Guanghua Army is in an orderly development.

Iron ore mining is in full swing, and every fifteen days, a batch of iron ore is transported back to the city for smelting.

The smelting workshop tried to mix copper and iron together to smelt according to Zhou Bo's plan, and sure enough, a completely new metal was smelted. Steel is of much better quality than both iron and copper, is hard and elastic, and does not rust easily yet. In the past two months, a total of one ton of steel has been produced, of course, because hundreds of pounds of raw materials were wasted in the test stage, so it was ignored.

It's a pity that iron ore can be mined, but copper is not easy to get. In the past, copper was smelted from discarded weapons in the city, but now that copper is gone, the work of smelting steel bars has to be suspended. The smelting workshop could only continue to smelt the ore into iron, during which pig iron and wrought iron were available as needed.

Zhou Bo plans to use the only ton of steel to train it into weapons. The quality of steel is much better than that of iron and copper, and the lethality on the battlefield of cold weapons will definitely greatly exceed that of previous weapons.

Therefore, in order to cooperate with the forging of weapons, he decisively opened the first arsenal in Nanxian County, named Xiangyang Ordnance Institute. The Ordnance Institute has opened three departments, the first is cold weapon forging, the second is gunpowder manufacturing, and the third is large weapons research and development.

The Xiangyang Ordnance Institute is subordinate to the Academy of Sciences and is listed as a government unit at the same level as the Ministry of Mines. The establishment of the Ordnance Institute immediately led to the use of human resources in the Guanghua Army and solved the employment problem of a large number of ordinary people. Earlier, because of the craze for learning blacksmith skills, the blacksmith's resources were very abundant, and it took only three days for the armory to recruit 500 craftsmen.

Of course, these craftsmen have only learned the basics of blacksmithing, and they can do physical work, but it will be difficult for them to invent zào.

For this reason, half a month after the establishment of the Xiangyang Ordnance Institute, Zhou Bo attached himself to the Xiangyang Ordnance Institute to open a continuing education college, named "Xiangyang Ordnance Technology School". This "Xiangyang Ordnance Technology School", like the "Army Academy", was very simple at the beginning, and it was completely held in the factory of the Ordnance Institute.

The purpose of opening the "Xiangyang Ordnance Craft School" is to improve the invention and creativity of craftsmen, so that they can think actively, not be limited to form, do not regard themselves as individual workers, and do not want to forge ahead. In this "Xiangyang Ordnance Technology School", thirteen craftsmen of the Academy of Sciences became teachers, and at the same time, Zhou Boyi would personally teach some of the laws of industrial science in the 21st century when he had free time. (To be continued.) )