Hearing the figures reported by Shen Yong, Min Yuanqi frowned greatly.

This number is certainly not enough.

It takes a year to get 2,000 armor, and the officers and soldiers of one battalion are not enough, not to mention that Min Yuanqi's goal is to train at least two battalions of soldiers into elites within a year?

At this rate, when the Qing army goes south next year, only about forty percent of the soldiers of the two battalions can be equipped with armor, and the rest can only wear the collected cotton armor to fight with the Qing army.

In fact, about forty percent of the iron armor with the rate is already quite high, at least in the Ming army there are only a few elite troops, most of them are family members have such treatment.

If it is an ordinary battalion soldier, only three or four percent of the 10,000 people have to wear cotton armor or leather armor, and the rest are without armor or even helmets.

What does it matter if those cannon fodder, with or without armor?

And Min Yuanqi regards his subordinates as family members, if he can't achieve full armor, Min Yuanqi is not at ease to bring his brothers to the battlefield.

Shen Yong in front of him was a little uneasy, but he was helpless.

There are only a few hundred iron blades made in the workshop here, and according to Min Yuanqi's instructions, the iron blades should be made as big as possible, and the thickness should be increased as much as possible.

The Ming army also had armor, quite thin iron blades, and the protection ability was very poor.

If the workmanship is poor, it is easy to be broken on the battlefield, and the armor is directly broken after cutting the hemp rope is useless.

The nails produced by Shen Yong's workshop have large and thick blades, which can save time in the process of forging leaf holes and threading ropes. If it is the kind of small iron leaf armor, it also has to tie thousands of iron leaves, and then use a complex process to thread the rope, and the process of making the armor is only slightly lighter than the scale armor.

If the number of blacksmiths here in Min Yuanqi increased tenfold to hundreds, and the number of apprentices was thousands, Min Yuanqi would have set up a blacksmith shop for more than ten miles outside Shenyang like the Jurchens, forging fine iron weapons and iron armor day and night.

The Jurchens' armor-making skills may not have surpassed that of the Ming army, after all, most of their blacksmiths came from the original craftsmen of the Liaodong Guard. However, its supervision and management is ten times stricter than that of the Ming army, a hundred times, and the quality of the iron armor it creates is qualified.

This is the advantage of a small barbaric new state, which can devote all its energy and national strength to the matter of conquest. Even in the era of the old slaves, there were only a few cavalrymen with armor and horses, and the followers without horses and armor were the mainstream of the Eight Banners, but by the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, the Jurchens turned all the wealth of the Liaodong Han people and the five raids into war potential.

More people are there to grow the land and store grain.

More materials are used to craft weapons and armor.

Of course, the Jurchens also built a large number of qualified artillery, and quickly mastered it, achieving the advantage of sharing artillery with the Ming army.

The soldiers of the Eight Banners have achieved that everyone has armor, especially the iron armor of a small number of Ge Bush Shixian and the Swing Tooth La, all of which are high-grade scale armor made by stacking armor leaf technology, especially the silver armor of the Swing Tooth Lap Soldier, which is also the silver armor of the white armor soldiers, which is quite eye-catching in the records of the Ming people.

After the conquest of Mongolia, the Eight Banners also solved the problem of lack of horses, and a large number of war horses continued to be imported, and the Eight Banners had basically completed the cavalry.

Elite iron long soldiers, thick and strong armor, full cavalry, with artillery, with a large number of elite elites in a hundred battles, with firm will, up and down with one heart, orders and prohibitions.

Such an opponent, at a time when Han culture was declining and regressing, was indeed a very difficult opponent to deal with.

But the shortcoming of Eight Banners is that the number of dingkou is too small.

Even if it is supplemented by capturing the savage Jurchen Dingkou, there are also the Eight Banners of the Han Army and the Eight Banners of the Mongols, plus the servants of King Sanshun, and all the Jurchens have entered the customs, and the number is more than 100,000 people.

It is also necessary to divide troops to seize land, fight several battlefields together, and then divide troops to garrison strategic places, and the number of Manchurian Eight Banners, which was less than 70,000 Ding at the beginning of the pass, was simply not enough.

Around five years after Shunzhi, Azig, Haoge, Duoduo and other kings returned to Beijing, and Jiangnan to Hangzhou and other places, adding up to only 15,000 real Manchuria garrisons.

Even if the Eight Banners are all strong and sharp, such a small number of people, if the Ming Dynasty is not wasted to the extreme, it will not have no chance.

When Min Yuanqi stood by the river for a long time, he secretly established or strengthened his beliefs.

I want to give myself, these familiar people of Dahewei, and the entire Ming and Huaxia a chance.

The more than 10,000 soldiers and horses who led the army to resist the south, at most about 20,000.

Among them, there are also the servants of Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming, the Han army, whose combat power is far from that of the Eight Banners of Manchuria.

The Manchurian soldiers of the Duoduo headquarters were seven or eight thousand at most.

Min Yuanqi had a feeling that if he could also achieve a strong military advantage, and create an elite of more than 10,000 people in three battalions, it would not be impossible to take advantage of the favorable location and people to compete with the Qing soldiers in the south.

If so, it is equivalent to keeping a place south of the Yangtze River.

If you use your own strength and a little change to bring back a little luck in Huaxia, give Daming a little chance, and also give thousands of people who will be insulted, enslaved and slaughtered in the future.

Min Yuanqi thought to himself that he was not the kind of person who could sacrifice himself to defend others, even if he sacrificed himself for the rebirth of the Ming Nirvana, Min Yuanqi was absolutely unwilling.

But if there is a slight opportunity to seize, taking a certain risk can save Huaxia's luck, even if it is a person like Min Yuanqi who wants to protect himself after being reborn and takes the opportunity to go south, he is willing to try.

This is a feeling, a kind of inheritance, a deep-rooted thing in the depths of the soul, as long as it is a Chinese person, even if it is a reborn, this feeling and inheritance is still hidden in the body, as long as there is a slight opportunity will emerge, like the weeds on the bank of the Huai River, experiencing the harsh winter of ice and snow, and in spring, the weather will warm up a little, and it will emerge tenaciously.

It's just that the speed of the iron armor casting in front of him obviously broke Min Yuanqi's original abacus.

With the current financial and material resources, it is difficult to find more blacksmiths and recruit more apprentices.

The entire system built by Min Yuanqi needs the support of financial and material resources, and now the first phase of the project has been completed by the expansion of Yanchi, and it will take a long time to complete the second phase, and it is also necessary for the Zhu family to continue to develop new trade routes in order to continue to ship.

Farmland water conservancy is also in progress, and it will take half a year to see results.

The rest of the financial resources are also being considered for development, such as sea trade, if financial resources allow, Min Yuanqi plans to ask Min Qiande and Han Sen and others to build large sea ships for sea trade.

Shipbuilding is not a difficult task here at Yunti Pass, although the shipyard of the guard is in the Huai'an Acropolis, but the maintenance is the business of the flag army, and it is also the errand of the flag army to go north. When the shipyard started to build a new boat, it was also the flag soldiers under the guard to help, and the craftsmen under the guard were also working in the shipyard, and there were many veterans who had worked in the shipyard for many years here at the Yunti Pass.

As long as you gather cloth, wood, nails, tung oil and other necessary materials for shipbuilding, it is not difficult to build a sea ship.

After all, this was once the outlet to the sea in the Yuan Dynasty, and there has been a tradition of shipbuilding and going to sea from the Yuan Dynasty to the beginning of the Ming Dynasty.

Min Yuanqi hesitated because the sea trade is now controlled by the Zheng family, and the economic crisis in Spain is there, the trade volume is shrinking, and the Dutch are hostile to the Zheng family, suppressing and shrinking the trade quota with China.

The Zheng family also sent Zheng Cai and others to lead troops to serve in Nanjing, and after the fall of Nanjing, Zheng Zhilong's ambitions swelled, and he took over the power after the establishment of Emperor Longwu, and there were many unsubordinate measures.

After the Qing army went south, Zheng Zhilong quickly surrendered, abandoning his hundreds of thousands of subordinates and thousands of warships.

The result was also declining, his son Zheng Chenggong insisted on resisting the Qing, and Zheng Zhilong was ordered to be executed by the angry Qing court.

Later, the Zheng family also declined at sea, mainly because of the trade blockade that the Dutch continued for decades, and after Zheng Chenggong went to Taiwan, the Zheng family's trade route was only Japan after the lockdown, and the trade volume was quite limited.

Zheng Chenggong had to reduce the size of the naval division in Tuntian, Taiwan, and after Zheng Jing, the Zheng family had to deal with both the Qing army and the Dutch naval division at sea, and the declining Zheng family naval division was finally defeated by the Qing naval division in Penghu, and China's last hope for the sea was also wiped out by the Western colonizers and the barbarian regime of their own country.

Min Yuanqi was not in a hurry to build a sea ship because this fashion was out of place.

"How's the chain mail?" Min Yuanqi said to Shen Yong: "Do you have a clue about the hydraulic wire drawing machine you mentioned before?" ”

If Min Yuanqi can accept to settle for the next best, it is also within the scope of consideration to make a batch of chain mail.

Chainmail is not under the armor against arrows and slashes, but it is weaker than the armor when stabbed. However, a large number of gunmen and pikemen wore chain mail, and the pikemen were equipped with some stuns, arm guards, and shin guards, and their defensive ability was not bad.

The focus is on mass production.

The Ming Dynasty did not click on the technology tree in the metal drawing technology, and the chain mail did not have mature technology until the Ming and Qing dynasties, the output was extremely low, and the manufacturing process was quite complex.

At the same time, due to the popularity of hydraulic wire drawing machines in Europe, the manufacture of chain mail was quite easy.

Shen Yong said with a look of shame: "Lord Hui, I really haven't figured it out yet. As far as wire drawing is concerned, we have two methods before, one is to draw and cut the ring by hand, and the other is to forge and burn the thin red iron sheet, and then cut the wire while it is hot, and then create a ring buckle, which is buckled one by one. The villain said that he had heard of this craft, and Dengzhou Town had not built chain mail at the beginning, because the villain had not seen this craft with his own eyes. The hydraulic wire drawing machine explained by the adult, the villain and others have discussed it many times, and now they haven't figured it out, so it's really ashamed. ”

Min Yuanqi has already explained the matter of the hydraulic wire drawing machine, but Shen Yong and Chen De and others have tried again and again, and the hydraulic flushing has been involved, and everyone has understood the principle, but to turn the theory into practice, these craftsmen obviously do not have this ability at present.

Min Yuanqi was slightly disappointed, he originally thought that hydraulic wire drawing and hydraulic boring machine plus hydraulic forging mallet were easy to make, but now it seems that he has taken it for granted.

"It's okay, you can always think of a way." Min Yuanqi said to Shen Yong: "The important thing about chain mail is the iron ring, you can always think of a way, it is easier to get the iron ring, and the rest of the things will be easy to do." ”