After the confrontation in February, Zhang Lixin did not organize his team to expand his territory or attack the county seat. Knowing that the nails near Shengxian Village in Mancheng County were not easy to touch, and after temporarily consuming the necessary resources, there was no Ming army brigade to attack this area.

It's just that after this impossible to conceal the war, many people know that this area seems to be a "bandit area", and it is no longer as convenient for individual or sporadic teams to go out to buy and sell and buy supplies.

In the whole confrontation, a lot of firecrackers and even gunpowder were lost, but a lot of artillery and artillery ammunition discarded by the other side were also captured. It's just that the "net profit from seizures" as expected before is not much, but it is just that a lot of inferior gunpowder that cannot be used as gunpowder at all is consumed, and a lot of gunpowder is seized, so the quality structure has been improved.

At the beginning, Zhang Lixin tried to make the gunpowder craftsmen of the craftsman team "work carefully", and on average, about one gram of gunpowder weighed about three or four kilometers on average, the density and fineness were determined by self-made "standardized small balances". Among them, the quality is reliable and valuable, and the particles that are neither too large nor too small are screened out with two kinds of sieves, and the rest are re-ground and re-processed.

In such a situation, five or six hours a day is busy, and it is often necessary to re-prepare about 200 grams of black powder for six or seven taels.

At the beginning, those craftsmen and even many people who came to help felt that Zhang Lixin was going to "buy meat from Zhenguanxi" - purely to find fault. It is even harsher than Naruti to let the town of Guanxi chop meat.

Fortunately, Zhang Lixin also expected this, so he explained at the beginning: "When I was in the Weiyuan Battalion, I understood this truth from the preparation and actual combat: gunpowder weapons are different from the previous combat mode. Fine and accurate is combat effectiveness, and a slight miss can be a thousand miles. Spend a little more effort on accuracy, and your combat effectiveness on the battlefield will be significantly enhanced... ”

However, it seemed useless to say, and in the end, Zhang Lixin could only inform the entire artisan battalion: In the future, if there is a war, the artisan battalion will also be incorporated into the combat team to meet the enemy together. And after understanding that this kind of work does not require technical content that is difficult for ordinary people to achieve, but only an attitude, Zhang Lixin also took out more manpower to make relevant preparations.

What makes Zhang Lixin feel gratified is that his teaching to the entire team has not been in vain these days, and the soldiers in the company are obviously much more receptive to their seemingly harsh requirements, although many people are not strong in their hands-on ability, but the actual efficiency is not worse than those old workers.

In addition to the careful and patient preparation of gunpowder, Zhang Lixin also tried his best to "keep improving" in the specifications of lead bullets, and also made special balances and volume measuring tools. According to the plan, even if 300 kilograms of better quality gunpowder and about 800 kilograms of various ammunition are prepared within a month or so, it should be enough to improve the combat effectiveness of the entire team considerably.

It's just that when the artillery firing drill and test were carried out on the spot, a lot of waste was discovered. Cheng Hai, who was in charge of this matter, was inspired by Zhang Lixin: "The shotguns that hit the area are often unevenly distributed. A lot of it is outside of the ideal scattering area. It would be nice if the boxy ones could be roughly evenly distributed... ”

When discussing the specifications of the newly prepared artillery, Zhang Wen bluntly proposed: "If the enemy is equipped with a large number of artillery carriages with shields to fight me during the day, I think we should try to avoid this kind of battle. In this case, the enemy artillery must not be moving fast, rather than focusing all its resources on dealing with this unnecessarily occurring possibility. As long as it is not a team that engages our army repeatedly, with the attitude that most opponents do not care so much about their business. Our long-range firearms should still be based on the opponent who is not too perfect to defend and shield the opponent with vehicle shields... ”

Of course, in the planning and design of firearms, no one can compare with Zhang Lixin, and many people do not have much awareness in this regard because of the inertia of thinking.

After many on-the-spot tests with a large slingshot through the seizure of equipment and horses, Zhang Lixin finally found that even a sheep or horse wearing a decent armor covered with iron cotton armor would be smashed to the ground by a buckshot thrown from a distance of four or five hundred meters, and he could not stand up. It's just that you won't be smashed into the flesh to form a more terrifying injury. As long as it is a target without plate armor protection, six taels of lead bullets with a range of 2 to 300 meters, or about 3 or 200 grams of lead bullets with a range of about one mile, can smash and fall down at the level of the "ancient regular army" level, and there is a high probability of internal injuries above the degree of fracture. If the power is a little smaller, although it can also cause most of the injuries, it seems to be a little unsafe.

During the trial production of firearms, the specifications were not determined by more guesswork as in the past, but it took more than 10 catties of gunpowder and hundreds of test firings before they were finally determined: the length of the body tube should be about 40 centimeters long by one foot, and the weight of the body tube was determined to be about one catty, and it was completely feasible to fire shells of less than three taels or about 100 grams at such specifications. Moreover, it does not need too good copper and iron materials, and only uses iron sheets to roll and forge on a fixed iron mold, and the entire inner chamber can be regularized by using a special iron mold. Because the power of the projectile is similar to that of the handcuffs of this era, the walls of the tubes can be as thin as a piece of armor.

In this way, it suddenly became much easier to make a similar firearm barrel. A craftsman with a little hands-on and firearms experience can probably make such a short gun in only four or five days, and even if the cost of raw materials is included, it is only about seven or eight man-days.

In this case, it didn't take too long to produce hundreds of these short guns like reinforced handcuffs. These short guns are made of special wood and clay tools, and a kind of "gun cart" that fires combined firearms can fire about 100 guns at a time, and the three or two bullets can be nearly a mile or so. Even if the error of shooting in unfamiliar places, unfamiliar distances and targets is completely in accordance with the requirements of actual combat, even the most sophisticated ammunition can have a radius of more than ten meters, but this accuracy is already a success in a great sense for Zhang Lixin's purpose and appeal.

Using this tool, Zhang Lixin also trial-produced a "ten-eyed gun" that weighs less than 20 catties and can barely use a special rack to fire