Foshan, Firearms Research Institute, after Ye Liangchou returned with Fang Nan's mission, he immediately dispatched personnel to form a rocket project team.

At present, the Firearms Research Institute has three project groups, namely muskets, artillery, and grenades, which conduct research on muskets, artillery, and grenades.

At the moment the busiest is the artillery research group, followed by the grenade research group, and the lightest is the musket research group.

The tiger head gun has almost developed to the pinnacle of front-loading rifled guns, and the only place that can be improved is basically the barrel, and the number of barrel firing is mainly determined by the barrel material, and the main force is the steel plant, and the musket project team is relatively relaxed.

Therefore, Ye Liangchou transferred personnel to form a rocket project team, mainly from the musket project team.

It took less than half a day to return to the Firearms Research Institute, and the rocket project team was completed, plus Ye Liangchou, the entire rocket project team was only six people, much less than the other three project teams, and the main reason was that the rocket project was relatively simple.

Things are just as Ye Liangchou thought, in just three days, the rocket project team completed the complete design of the rocket, the structure is a little more complicated than the drill monkey, but it is not so complicated.

The design of the rocket has been completed, and the next step is to build the rocket, and the firearms research institute is basically full of researchers, and strong research ability does not mean that the hands-on ability is also strong, and the task of building rockets according to the design drawings must be handed over to skilled craftsmen to do.

The Firearms Research Institute is adjacent to the Foshan Arsenal, and some of the craftsmen in the Foshan Arsenal are highly skilled.

The design of the first version of the rocket body was relatively simple, and in just two days, the craftsmen under the command of the researchers created three projectiles, which were more than one meter long and about eight centimeters in diameter.

Researchers and craftsmen worked together to move the bomb to an open test site, loaded the gunpowder used for propulsion into the projectile, and began the first test of the rocket.

The rocket was placed at an angle of thirty degrees to a proposed launcher.

"Ignition!"

In about ten seconds, the fuse burned out, the gunpowder in the rocket began to burn, the flames sprayed out from the tail of the rocket, and the rocket flew up, but this big diamond monkey only flew in the sky for one or two seconds before losing power and quickly falling to the ground, and the landing position was only more than 50 meters away from the launch site.

The distance of more than 50 meters is very close, if the grenade catapult device of the siege vehicle is improved, maybe the farthest can reach a range of more than 50 meters, then this rocket will not show its effect, and the range of the rocket must exceed 100 meters in order to play a role.

Fortunately, the research work on rockets has only begun for a few days, and it will take several months or even more than half a year to improve the rockets and research and manufacture rockets that can be put into actual combat.

Ye Liangchou stayed in the rocket project team for less than ten days, and then returned to his previous task, handing over the rocket research work to Duan Kun, the leader of the project team.

The musket project team studied the improvement of the musket, and the grenade project team studied the improvement of the grenade, but the artillery project team was not improving the Franc cannon and tiger head cannon currently used by the KPA, but was studying a new type of artillery, more precisely, a new type of artillery shell.

At present, the KPA artillery is mainly used with solid shells, followed by scattered shells.

The use of solid shells has a long range, up to more than two thousand meters, but the lethality is not enough, solid shells mainly cause penetrating wounds to the enemy, shells directly penetrate the human body, on the battlefield, a solid shell can even penetrate several enemies in a row, there is a big scar on the body, how can it not survive.

A solid cannonball piercing several enemies is very lucky, and more often than not, it can only hit one person or hit an open field.

Even if a solid shell has a long range, on the battlefield it is far less useful than a musket.

Replaced with a scatter bomb, the range of the shot is only about 100 meters, but the coverage of a shot shot is very large, a dozen large areas, full of lethality.

Both solid shells and scattered shells have obvious shortcomings, one is long-range and weak-lethal, and the other is high-lethal but short-range, and the People's Army is very much in need of a long-range artillery shell with sufficient lethality.

Fang Nan thought of a kind of artillery shell, commonly known as "flowering bomb", the correct name is "grenade", the biggest feature of flowering shell is the explosion, the shrapnel produced by the explosion can cause huge damage to the enemy within a certain range, and at the same time has enough range.

Fang Nan handed over the task of researching grenades to the Firearms Research Institute, and Ye Liangchou personally led the artillery project team to study grenades.

If you want to study a grenade, the most important point is the fuse of the grenade, the fuse of the grenade used in modern warfare is impossible for the People's Army to study, but the fuse of the early flowering bomb is relatively simple.

The fuse of the early flowering shell is a hollow wooden tube filled with a very dense hard black powder column (the suppressed dense black powder burns very steadily), which can also be called the letter tube of the cannonball, and the letter tube needs to be cut off or punched in the scale outside the fuse tube before firing to mark the burning time.

The cannonball is a cast, hollow metal ball filled with fine-grained black powder, which is then loaded at the tip of the cannonball (stuffed into the fuse hole) of the shell before it is fired.

However, there needs to be a wooden butt behind the shell, which can prevent the shell from rolling unsteadily during the discharging process (because there is no egg tray, the friction between the shell and the inner wall of the barrel causes the shell to roll, and if the fuse is facing the burning high-pressure gas at this time, the fuse will be pressed into the projectile body and explode directly).

During the discharging process of the shell, the high-temperature gas will leak from the gap between the shell and the barrel to the front of the shell to ignite the fuse, so that the shell is ignited during the discharging process, and the shell will explode after flying out of the muzzle according to the marked time.

In fact, some of the rockets and flowering bombs are the same, they can explode when they are fired, but the range of rockets is shorter, the advantage is that it is easy to use, the range of flowering shells is longer, the speed of artillery loading flowering shells is relatively slow, and the firing frequency is far from being comparable with the sub-mother cannon of the Franc machine gun.

According to the distance of the target, the flowering bomb needs to be cut off or punched in the scale outside the fuse tube to calibrate the burning time before launching, and if it is not good, the flowering bomb will explode after landing for several seconds, if it is put into naval warfare, the shell will bounce a distance after hitting the enemy ship and then explode, which has little lethal effect on the enemy at all.

Flowering shells have various drawbacks, but in the future, the guns that fire flowering shells will replace the Franc cannon.

Due to the power and effect of flowering shells, the Firearms Research Institute has devoted more personnel to the study of flowering shells, and by the way, it is also necessary to study the artillery that fires flowering shells, which are more difficult to study than artillery.