In the city of Xingquanfu, Li Xuangang saw the battle report sent back by Hao Bonian a few days ago, which said that the first corps was about to arrive in Lipingfu City, and would launch a tentative attack on Lipingfu City, so as to prepare for the general attack after the arrival of the Second Infantry Regiment.

At the same time, he also sent back the information collected by the Ming army, which said that the regular garrison in the city of Liping Mansion was only more than 1,000 people, and the rest were young men who were temporarily recruited with weak combat strength, and they did not find that a large number of Ming troops went to the direction of the provincial capital.

Judging from the information obtained from various aspects, Zhu Zhihai, the governor of Guiyang, the provincial capital, attached great importance to the fall of Xingquan Mansion and was ready to send a large army into Xingquan Mansion, predicting that the number of assembled troops would not be less than 30,000, and it was very likely that the number would be as high as more than 50,000.

But because the more attention is paid to it, the larger the size of the army, the more difficult it is to assemble troops, and the later it is to send troops.

Zhu Zhihai wants to transfer troops, only from the whole province, and at the same time, he will recruit a large number of young and strong soldiers, and at the same time, he also needs to organize many people to transport baggage.

This kind of thing is not so easy to do, not to mention the difficulty of raising food and salaries and coordinating the various ministries, it will take at least one or two months for Zhu Zhihai to gather troops from the whole province of Guizhou and then arrive in Liping Province

In this era when marching can only rely on two legs, it is not ordinarily difficult to mobilize a large army in Guizhou, a mountainous area with many mountains, and it is simply impossible to do it in a month or two from gathering troops to launching an attack.

In this way, it will also give the Datang New Army enough time, at least in the next half a month or even a month, the Datang New Army will not be attacked by a large-scale attack from the Ming army.

In this case, it will not be too difficult to take down Liping Mansion!

Therefore, Li Xuan did not put too much pressure on the generals on the front line, let alone interfere in the operations of the front-line generals, this Xingquan Mansion is several days away from the front line, if he learns what to play bald-headed and personally commands the detailed operations of the intervention troops, it is impossible for the new army of the Tang Dynasty not to be defeated.

Moreover, Li Xuan is still relatively relieved of the abilities of Hao Bonian and Li Chunjing, the new army of the Tang Dynasty has been established for more than a year, and there are hundreds of officers who have studied in the Imperial Academy, and the only reason why Li Xuan promotes and reuses these two people is that their abilities are better than others.

Therefore, in the battle of attacking Liping Mansion, Li Xuan did not worry too much, he was more worried about how to face the counterattack of the Ming army after taking Liping Mansion.

Zhu Zhihai on the other side of the provincial capital has to gather tens of thousands of troops, and it is difficult to maintain it by relying only on the two infantry regiments in Liping Mansion now, not to mention, the main task of these two infantry regiments is not to defend in Liping Mansion, but to continue south to Guangxi.

The task of defending Lê Binh Province in the future will largely depend on the troops that will march into Lê Binh Province in the future.

So recently, Li Xuan has put a lot of time and energy into the follow-up expansion of the army.

Although the Third Infantry Regiment and the Fourth Infantry Regiment had not yet been fully formed, the plan for the establishment of the Fifth Infantry Regiment had already been determined by Li Xuan, and the departments under the Privy Council had made relevant preparations in advance.

For example, the commanders of each battalion and team of the Fifth Infantry Regiment, the grassroots officers of each platoon, and the backbone non-commissioned officers of each platoon need to be arranged in advance.

In this way, after the recruits recruited in Liping Province have completed one month of basic training for recruits, they can immediately replenish the Fifth Infantry Regiment, so that the Fifth Infantry Regiment can be established and trained immediately, and become an army as soon as possible.

Now, with the 1st Corps and the 2nd Infantry Regiment entering Liping Province one after another, even if they have not yet taken Liping Province, the officials of the Ministry of War have already extensively penetrated into the eastern part of Liping Province and began to recruit troops, and hundreds of people are recruited as recruits of the Datang New Army every day, and these recruits will enter the two temporary recruit camps set up by the Privy Council for training.

These people will be able to complete basic physical, discipline, and tactical training after a month, and some of them will be supplemented to the First Infantry Regiment and the Second Infantry Regiment to supplement the battle losses of these two infantry regiments, while most of the rest will become soldiers of the Fourth Infantry Regiment and the Fifth Infantry Regiment.

In other words, after a month, the Fifth Infantry Regiment would be able to accept a large number of recruits, so there was not much time left for Li Xuan to prepare for the Fifth Infantry Regiment.

In addition to the preparation of personnel, the preparation of ordnance is also not slackened.

Fortunately, although the number of cold weapons created by the Datang New Army itself is not much, there are many cold weapons captured from the Ming Army, such as armor, waist knives, spears, bows and arrows, almost everything, and some of the cold weapons created by the Datang Ministry of Industry Workshop itself are also imitations of the Ming Army's standard swords, which also leads to the fact that the cold weapons equipped by the Datang New Army are all Ming Army standard weapons, from swords to bows and arrows.

However, the difficulty in restricting the expansion of the new army of the Tang Dynasty was not the lack of cold weapons, but the lack of firearms, especially muskets and artillery.

Li Xuan has asked the Ministry of Industry several times to find a way to increase the output of artillery and muskets as much as possible!

For this reason, the craftsmen in the Ministry of Industry have also tried their best, and all the methods they can think of have been used, such as forcing those skilled craftsmen to bring apprentices, and they are bringing a lot of apprentices, such as formulating unified manufacturing standards and simplifying the production process.

Finally, after the scale was expanded, the production method of the assembly line was also formulated according to Li Xuan, such as a musket, which requires multiple parts, and each part requires multiple processes.

To this end, the Ministry of Industry is to split the entire process of manufacturing muskets, and then formulate standard parameters, so that everyone is dedicated to one of the processes.

From the raw materials to the factory, a musket needs to go through the hands of at least hundreds of workers, no longer as before, by those craftsmen themselves, from beginning to end is a craftsman with a few apprentices in charge of the end.

Nowadays, the musket workshop established in Xingquan Mansion has taken the lead in adopting this assembly-line production model, and hundreds of people in the entire workshop do what they are best at in different divisions of labor, and what is good at?

In the past, it might take a month for a skilled craftsman to make a musket, which meant the same process, and they would only do it once a month, but now the craftsman may have to repeat the same process every day, day and night, and be far better than the craftsmen of the past.

In the same way, such large-scale assembly line production also greatly improves the yield rate, reduces the cost, and at the same time no longer needs a large number of skilled craftsmen, these skilled craftsmen can serve as the leader of some groups, responsible for technical adjustments and improvements, but the people who specifically build the musket have become ordinary workers.

This mode of production is actually similar to the production mode of the late nineteenth century, of course, and the extensive assembly line production mode in the twentieth century, which is still very different from the extensive assembly line production mode in which the whole society participated, and can only be regarded as the most preliminary, the most basic narrow assembly line production model, and it is inaccurate to directly say that the assembly line production is inaccurate, it should be said that it is the combination of 'object specialization' and 'parts standardization'.

The combination and widespread application of these two modes of production began in the early nineteenth century and developed into the Ford model of widespread flow production in the twentieth century.

Datang's workshop has engaged in the standardization of parts and components and the specialization of objects, which is an exaggeration to say, in fact, it has entered the category of modern industry.

Therefore, if Li Xuan is a little shameless, it can be said that the Tang Dynasty is already a modern industrial country, and it is also the most advanced industrial country in contemporary times, and the mode of industrial production is enough to beat the Ming Dynasty and many chaotic countries in Europe.

There is no doubt that the Tang Dynasty has become the strongest industrial country in the world!

The only trouble is that this production model is almost like a robot, and it is repetitive and monotonous and the labor intensity is quite large, which can easily cause physical and psychological exhaustion of workers.

Because a worker, to constantly repeat the monotonous work on the assembly line, every day has to last more than ten hours, in order to increase the output, the rest time of the workers is extremely compressed, since the musket workshop in Xingquanfu City adopts the flow of production, it has been tired of several workers, and because of excessive exhaustion accidents, resulting in accidents, casualties and accidents.

But those officials of the Ministry of Industry naturally turn a blind eye to this, as long as they can greatly increase the output and meet the requirements of His Majesty, so as to keep their official hats or even rise to a higher level, they do not care about the lives of those workers.

After the officials in charge of the Xingquan Fucheng musket workshop were promoted because of the large increase in output, other workshops under the Ministry of Industry also coincidentally adopted the assembly line production mode one after another, and the output of various ordnance products also increased significantly in a short period of time.

For this reason, Li Xuan naturally will not hesitate to praise himself, and he will always hear the news of the promotion of officials from the Ministry of Industry in the near future, which makes the officials of other departments in the cabinet envious when they hear it.

To increase the production of ordnance, the officials of the Ministry of Industry have already regarded this as the main achievement of promotion, and Li Xuan is not too worried about this, but the development of new ordnance, which still needs to be watched by Li Xuan himself.

After all, when he didn't personally watch, who knew what strange ordnance those people in the Ministry of Industry would come up with, for example, some time ago, someone had the idea of building a musket that could fire dozens of rounds at the same time.

It sounds like a repeating rifle, but in fact, the craftsmen of the Ministry of Industry tied dozens of barrels together, then loaded them and fired them at one time.

The power is indeed quite fierce, so fierce that the continuous dense recoil directly dispersed the iron frame that fixed dozens of barrels, because the bullets in dozens of barrels were not fired at the same time, and after the gun carriage fell apart, the bullets fired in the follow-up shot turned a craftsman who participated in the experiment into a hornet's nest on the spot, and there were three other people.

After hearing about this, Li Xuan was a little helpless, on the one hand, he complained that these people were messing around, now it's okay, not to mention wasting a lot of resources, and he also caused an accident and killed people. But on the other hand, he was a little lucky, because these craftsmen of the Ministry of Industry did not rest on their laurels, but were actively discussing new technologies and weapons.

Therefore, Li Xuan himself is a little helpless, this punishment naturally cannot be punished, and he has to properly handle the aftermath and give generous pensions to the families of the deceased craftsmen.

But on the other hand, he has also strengthened his control over the research and development of new weapons that require a lot of resources, and all the research and development plans of major projects that require a lot of resources must be approved by him.

And the 1,300-kilogram artillery project is such a kind, this project, Li Xuan was staring at it the whole time, so when the cannon was just manufactured and ready for a live-fire test, Li Xuan personally went to the artillery workshop of Xingquanfu of the Ministry of Industry to watch the test firing.