……

Because the black powder was completely developed, Chen Xu had no interest in making crockpot grenades.

This kind of earthen grenade is not very useful in the primitive battle of Daqin at the moment, and the clay pot is fragile, and it is not far away, and the grenade is mainly used to assault the enemy's fortified position, but for the primitive tribe of the Huns, who come and go on horses like the wind, it is not as good as using a bow and arrow, and the possibility of throwing grenades on the battlefield to frighten their war horses is relatively large, even if they are not scared, it is not good to blow up the flowers and plants!

What's more, now that Daqin has new equipment, he can chase and slash on the battlefield, and the advantage of the Huns' fast horses has been quickly lowered the gap.

Therefore, what Chen Xu wants most at the moment is naturally to make real muskets and artillery, but at the moment, there is a serious shortage of gunpowder, and the artillery is gone, and the gunpowder of tens of hundred and eight catties will be gone, so he naturally paid attention to the earth gun first.

It took Chen Xu to hide in his own huge laboratory of the Academy of Sciences, according to the style of the earthen gun he had seen when he was a child, and then refer to some memories of the Internet pictures and the plot in TV movies, to draw a rifle-style earthen gun.

In order to increase the shooting distance, the barrel should naturally be designed very long, so as to generate enough kinetic energy to propel the projectile far enough in the unsealed chamber, so the barrel designed by Chen Xu is one meter two, plus the butt and other parts, the length of the whole gun is more than one meter five.

In later generations, the earthen guns were all duck-billed hammer firing methods, and the ignition was also a special fire bubble, commonly known as the primer.

It is estimated that many friends after zero have not seen it, but in the eighties and nineties it was still a children's toy, that is, two layers of paper are stacked together, the middle is like a plastic bubble packaging bag, and the top is densely packed with bulging bubbles, which contain a certain amount of flammable gunpowder, tear off a fire bubble and put it in the ignition position of the earthen gun, and then pull the trigger The moment the hammer hits the fire bubble heavily, the gunpowder in the fire bubble will burn, and the spark will be ignited through the ignition hole into the chamber of the gun, and the projectile will be launched.

The gunpowder of the fire bubble requires that the flammable and explosive properties are very keen, similar to the match head, it can be ignited by slight friction, and the stability is much worse than that of gunpowder, and it is estimated that it can be successful by mixing saltpeter and sulfur with a large dose, because even if two pieces of iron can be quickly impacted, it can produce sparks, as long as the instantaneous temperature is high enough, it can be ignited, so these are not what Chen Xu wants to consider immediately, what he needs to consider now is to verify the power of the unearthed gun first.

And even if you can't get out of the fire bubbles, you can basically replace it with flint excitation, the world began to prevail in the late Ming Dynasty, the West first invented, and China began to appear in the Ming Dynasty, so the Ming Dynasty also has a strong firepower that is not lost to Western civilization, but it is not an egg, the Qing army because of the suffering of firearms in the battle with the Ming army, after entering the customs, the research and development of muskets and artillery was forcibly abandoned, and they decided to use their best bow and horse technology, and the people could not even manufacture gunpowder, so the entire Qing Dynasty for more than two hundred years, The development of firearms in the West is changing with each passing day, all kinds of strong ships, cannons and even machine guns have begun to appear, the world's great powers are the only ones in our Qing Dynasty who are still riding horses and archery, and the battle of Bali Bridge is a terrifying joke in the history of world wars, the Qing army of 30,000 attacked 8,000 British and French troops, and killed five opponents at the heroic cost of more than half of the casualties...... Five people...... Five people......

Therefore, from the perspective of the victory and defeat data of the battlefield, the thermal weapon driven by gunpowder is the terminator of cold weapons, from the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, flintlock muskets and artillery have become the main force of the battlefield, the era of cold weapons is gone forever, and the battle of Baliqiao also completely woke up the Qing Dynasty rulers who closed the country, and decided to start developing firearms, but the Qing Empire has rotted to the bones, there is an imperial shelf, and there is no soul of the empire.

Compared with the firecrackers of later generations, the flint method is much simpler, that is, a piece of flint fixed to a duckbill hammer, after which the flint hits the gunpowder nest, and ordinary gunpowder can also ignite.

But at the moment, these are not the point, the focus is on the way of excitation, no spring and any automatic excitation device is a fart, so the main thing at the moment is to make a spring with high strength first.

But to make a good spring......

Chen Xu's teeth began to hurt again.

So he completely abandoned the stimulator that he had laboriously designed for a long time and replaced it with an arquebus.

The arquebus is very simple, that is, a copper or iron pipe, there is a small hole in the tail, first insert a fuse, and then load gunpowder and projectiles from the muzzle, the principle is similar to that of a clay pot grenade.

This is much simpler, Chen Xu looked at the revised drawings, in fact, it was just a pipe with a wooden handle.

Grab a few drawings and go out, summoning the grooms and guards out of town.

Although there is no spring at the moment, but the carbon steel is already there, you can let the two of them refine a furnace of high-carbon steel to pull out the thin steel wire to make a spring, after all, if it is really applied to the battlefield, the arquebus is not good, and it is similar to a burning stick in windy, rainy and snowy weather.

I haven't been to the factory for almost half a month, but now the factory has become much more organized.

Since the last fire, the emperor sent two hundred forbidden troops from the Weiwei Mansion to guard the factory, not only inside the factory, but also outside the forbidden army on horseback patrols, outside the factory wall a hundred zhang away from no one is allowed to approach, the wall also built an arrow tower, there is a watchtower in the factory, the gate has also been rebuilt, stationed a tun of soldiers to check all the personnel in and out, stewards, supervisors, craftsmen, helpers, etc. are all in the inspection, and no factory waist card will be arrested and interrogated.

However, Chen Xu was not within the scope of the inspection, the carriage was still a mile away from the gate, and there were patrolling soldiers to meet him, and then someone entered the factory to notify to greet him, and soon Yingbu, the director of the safety department of the factory, rode a horse equipped with a new saddle stirrup, wearing a black armor waist straddle saber, and a leather forehead guard on his head.

"Subordinates, see Master Hou!" Yingbu dismounted and respectfully clasped his fists and saluted.

"Excuse me, what's going on at the factory?" Chen Xu sat in the carriage and nodded with a smile.

"Back to Master Hou, everything is fine!" Yingbu got on his horse and followed the carriage and said.

"Well, don't be careless on weekdays, the new horse equipment is a confidential thing at the moment, don't leave it out!" Chen Xu advised.

"Master Hou rest assured, now the drawings of weapons and equipment are stored in a special secret room, and they are guarded by the forbidden army for twelve hours, and all craftsmen and overseers cannot easily leave the factory, and they will definitely not be left out!" Yingbu hurriedly said.

"That's good!"

Chen Xu walked, by the way asked in detail about the recent situation of the factory, and after entering the factory gate, he saw two earth and stone walls nearly ten meters high built on the open space, and there were huge scaffolds nearly twenty meters high on both sides, hundreds of slaves and helpers were sawing wood under the supervision of the soldiers, and dozens of slaves were hoisting wood and planks with thick ropes under the command of craftsmen on the scaffolding.

"Master Hou is here!" Hu Kuan held a stack of drawings and panted and ran over to salute.

"Well, are there any difficulties in building a model waterwheel?" Chen Xu got down from the carriage and looked at the half huge wooden wheel that already had a bit of the prototype of a waterwheel and asked.

"The spindle and live ring have been successfully installed, but because it is a one-to-one production, so the amount of work is very large, it is estimated that it will take half a month to complete it all, as for the supporting transmission device, it will take at least a month to complete, and I am afraid that it will be spring at that time." Hu Kuan said with some uneasiness.

"Let's take it slowly, this is a process of accumulating experience, anyway, the craftsmen who are proficient in water conservancy construction have not been found yet, let alone in a hurry!" Chen Xu patted Hu Kuan to his shoulder to comfort.

"Hou Ye is not in a hurry, but I am very anxious, Kuan is very eager to see if the power of this waterwheel is as convenient and labor-saving as Hou Ye said!" Hu Kuan shook his head, and then continued with a little hesitation, "At present, it is so time-consuming and laborious to build on a flat and spacious place, and I am afraid that it will be even more difficult to manufacture on the bank of the river at that time, and it is estimated that it will take several months for the waterwheel to be fully installed." ”

"It's certain that the waterwheel is labor-saving, but if you don't hoist it in the right way, it will be so time-consuming and laborious." Chen Xu said with a smile.

"The construction of houses and city walls is like this, and it is all carried by manpower, so how can it be said that it is easy and labor-saving?" Hu Kuanyi shook his head and smiled bitterly.

"No, your method is too coarse, and it's easy to miss, once the wood falls, it will cause casualties, if you use the crane and pulley, it can be much safer and easier!" Chen Xu said with a smile.

"What are the cranes and pulleys?" When Hu Kuan heard two new terms, his eyes became bright and he asked excitedly.

"Here, I'll draw it for you, it's very simple and practical!" Chen Xu picked up a wooden stick casually, swept the sand on the ground out of a flat open space with his feet, and then drew the appearance of a hanging tower.

"See, this is the hanging tower, the tower body can be built with thick wood, which is the appearance of scaffolding, and a long log on top is used as the tower arm ......"

"A fulcrum can be rotated up and down left and right in the middle part, and there are ropes and iron hooks at both ends of the tower arm, which is actually similar to the principle of the scale, but the rope on the pole is replaced by a fulcrum......

The iron hook at the rear end of the tower arm is used to hang heavy objects, just like a weighing stone, the heavier the weighing stone hanging, the heavier the weight lifted at the other end of the tower arm, the helper can swing the tower arm by pulling the rope on the ground, and naturally the heavy object can be hoisted to the position that needs to be placed, and only one person needs to stand on the top of the hanging tower and wave the flag to command......

"In order to save effort, you can also add a pulley block on the tower arm, the pulley is an iron live ring, divided into two kinds of movable pulley and fixed pulley, and the structure of the pulley is like this......"