The person responsible for the research and development of spring steel is a spring steel group at the Royal Institute of Technology, and this spring steel team is the leader of the basic materials branch.

There are not many people in this spring steel group, only seven people, the most senior of which is a second-year student of the Royal Institute of Technology, whose actual theoretical level, according to the classification of the Royal Institute of Technology and the young military camp in the past, is roughly equivalent to the ninth grade, well, that is, the level of the third year of junior high school.

And the remaining six people are all first-year students at the Royal Institute of Technology!

Don't think that first-year students at the Royal Institute of Technology are ordinary people, in fact, the students who can enter the Royal Institute of Technology are almost all geniuses.

The Royal Institute of Technology recruits only dozens of students every year, and these dozens of people are recruited from young military camps, middle schools, and preparatory schools in various places, each of which can be regarded as one in a thousand.

These students who can be admitted to the Royal Institute of Technology basically have two characteristics: one is that the self-learning ability is very strong, because the students in the Royal Institute of Technology are basically self-taught, because so far, there is no pure teacher in the Royal Institute of Technology, and the teaching is represented by the senior students, and the senior students themselves are busy with self-study and various scientific research, and there is not much time to teach.

Therefore, at RMIT, the ability to learn on your own is very important, otherwise you will not be able to adapt to the learning environment at RMIT.

In addition, these students have a very important trait, which is the general high IQ!

How can you tell if they have a high IQ?

Being able to spend most of their time on their own on the premise that they have spent only a few years to complete their current primary, secondary, and preparatory courses, and then be admitted to the Royal Institute of Technology in many competitions, is basically enough to prove their high IQ.

So to put it bluntly, there are currently nearly 400 students at the Royal Institute of Technology, all of whom are geniuses!

And they have undoubtedly become the most valuable talents of the Tang Dynasty in Li Xuan's mind, and they are all cultivated as scientists.

These students, in addition to self-study more advanced courses and lecture to junior students, also have an important task of conducting various research and development, according to their personal interests and hobbies and the actual needs of the Tang Dynasty, they will form various groups to research and develop various technologies.

Among them, the most famous are the steam engine group, the former developed the steam engine, and the machine tool group, the latter designed the industrial machine tool specifically for the production of machinery, that is, the industrial machine tool.

The Spring Steel Group is one of the many research groups at the Royal Institute of Technology.

It took them several years of repeated research to finally come up with a qualified spring steel, and then the flintlock pistol development team at the Royal Institute of Technology immediately used this new spring steel to make the bolt of the new flintlock pistol and tested it.

After testing, the bolt of the new flintlock pistol made with this spring steel as the core has a firing rate of more than 80 percent, although this is still a relatively large deficiency compared to the almost 100 percent success rate of the arquebus.

However, this new technology has just been born, and it has such a high firing rate, which naturally proves the feasibility of flintlock pistols, and if it continues to improve in the future, the firing rate will reach more than 95 percent, which is just around the corner.

Therefore, they just asked the Jiangnan Arsenal to first make a hundred sample guns for various tests, trying to find out the hidden problems, and then use them to improve, mainly to improve the firing rate.

After all, the 80 percent firing rate is still a great deficiency for large-scale equipment, and no army general can endure the situation that only 80 muskets are successfully fired in each round of firing of 100 soldiers under his command, and the remaining 20 are dumb fire.

After Li Xuan heard that the flintlock pistol was going to conduct various live-fire tests, he found an opportunity to prepare to watch the live-fire test this time, because Li Xuan's attention to the flintlock pistol was far more concerned than others.

At present, the generals of the Tang Army are not very enthusiastic about flintlock pistols, and they also know that there is such a thing, but the previous flintlock pistol only had a firing rate of 50 percent, which really disgusted them, and now although there is a firing rate of 80 percent, there is still a certain distance from the official large-scale service.

Until there are follow-up improvements, the army will not rush to replace the flintlock pistol on a large scale.

But Li Xuan is different, he knows better than anyone in the contemporary era that the flintlock pistol is the future development direction, and the sooner the flintlock pistol is made and equipped on a large scale, the Tang Dynasty will be able to gain a greater tactical advantage one day earlier.

And when the time comes, you don't have to worry about large-scale imitations by the enemy!

The arquebus is simple in technology, and if you want to imitate it on a large scale in the Ming Dynasty, you can imitate it on a large scale, but the flintlock pistol, there is no spring steel, you can imitate one for me to see!

At that time, as long as the Tang Dynasty strictly keeps the spring steel secret and prohibits the leakage of exports, unless outsiders slowly study it themselves, otherwise, there is no way to imitate it.

Even Li Xuan, who is important to the flintlock pistol, will specially watch the live ammunition test, and his intention is not because of curiosity, if he is just simply curious, then he can take a pass and watch it slowly at any time.

What he wants to do is actually more politically symbolic!

He wants to convey a concept to those army generals: flintlock pistols are the future development direction of guns, and I attach great importance to it!

Well, at the same time, let the admirals know about this future trend, because the navy also has marines, and they also use muskets.

With Li Xuan's current status, he is going to inspect a musket in person, and he affirms this musket, then the influence will be huge.

After Li Xuan arrived at the Jiangnan Arsenal on the outskirts of the city with a group of important ministers, especially the generals of the army and navy, the first thing he saw was the huge factory building of the Jiangnan Arsenal!

This Jiangnan Arsenal is larger than the Zhaoqing Arsenal, with three times the area, of course, the floor area of the plant does not represent anything, and more importantly, he saw several production lines with a high degree of mechanization, including the shell production line, the musket production line, the five-kilogram field artillery production line, and the two-kilogram and three-kilogram shotgun production line.

In addition, in the Jiangnan Arsenal, there was also an attempt to copy the Franc machine man rear-loading artillery, well, this kind of artillery is the same as the shotgun, the positioning is auxiliary artillery, mainly equipped on the ship, for personnel killing.

The army said that it was not interested in the rear-loading artillery of the Franc machine artillery, although the loading was simple, but the air tightness was too poor, the firing range was too close, and gunpowder was wasted.

With this Franc cannon, they might as well use a two- or three-pound shotgun, which is simpler, cheaper, and not badly powerful.

The army wants howitzers, or more accurately, grenades that can be fired in long-barreled artillery!

The army has always wanted to stuff grenades into nine-pound or five-pound field guns, but unfortunately, the fuse technology is not up to par, and the current grenades have always been unable to be loaded into long-barreled artillery guns for firing.

Li Xuan took a closer look at these production lines, although these production lines are still very backward in the eyes of modern people, full of a strong retro atmosphere, but it has to be said that these ordnance production lines of the Jiangnan Arsenal have almost reached the peak level of this era, and they have surpassed those workshops in Western countries of the same era.

Not to mention anything else, the dozens of huge steam engines in the Jiangnan Arsenal alone are enough to prove its technological advancement.

"In order to solve the defect of the original steam engine with insufficient power, we have continuously improved the steam engine, and now it can achieve a single engine power of ten horsepower."

"At the same time, in order to use these steam engines in production, our Zhaoqing Machinery Company has specially designed a complete set of power solutions for Jiangnan Arsenal, and has used a large number of advanced equipment to successfully use these steam engines in these production lines!"

"At present, although the main power of the factory still mainly relies on water power, the steam engine can replace water power in some fields!"

Li Xuan naturally knew that the steam power in the Jiangnan Arsenal was actually just an auxiliary power, and it was almost unrealistic to completely replace the water power with a steam engine.

This is not even a problem of operating costs, but a technical problem, the power of the current steam engine is too low, the power of a single engine is only ten horsepower, which is too little for a large arsenal.

But this is a very good start, so Li Xuan still expressed great appreciation and encouraged them to increase and deepen the research and development and application of new technologies.

After a brief inspection of the Jiangnan Arsenal, Li Xuan and the others went to the shooting range, ready to watch the live fire test of flintlock pistols and other new weapons.

The first to start testing was not a flintlock pistol, but several other weapons, well, including cold weapons!

The first new weapon was a bayonet, a bayonet made of new steel, which surpassed the previous bayonets by a lot in terms of strength.

Then there is an improved cavalry saber, which has been slightly adjusted on the original cavalry saber, and the whole remains the same, only some details have changed, so it has not attracted much attention.

And then there's the new type of plate armor, but it's a new type, but it's actually a thicker plate armor, and this time it's a full-body armor that was tested, and its chest part, well, it's also the most central part of all the plate armor styles, and its thickest position is eight millimeters, and the average thickness is six millimeters.

This made Li Xuan quite speechless, because during the test, although the standard fourteen-millimeter arquebus in the Datang Army had a poor penetration effect.

But later, when a few fierce men who looked tall and tall at a glance wore this kind of full-body armor and began to do mobility tests, it was unacceptable, they wore this kind of thickened full-body armor, and then took shields and spears, imitating the maneuvering of heavy-armored spearmen, charging and walking continuously, arraying, and then running for a distance, one by one, they were tired and lay down on the spot.

And the next test is an eighteen mm heavy arquebus, the test object of which happens to be this thickest eight mm, an average of six mm plate armor, at a distance of thirty meters, one shot through, a big hole, fifty meters one shot, another big hole, and when it reaches eighty meters, one shot over, and a big hole!

The army generals on the side were dumbfounded, and several people said on the spot that the plate armor is useless such an extreme remark, and the army must quickly and massively equip this heavy musket!

After testing many new weapons one by one, it is the turn of today's main event, the live fire test of the flintlock pistol!