At present, there are 10 brigades of the New Army, except for the infantry battalion under the Dingyuan Brigade, which is equipped with one selective company and five flintlock companies, and the cavalry infantry of the Jingyuan Brigade is all equipped with flintlock guns, the other eight infantry battalions under the field brigade are all equipped with one selective company plus two flintlock companies and three arquebus companies.

Replacing the arquebus with flintlock pistols only required 48 companies and 5,000 flintlock muskets.

Combined with spare weapons and the replacement of damaged flintlock pistols, it is not expected that the new army will need more than 6,000 guns—the Dengzhou Arsenal is now producing just the right amount of a year.

"In the next year, we plan to open a new workshop dedicated to the production of flintlock guns."

Tang Long, the manager of Dengzhou Ordnance, said to Xu Shiyang:

"If we can produce 1,000 bolts a month, we can even convert all the arquebuses into flintlock pistols, so that we can have more than 10,000 flintlock pistols by the end of this year."

The flintlock pistol and arquebus produced in Qi Province are only different in the firing mechanism, and other data, including caliber, barrel length, butt type, etc., are the same.

"Just do what you say, it's a good thing to have more guns."

Xu Shiyang immediately agreed to Tanglong's new workshop plan:

"Also, you have to continue to find ways to increase the production capacity of muskets, and the Forces nouvelles are being expanded, and the demand for flintlock pistols will not be limited to replacing existing arquebuses."

"In addition, I am ready to allow the Tunpu militia to buy guns, especially the civilians who have emigrated to Liaodong, and only with guns can they deal with those four-legged or two-legged jackals!"

Xu Shiyang plans to build a three-level mobilization structure: the field unit of the New Army, which maintains full training, is the first level; After five years of service, he will be retired from the first line and transferred to the second level of reserve and new battalions; The militia that takes time to train each year is the third level.

The militia used cold weapons naturally could not be compared with the Tartars, but if everyone was equipped with muskets, and a farmer could easily kill an elite Tartar armor soldier who had been trained for ten or twenty years, then the Han people's tunbao would have a chance to gain a foothold in the territory of the barbarians.

The westward expansion of the Mi people on another plane is also in this form - gun-armed immigrants with the support of a small number of regular troops poured into the traditional territory of the indigenous people, frantically encroaching on land resources until the Indians were killed in the reservation.

The advantage of this kind of policy is that it is easier to expand the living space of the nation, but the disadvantage is that it is easy to produce a large number of public security cases involving firearms after stabilization.

Xu Shiyang feels that the former is the most important issue now, and the latter should be a headache for the descendants of the Han people.

Just when he dug a small hole for the future Chinese leaders.

In fact, in addition to his own people's flintlock pistols, Xu Shiyang also wanted to produce some arquebuses and export them to Jiangnan or Fusang.

This arquebus used a shorter barrel (close to the length of the carbine's barrel), a hand-held butt instead of an over-the-shoulder butt, and a hook-type arquebus instead of a simple S-shaped lever bolt, reducing the weight of the whole gun from 9 catties to 7 catties of the Qi provincial flintlock pistol.

On the whole, this simple arquebus style is close to another dimension, the iron cannon that was popular in the Warring States period in Yingzhou, and Xu Shiyang hopes that this weapon with weak performance and his own arquebus can open up more commercial channels for Qi Province's goods.

Of course, exporting arms is always a double-edged sword, and one day in the future, the Qi army will collide with the enemy army equipped with Qi weapons.

Therefore, even Xu Shiyang did not dare to say a word in this regard, and he planned to negotiate with his father to sell weapons, including cuirasses and arquebuses, to non-hostile regimes at this stage in the name of a separate import and export company.

If there is any bad political impact on the future arms exports, the Metropolitan Government itself will have the opportunity to disassociate itself from it.

Dengzhou Arsenal is the last occupation of Xu Shiyang's factory inspection in the province.

At the beginning of April of the second year of Longdao, Xu Shiyang inspected the expanded New Army units in Dengzhou.

At this time, the recruits of the first year of Longdao had been replenished into the various field brigades as planned, and at the same time, the new army also recruited soldiers with a horse base from various units and the whole province on a large scale.

According to the General Staff Statistics, all field infantry brigades of the Forces nouvelles have now been expanded to 2,000 men, and five new companies have been added to each infantry brigade — including a company of selected men directly under the brigade commander and two musket companies per infantry battalion.

The cavalry infantry of the original Jingyuan Brigade was renamed the "dragoon" that Xu Shiyang preferred, and although this unit was still a mounted infantry that dismounted and shot and mounted on the horse, the mounts had begun to replace with taller and stronger war horses.

The dragoons were expanded to 18 cavalry companies and two cavalry artillery companies, totaling 2,000 men, and this team served as the general reserve of the whole army, directly under Xu Shiyang, the commander-in-chief of the new army.

The original Jingyuan battalion was reorganized into an infantry brigade.

Together with the newly formed ten heavy cavalry companies (cuirassiers), the current formation of the new army is:

There are 10 field infantry brigades, each of which has 17 infantry companies, 2 artillery companies, and 1 light cavalry company, with a total of 2,000 people.

20 dragoon companies, 10 cuirassiers, 10 trap companies, 10 blue army companies, 10 guards companies (including 1 cavalry artillery and 8 infantry), and 5 companies each of engineers and independent artillery.

The total strength of the field army is 27,000 people; another 5,000 in the Navy (including naval engineers, artillery, and marines); 8,000 people in a separate recruit battalion.

The total strength of the Qi army was expanded to 40,000.

This is a very low figure for the 1.63 million people currently enrolled in Qi Province, but the General Staff believes that if the situation is critical, the province can mobilize about 300,000 militia.

It's just that there is really no need to do that now, and it is difficult to bear the cost of such a mobilization.

The forecasts of the General Staff for the current stage of the surrounding regimes are:

The hostile regime, the Jurchen Jin State, should still be able to mobilize 5 to 60,000 armor soldiers, 12 to 150,000 armorless soldiers and Aha slave soldiers.

The hostile regime of the Mengwu Yuan State currently claims to have 95 thousand households, but at present they are divided into two hostile regimes, the stronger of which is the self-proclaimed Gul Khan Zamuhe, which has about 60 thousand households and about 60,000 troops.

In addition, he was supported by six Han military princes in the Shanxi region, and the total mobilization capacity may exceed 200,000.

His enemy, Khutul Khan, was also severely damaged by the Jin army some time ago, and lost the fertile pastures near Liaodong, and now there are only about 35 tired thousand households left under his command, and I don't know if it can maintain the standard force of 35,000 people, and the mobilization capacity should also be reduced to about 50,000.

The standing strength of the hostile regime Xiang Xia should be around 20,000, and the total mobilization capacity should be 60,000, which is the weakest of the three groups of Tatars of the Jurchen, Mengwu, and Dangxiang.

However, they can get the support of many Buddhist countries in the Western Regions, as well as the Hengshan Tibetan tribe, and if they are mobilized to the limit, it is not impossible to raise an army of more than 100,000 or 200,000.

Of course, there will be no more than a third of the really combat-ready troops in it.

All three regimes had plundered the Central Plains many times, so they were all classified as hostile by the General Staff.