As for why the breech flintlock pistol was chosen instead of the breech flintlock rifle, on the one hand, Bailiyan has no plan to produce firearms on a large scale, because the industrial capacity and funds are very insufficient.

Yongxing City is currently based on general machine tools, industrial-scale production of firearms in terms of cost and process requirements, it is best to use special machines, especially deep hole drilling, hole drawing, inner diameter machines and other special machines, the cost of special machine production is lower, the pass rate is high, the quality is stable, and the cost can be significantly reduced.

However, Yongxing City is now starting to expand the scale of general cutting machine tools and basic industries, the demand for general machine tools is huge, and there is no time to reallocate excess production capacity to produce a large number of special machines, especially the demand for steam engines can not meet the needs of general machine tools.

Secondly, the power of the new artillery and howitzer is sufficient, while the production rate of the rope hat guns of the princes' army is very low, the shooting accuracy and efficiency are even lower, and they can only shoot platoon guns, and the suppression of advanced artillery is not enough to create a huge threat on the ground in the short term.

Finally, Yongxing City now has complete basic processing capabilities for turning, milling, planing, grinding, drilling, boring, spinning, and forging, and after several technical comparisons, with the current technology and technology, regardless of the metal bullet case process and tool materials, it has the full processing capacity to manufacture assault rifles [Note 1], which means that the production of low-grade products and high-grade products, in essence, high-grade products have more technical and quality advantages.

The mature breech flintlock pistol and breech fixed gun both use smoothbore barrels, and under the technical indicators of the capacity of one round, the theoretical production hours of the two are actually not much different.

There are roughly two structures of flintlock breech guns, one is a mechanical runner lighter, and the second is the integral structure of a flintlock machine, a fire sickle and a percussion pool.

The former is the common structure of early flintlock pistols, which has a low firing rate, a high failure rate, poor reliability of the mechanical runner, and a long manufacturing process and assembly man-hours.

The firing rate of the latter is guaranteed, the failure rate is reduced by half, and the manufacturing process is not even less time-consuming than the former.

The breech is equipped with a rotating pull-back bolt-action closed rifle, which is mainly based on rotary parts and short inner holes, which is conducive to processing and production [Note 2], with high reliability, short working hours, and fast ammunition supply speed, even if only one bullet is loaded, one minute can ensure the loading speed of six rounds, while the breech gun can only ensure that two rounds can not be reloaded in a lying position.

In terms of ease of production, the same breech fixed rifle is produced, and the production process of rifles using flap closure [Note 3] is less than that of loading rotary pull-back bolt closure structure.

However, the structural defect of the valve lock restricts the pressure bearing capacity of the breech, so it is easy to explode, and the valve lock is more used for shotgun and high-power pistol bullets, and is rarely used for full-power rifle bullets because the chamber pressure is too large.

Based on the existing technical conditions and the technical indicators, it is necessary to balance the filling speed, reliability, firing rate, and processing adaptability, and the performance of the breech-loading paper shell bolt-action rifle is much higher than that of the breech gun by an order of magnitude.

Of course, it's one thing to be able to make a gun, and it's another thing to be able to make a bullet. [Note 4]

The processing and production of bullet cases is much more difficult than that of firearms, and the required production processes of extruder, stamping, drawing, forming, shaping, forming, assembly, and pressing are quite complex.

It takes time to accumulate from scratch, which is also the main reason why Bailiyan opened a stamping workshop to produce stamping products, and technical accumulation and data sampling are the prerequisites for complex and difficult stamping, but it is impossible to do it in one step.

Due to the full schedule, by the autumn of that year, Bailiyan had only arranged to produce 90 rifles of this type for testing.

In view of the technical constraints, the means suitable for processing the barrel are limited, and there are only two ways to drill holes at both ends and seamless steel pipes. [Note 5]

The seamless steel pipe needs cold drawing, hot drawing, and metal extrusion, and the equipment is complex, and the conditions are not available at present.

Therefore, the 90 rifles in pre-production had to be pre-cast pipes, reserved with a diameter of 10 millimeters, and first used a quenched manganese steel drill bit with two ends to drill a length of nearly 90 centimeters, and then connected it. It is then machined to the desired diameter with a broach, and finally the barrel is obtained by holding the inner hole to remove the excess metal from the outer circle.

This method not only has a low production efficiency, but also the cast steel pipe cannot guarantee the quality of the small hole, let alone forge, so it cannot eliminate the casting defect and improve the quality of the barrel.

At the same time, the inferior tool material restricts the production efficiency, the manganese steel drill bit effect is unsatisfactory, the problem of drilling ordinary inner holes is not big, and deep hole processing will be very problematic.

For the sake of 90 barrels, 400 pieces of blanks were actually produced, the scrap rate was 80 percent smaller, and the cost of processing to a good one, and the final accounting cost was equivalent to 35 inches of silver per gun, and the cost was too great. It can not realize large-scale industrial production, the high price cannot be equipped in batches, and it also occupies limited industrial resources, which really outweighs the losses.

To this end, Bailiyan considered walking on two legs, on the one hand, ordering Yongxingcheng and Ligong to send key cold-rolled and hot-rolled pipe small-diameter seamless steel pipe extruders, and at the same time increasing the research and development of high-speed steel [Note 6], so as not to hang a tree.

Modern gun barrels are usually drilled in solid barrel steel, or using an internal diameter machine, rather than using a seamless steel tube.

The reason is that the barrel material must be forged and heat treated before processing, and the hole reserved for the seamless steel pipe cannot be saved to the processing link, even if it is retained to the processing link, the deformed inner hole is extremely harmful to the drill bit, so the barrel is mostly made of solid special gun steel as raw material.

But it is not without premise, the premise is that there must be a suitable processing tool, and the caliber of modern assault guns is mostly 5.56 and 7.62, even if it is 12.7 caliber, its processing difficulty and technology are also very high, and the smaller the caliber, the greater the requirements for tools and equipment.

Therefore, while appropriately relaxing the caliber, Bailiyan considered using seamless steel pipes, although the technical indicators of seamless steel pipes are not as good as the forged solid round steel materials, which will ultimately affect the charge and range.

But as far as the present situation is concerned, the muzzle velocity of the projectile of the Yongxing rifle is very low, less than 380 meters per second, and the killing range of the smoothbore gun of 400 meters does not have any accuracy at all, and it is not as effective as 200 meters.

If you can't overcome the seamless steel pipe technology, you can only overcome the tool material, improve the quality of the tool, use an extended drill bit, appropriately shorten the length of the barrel, use the drill bit to open up the solid forged round steel, and then use the broach to process the inner hole.

Of course, if there is no seamless steel pipe, the seamed steel pipe can also realize the firing process of the firearm. Whether it is an early breech gun arquebus, or a flintlock pistol in the later period, the barrel is first a seamed steel pipe for heating and closing and then processing the inner hole on the processing machine. [Note 8]

This is also evidenced by the bizarre guns that were previously captured, and the barrel can also be processed with seamed hot-rolled coiled steel pipes.

In the early days, tubular firearms were mainly cast in copper, and the weight was very large, and later the blacksmith hammered the iron plate together, and then inserted the iron core rod into the tube for shaping.

Although the weight of this kind of iron pipe is slightly reduced, in fact it is not much lighter, and the caliber often reaches more than twenty or thirty millimeters, and the accuracy is not at all.

Since then, the appearance of the steam engine has provided a power basis for hot-rolled coiled pipes, and seamed steel pipes have emerged.

This kind of seamed steel pipe is first heated and curled with rolled steel, and then sprinkled with caustic soda, soda ash or borax at the gap, which is a catalyst for hard metal bonding, and finally squeezed and closed the seam, and then set the hoop after closing, so as to increase the chamber pressure and prevent the barrel from cracking and exploding, but the safety factor is still not high. Later, with the advancement of tool materials, the barrel processing was changed to the implementation of round steel drilling.

It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the British invented the seamless steel tube, and the early breech fixed rifles used seamless steel tubes as the barrel for a period of time due to the low requirements.

Later, with the development of gunpowder technology, the chamber pressure gradually increased, and further requirements were put forward for the barrel material, and the seamless steel pipe formed by hot drawing after forging became the mainstream one after another.

In modern times, guns and bullets are more than two to three times the speed of sound to fire high-speed bullets, the traditional hot-drawn seamless steel tube has been incompetent for the production of alloy barrel steel, coupled with the shortening of the assault rifle barrel, so that most guns are connected with solid alloy bar two ends drilling, or on the inner diameter machine, and finally draw rifling, or squeeze rifling, to achieve inner hole processing.

Yongxing rifle due to breech loading, the use of safe smokeless gunpowder, kinetic energy is more powerful, seam steel pipe can not meet the demand of chamber pressure, seamless steel pipe this technical route is basically impossible at present.

Of the first batch of 90 rifles, 30 were sent to Qianyue Mountain for testing in the severe cold of the plateau in winter, and the remaining 60 continued to be tested in various indicators in Xianguo to discover problems in use and improve them in time to facilitate the finalization of large-scale production in the future.

In the spring of 646, there were extremely immoral things one after another, and a large number of refluxes of inch gold and inch gold appeared short of two.

Due to the inherent shortcomings of metal coins, which wear and tear increases with circulation, there are errors of natural attrition, especially the poor hardness of gold and silver precious metals, which are soft and wear out faster than copper coins and alloy coins.

However, the precious metals in circulation are mainly bar-shaped silver and gold, supplemented by gold and silver collars, and compared with traditional Chinese ingots, the wear rate of bar-shaped metals is slightly less than that of ingots. Because the shape of the ingots is easy to produce notches under the collision, so the large amount of snowflake silver ingots, the two warps of the ingots are somewhat notched, and the surface of the strip metal is symmetrical, and there are very few bumps, so the natural loss rate of gold and silver bars is not very large.

After a single inch of silver is used all year round, it is usually reduced by one-third of the money compared with the initial one-third of the money, to half a penny, and the treasury recovers gold and silver, each of which must be weighed, and if it is too much lost, it will be immediately recast to restore the sufficient amount.

However, on the basis of the lack of half a penny, five or six out of ten gold and silver bars are less than half a penny, or even more, this is not something that can be done by natural wear and tear, and the cumulative reduction of fifteen gold and silver is one tael, and the annual flow of precious metals in Xianguo is millions, and 150,000 silvers are less than half a ton, and the accumulation of millions has to be several tons.

The shortage of two catties first appeared at the end of 644, and the situation became more and more fierce in 645, and five or six out of ten gold and silver were short of two catties, and some were not only short of one penny.

The most feared thing finally happened, the black towel used nitric acid and aqua regia to corrode the gold and silver, and then replaced the gold and silver through acid replacement. Nowadays, five or six out of ten gold and silver are short of two, which means that it is already a common phenomenon.

[Note 1] The question of whether a machining plant with machining capabilities has the ability to produce firearms is whether it is legal.

[Note 2] In the field of machining of mechanical parts, the machining of rotary body parts is the most adaptable, that is, most of the parts with cylindrical geometry are the easiest to process. For example, the bolt structure of the rotary pull-back bolt-action rifle is mainly based on the rotary body, such as Mauser, 38 Dagai, and Mosin Nagant.

Automatic firearms, such as the Stern submachine gun and the M3 submachine gun, are both stamped and swivel body parts firearms.

[Note 3] There were many locking methods for early rifles, and the rotary push-bolt rifle was a typical and enduring structure. Its advantages are reliable locking, large chamber pressure resistance, high reliability rate, few mechanical failures, and the disadvantage is that the ammunition feeding efficiency is too low.

Trap locking is to connect the bolt valve and the barrel with a shoe, and then lock it with a clip, so the lock needs to be opened for loading and unloading, which causes the barrel and bolt valve to open.

Moreover, the trap lock is not suitable for firing full-power rifle cartridges due to the need to open the bolt, resulting in low chamber pressure resistance. At the same time, the magazine structure cannot be used, so the barrel can only be increased to get more ammo.

[Note 4] Regarding the self-making of bullet cases, in terms of the structure of the parts, the gun is more complicated than the shell. But in fact, it is more difficult to make bullets than guns, and it is not a star. Therefore, there are many countries in the world that can make guns, but very few can make bullets.

Therefore, it is easy to build a gun, but it is difficult to make a bullet.

[Note 5] Seamless steel pipe technology was invented by the British at the end of the 19th century, and before that, steel pipes, especially small and medium-diameter deep-hole steel pipes, were processed with drill bits.

[Note 6] High-speed steel was invented by the Americans at the beginning of the last century, which doubled the efficiency of metal cutting.

Of course, despite the name "HSS", that is relative to the cutting tools that preceded HSS. The usual cutting speed of high-speed steel is only three to five hundred revolutions per minute of the spindle, and seven or eight hundred is already the limit.

Compared with cemented carbide tools, the dynamic can be seven or eight hundred revolutions per minute, and high-grade cemented carbide props can have three or two thousand, or even tens of thousands, and high-speed steel is no longer enough. But even in modern times, HSS is still a conventional general-purpose cutting tool steel.

[Note 7] Regarding the question of whether the barrel is seamed or seamless, the general short-barreled iron pipe can still be produced by casting, but the hole length is relatively short, and four or five hundred millimeters is already the limit of casting small-hole iron pipe, because the sand mandrel required for casting will be very fragile, and the deformation and fracture will occur during the casting process due to the influence of molten iron and casting impact pressure.

Therefore, the longer the through hole and the smaller the diameter, the more unproducible the casting is, and even if it can be produced, it is not large-scale industrial production.

Therefore, the muskets that began in the middle period were thin-rolled steel jointed steel pipes, to be precise, a kind of soft-rolled iron, and the performance of rolled steel was too good, and there was no seam processing ability in the early stage.