When Xu Shiyang and his entourage arrived in the northwest, he saw a rear-loading rifle modified by a civilian gunsmith from a standard Type 3 rifled gun at a militia in Gan Province.

The modification method is very simple, a standard Type III rifle is about 65 mm away from the rear barrel part of the bolt, which is about 65 mm, and the barrel is cut open and modified into a cap mechanism that can be rotated to the right, so that the cover forms a less secure but very simple locking device.

And so a breech-loading gun was born.

The gunsmith who invented this thing even made a one-piece bullet with a cartridge case!

To put it bluntly, this thing is also very simple, in fact, it is just a shell made of oiled paper or flax soaked in beeswax, and the warhead and propellant are encased in it.

However, this gun does not require many of the necessary procedures when firing the standard Type III, such as pouring propellant into the barrel, using a strip to solidify, and biting open the cartridge package.

This means that the rate of fire of this rifle will far exceed that of the standard Type III equipped by field armies, and it will allow soldiers to load and shoot while lying on their stomachs!

In Gan Province, Xu Shiyang personally met with the inventor of this improved rifle, a veteran named Dai Zi.

He stayed in the local area for a few more days, and asked Dai Zi to use the equipment of the local garrison repair institute to temporarily process 6 rear-loading rifles, which were used to conduct a comparative test with the standard 3 type.

As a result, Dai Zi's rear-loading gun could fire twenty times in two and a half minutes! That's only half the time of the Standard Type III, and if you shoot at breakneck speed, a skilled shooter can even shoot 15 shots per minute! This is something that a front-loading gun can't do anyway.

And because it is directly modified from the Standard Type III, the ballistic performance of this gun is almost exactly the same as that of the Standard Type III, and the accuracy, range, etc. are almost not affected by the modification.

In other areas, such as reliability, the Dai Zi rifle can fire 1,000 rounds in four days, maintaining performance even without cleaning the chamber.

The results of shooting experiments in humid environments and heavy rain are also much stronger than those of the standard Type III.

If the standard Type 3 firing rifled gun gives a Han peasant who pioneered in the border wilderness the strength to fight alone against the elite Tartar armor, then these properties of the Dai Zi rifle can give a Han farmer the strength to easily kill an elite armored horseman!

In this regard, Xu Shiyang was very excited in his heart, which is a rare example of the people surpassing their own ideas and walking on the right path.

So Xu Shiyang gave Dai Zi a reward beyond what he deserved - the purpose was just to encourage others to work hard and innovate, just like a thousand dollars buying horse bones.

Xu Shiyang's reward to Dai Zi was enough to make everyone blush:

First, give Dai Zi a cash reward of 10,000 taels directly.

Second, Dai Zi was given a patent for the side-opening rear-mounted rifle, and in the future, whether it was the empire or other countries, Dai Zi would be given a patent fee for every similar weapon produced.

Third, Xu Shiyang will invite Dai Zi to join the newly established scientific association in Yanjing, and Xu Shiyang will directly give Dai Zi a silver badge of the third class (the first class is gold inlaid jade, and the second class gold emblem) to prove his contributions to military science.

However, there is still a requirement here, Xu Shiyang wants Dai Zi to take the lead in formulating the improvement standards of the standard Type 3 rifle, and everything is based on data, not all experience.

In fact, the current Xu Shiyang attaches more importance to the standard number of a new invention than the new invention itself.

Because with this kind of standard, everyone can continue to improve on the basis of this standard, or develop ideas to invent new things on this basis.

This is Xu Shiyang's favorite trend, and it is far more important to lay a solid scientific foundation than one or two new inventions - the empire is now invincible anyway, and it doesn't matter if there are those new inventions or not.

Then again, as long as the foundation is thick enough, there will inevitably be a blowout phase of various new inventions in the future.

This is also the reason why Xu Shiyang continues to invest in basic education - let the children learn the basic mathematics, Chinese and other courses well, and then have room for them to play, who dares to say that they will not have a Newton in the future?

Returning to Dai Zi's side, Xu Shiyang also gave him a fourth benefit:

He directly granted the status of Baron Dai Zi, allowing him to stride into the ranks of the nobility!

Now, the nobility of the empire is just an honorary title, but this honor is enough to make many people blush.

Moreover, this is the first example of a knighthood directly awarded for improving technology, from which the world will understand the importance of the empire to skilled workers, and may also lead to the future social atmosphere - when the social elite cannot rely on the Four Books and Five Classics to achieve class leapfrogging, Xu Shiyang pointed out a new direction for them - everyone should study more practical technology or devote themselves to science and engineering!

Xu Shiyang even planned to visit several mathematicians on the next trip to raise their status as well, so that people could see how much the empire attached importance to mathematics and other science and engineering foundations.

Of course, this is all the next work, and after setting an example for Dai Zixian, Xu Shiyang left Gan Province and continued his journey.

Here, let's continue to talk about the current cabinet statistics on the strength of the empire in all aspects:

In the military aspect, in addition to the Dai Zi rifle, the reserve and militia also have some other things that are modified by civilian gunsmiths themselves, such as double-barreled firing rifles, large-caliber rifles that mainly fire shotguns, and so on.

These things seem to have been specialized according to the area where the militia is located, such as double-barreled guns facing large and ferocious animals such as bears and tigers, which have a chance to fire a second shot quickly, and have a high margin for error.

The large-caliber shotgun is very useful against large groups of small targets - such as flocks of wild ducks, various flocks of birds, etc., a dozen can hit one piece, and the power of the bullet is just right, so as not to smash small prey.

Of course, more militia weapons are military weapons that are purchased directly or taken away by retired veterans.

In terms of muskets, there are many standard 1, 2, and 3 types of shotguns, as well as shotguns that have never become standard equipment, and even the more backward types 1 and 2 have higher equipment than 3 types. The reason for this is that the first two bullets can be made by themselves, while the fire caps of the Type 3 must be purchased from state-run weapons stores.

According to the survey, among the 3.8 million reservists and militia of the empire, the number of muskets was 2 million, including 600,000 standard Type 2 flintlock guns, 400,000 Type 1 arquebuses, 400,000 Type 3 firing guns, 300,000 shotguns, and the other 300,000 were pistols.

Considering that there are many people in the civilian population who are armed with multiple guns, there are still 2.3 million people in the imperial reserves and militia who do not have guns!

This is mainly due to the large shortage of muskets in the newly formed local militia in the Jiangnan region.

Considering that in the future, the foreign forces will be allowed to be equipped with muskets (shotguns and type 1 arquebuses) that are two grades behind, and the problem of changing the regular army, even if there is no war, the empire's musket market will be very profitable for a long time to come.