Under the guard of the guards, the group drove their horses to the artillery position located four miles northwest and half a mile away from the riverbank. The metal wheels of the guns were riveted and fired, all of which shocked the Mooneys and their others.

"Doesn't your cannon need to be cleaned of slag!"

"Black powder, that is, black powder is needed, but now we use safe smokeless powder, and the gunpowder will turn into air after firing, so there is almost no need to clean the gun chamber, just clean the gun chamber after use."

"Safe smokeless gunpowder? What is safe smokeless gunpowder. ”

Mooney asked, and Bailiyan waved his hand and said:

"It's too cumbersome to say, it's not easy to explain, and you don't understand it. But I can tell you that it is not charcoal and sulfur that can be made, so you don't have to go to great lengths to make this kind of gunpowder. ”

Nitrocellulose itself is smokeless gunpowder, but it is not safe, the use of ether ethanol conversion to form a more stable physical properties of safe smokeless gunpowder, but the early chemical inventions without exception come from accident, nitrocellulose is so, safe smokeless gunpowder is the same, Jin Xuedi people want to reproduce, without the core process and basic chemistry is almost impossible to produce and manufacture by themselves.

When he was young, he came to the mortar position on foot, and ten mortars were arranged in sequence from north to south at intervals of fifty meters, and after knocking out half of the base ammunition, he was always on standby. Bai Liyan patted one of the mortars and said:

"This is the mortar that attacked the West Bank Guard camp before dawn, you may wish to take a closer look."

"This cannon is fired in the sky!"

Mooney said in surprise, and Bailiyan nodded:

"It can also be fired horizontally, but not too far, and the distance is the farthest in the sky, so there are more launches in the sky."

At this time, Mooney found that the ammunition stacked on the gun position was different from the spherical projectile he had seen before, and was about to lean over to get it, but Bai Liyan decisively stepped forward to stop it:

"Beware, this thing will blow itself up!"

"Don't you want to light a fire?"

"Yes, no."

Bai Liyan said affirmatively, and Mooney was skeptical, saying:

"And what was the flame that spewed out before?"

"You've got a lot of questions." Bai Liyan shrugged helplessly, then carefully picked up a mortar shell, pointed to the fuse and said: "You see this silver-white protrusion, this is a retractable spring, there is a kind of gunpowder in the spring, as long as you hit it a little hard, this gunpowder will explode, and then detonate the other gunpowder in the projectile." After finishing speaking, Bai Liyan turned the tail and said: "This one also contains gunpowder, and it only needs to be hit hard, and it will ignite and spray gunpowder on its own, and it will pop out by itself, so you don't need to use someone to ignite it." ”

Mooney was dumbfounded and speechless when he heard the news, and Bai Liyan saw that he didn't seem to understand, so he ordered the mortar to shoot first, and when the shell was lifted into the air, Bai Liyan pointed to the red tail flame and said.

"See, the red tail flame is a cannonball, and it will explode when it hits a hard object when it hits the ground."

As soon as the words fell, the cannonball slashed through the sky and crashed into the city on the west bank, and then exploded into a field of fire.

Mortar shells run out of charge after firing and usually have no fire in the tail, so there is no very noticeable tail flame, but mortars have a fatal problem and are prone to reloading.

The propellant fails after the first shell hits the barrel striker, or it is partially invalid, and it is not enough to eject the shell out of the barrel, at this time, the blasting sound of the impingement charge is easy to mask the sound of the propellant, and the shooter does not find that the shell is ejected, and the second reloading at this time is equivalent to hitting the fuse of the first shot with the second shell, thereby causing an explosion in the chamber and killing the loader.

Even with artillery armed with modern digital informatization, repeated mortar reloading is still an unsolvable problem. Later generations are still helpless, and with the current technical conditions, Bailiyan does not have to take such pains.

However, the reality is much more complicated, the explosion caused by repeated reloading is at best killing and injuring a mortar team, and in modern times, it is at most a major accident, and people can be compensated for death, and then re-recruit new recruits to replenish, but it is precisely people who cannot afford to lose the most at the moment.

Mortar is the only kind of artillery in the artillery sequence of the Xianjun Army, each of which is installed and uses an optical sight, which needs to be combined with observation and sighting, and a certain mathematical calculation is carried out to confirm the trajectory and impact point, so the observer and sighter need to have a secondary education level to operate the mortar independently, which has extremely high technical requirements.

Of course, you can also use the jumping eye method to shoot the blind maneuver of the back shot table, but there is no basic condition for universal promotion that everyone will, and the accuracy of the blind maneuver may not be high, besides, the output of artillery shells is not large now, and a mortar shell is not cheap, and the blind operation is also fed with artillery shells, so it can still only be an optical sight.

However, it has been less than 15 years since the promotion of new education in Yongxing City, and less than 10 years since the popularization and promotion of mathematics, during which not many young people have received secondary education, and even fewer have received higher education.

As a result of the emphasis on basic education and industrial development, the personnel trained in the past 10 years have also been allocated to technicians, scientific research, academic teachers, and exploration military departments.

For this reason, we can only recruit a group of soldiers who have received primary education in the armament battalions, increase the number of middle and higher mathematics courses to train a group, and at the same time recruit another group of soldiers who have received secondary education, and open specialized artillery disciplines.

Therefore, the value of each observer is not as simple as losing a few people and compensating a sum of money. From basic cultural education to the completion of artillery subject training, the whole cycle takes more than five years, and if you receive secondary education, it will take seven or eight years, and the loss is not only money, but time and valuable talent.

In the future, technological progress, the updating and iteration of weapons and equipment, and the massive use of breech guns require more artillery sighting, artillery guidance, and middle-level command personnel, all of which need to be cultivated.

Mortars, as the only type of artillery that is universally equipped with optical sights, have the basis for experimental fields and seed selection and training, and in the future, middle-level generals and officers at the grassroots level of artillery will be selected from artillery artillery, and if one or two people are killed now, one or two artillery battalions may be lost in the future.

For this reason, Bailiyan racked his brains, and finally came up with a measure to add a flame tube to avoid the tragedy of repeated reloading to the greatest extent.

The shell ejects the barrel and ignites the tail flame tube at the same time, spraying a big red flame, the tail flame continues to burn for 200 to 230 meters and then burns out, and the observer can determine whether the shell is out of the chamber according to the tail flame, although sometimes the tail flame tube will fail due to storage and assembly process problems, increasing the frequency of inspection, but it is better than not having it.

This expedition to the west was equipped with a total of 70 mortars, one cannon for three people, and 70 guns for 210 soldiers who had received elementary and junior education; if they were all trained to become machine tool workers, they could almost open a medium-sized machine processing factory to produce guns and industrial products day and night, and the economic benefits produced in their lifetimes were hundreds of millions.

After three rounds in a row, Mooney could not understand how the shell flew out on its own, but the three explosions set off on the opposite side made him feel that times had changed. He said:

"How many of these cannons do you have?"

"As many as you want, Ben Shuai can produce it in large quantities at any time, if you want 1,000, I will have 10,000, and in the future there will be better, faster and more powerful artillery. In fact, you should be glad that you didn't rush to invade the north at this juncture, if it were now, how many of you came, it would be more than enough for the commander to send you one shell. ”

Bailiyan's words are both true and false, somewhat intimidating.

The mortar production process is relatively simple, the metal material of the barrel can be improvised, as long as the processing process and accuracy are passed, the production is extremely convenient, so it can also be produced in large quantities. However, the production of mortar shells needs to be cast first, and it can also be forged, but forging needs to occupy equipment, and the current equipment is in short supply, and the energy consumption and efficiency ratio are not high, so casting is more cost-effective at present.

Then the lathe is used to turn the shape, process the threads, customize the tail fin, and fill the gunpowder fuse, the process is much more complicated, and there is a lack of skilled workers, and the output is much less.

This time, 70 mortars, each with three bases of ammunition, about 135 rounds, and 70 less than 10,000 rounds, almost all reserves were emptied. More than 10,000 rounds may seem like a lot, but with an open rate of 25 rounds per minute, it can be played for five or six minutes. Therefore, if it is not a fierce battle, only two to three, or three to five, are fired per minute.

The artillery bombardment of the Xian army continued, until noon, the north and south wings of Jiangquan City were killed and wounded, in the afternoon Bailiyan adjusted the target, the muzzle turned to the southeast and north of Jiangquan City, and carried out a fire attack on the head of the city and the city wall, in order to avoid the people in the city, the projectile delay was set at the head of the city to explode in the air, and at the same time, the delay bomb was used to penetrate the city wall to destroy the city wall.

At present, ninety percent of the city walls are mainly adobe, without bricks, and the guards borrowed from the Xian army's city defense method, and hung mud straw bags and grass skirts on the head of the city in an attempt to offset the damage of the Xian army's artillery. However, the muzzle velocity of the Xianjun artillery was faster, and the kinetic energy of the projectile was higher, and this defensive measure originally used to deal with stone throwing and early solid shells had no effect at all, and the projectile was directly inserted into the grass and mud bag and embedded in the earthen wall, and when the delayed fuse burned out, the explosion instantly destroyed the adobe with a radius of one or two meters, and the guards could not parry it at all.

At the same time, the Xian Army's preset artillery positions along the river were in place one after another, and almost simultaneously carried out fire coverage on the West Bank Guards' artillery in the main camp; by the night of the same day, the commuter battle reports sent by fast horses from various places had a damage effect of more than 60 percent, and the more than 200,000 guards stationed along the river had only been killed or wounded for one day, and more than half of them had already been killed or wounded.

That night, the city wall of the east gate of Jiangquan collapsed, and in the second half of the night, the city wall of the north gate and the south gate collapsed one after another. The next day, on the fourth day of October, only ruins remained between the ruins of Jiangquan City, and on the same day, war reports were received from all over the country, and all the garrison camps along the river were destroyed, and all the obstacles to crossing the river were cleared.

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