At the same time, the military development of various countries can be described as "advancing by leaps and bounds", first of all, firearms, artillery from the first appearance in 430 to 15 years this year, countries have accumulated a lot of experience in using artillery, black powder technology has spread in an all-round way, and now even a small country has mastered the basic formula of black powder, and the actual combat experience has made countries fully aware of the rationalization of the formula.

Due to the technical bottleneck of steel smelting, the artillery technology of the princes of various countries gradually returned to copper cannons and made great progress. Individual firearms have not changed the problem of shoulder-fired ignition firing, but a launcher has been added to support it.

At the same time, two new firearms appeared, one was still fired on the shoulder, but with a unique "rope cap gun", and the other was inserted into a wooden pole, stuffed with iron sand or large lead pellets, and the muzzle of the ignition gun was sprayed at the enemy, similar to the three-eyed firearm of the Ming Dynasty.

Both are cast in copper, the caliber is more than 25 millimeters (about 22.5 mm in the metric system), the "rope cap gun" still uses the shoulder-mounted fire, the fire door is behind, but there is a barrel-shaped copper cap flap on the fire door, the flap is infected with cotton wool and animal oil wax, ignited when used, the user only needs to pull the rope on the shoulder, and press the flap on the fire door to fire, and it can be fired.

Although this kind of firearm is simple, the clamshell is extremely reliable, and the fire is retained for a long time, and there is no need to constantly adjust the length of the arquebus like an arquebus.

At the same time, because of the oil, the flame is not easy to extinguish, even if the heavy rain is pouring, it is difficult to extinguish, the reliability is very high, the basic realization of one person to operate the loading and firing, has a certain practicability, and is more reliable and practical than the arquebus.

If we do not take into account the efficiency problems brought about by the limitations of the current technology itself, this kind of firearm is already very advanced under the current technical conditions.

However, this kind of firearm is a cast product after all, and due to the backwardness of pouring technology and smelting technology, it is destined to increase the weight of the firearm at the expense of the pipe wall to increase the weight of the firearm.

Moreover, this shoulder-mounted rope cap gun is up to four feet long or even longer, which is a typical long-barreled weapon, and its casting molding rate is not too high, which is not enough to popularize equipment. The weight of dozens of catties needs to be erected at the front end to be launched when launching, and the effective range is less than 70 steps, and the low precision makes people dare to move.

In addition, when the fire door is loaded to the ground, and the flap is lifted to land the fire, when it is lifted again, the fire copper is sagging and swinging, and it is easy to hit the fire door to cause a fire, so there is a ring at one end of the rope that implicates the fire copper cap when loading, and the ring is buckled on the convex hook fixed on the side of the firearm, so as to tighten the fire copper rising, and release the rope when firing.

In addition, new signs of artillery have emerged, due to the double bottleneck constraints of smelting technology and cost of vassal states, copper artillery has gradually become the mainstream.

In particular, the early model artillery of the Xianguo State and the Tianwei General Cannon of the Changsun Kingdom were erected there, and the development of the bronze artillery of the vassal states was advancing at a frantic speed.

Due to the first war in the south, the main princes of the Central Plains obtained a large number of breeding unicorns, which brought a serious problem, the unicorn horse's carrying force was huge, its pulling power was greater, and the copper cannon could also be made thicker and larger while satisfying the chamber pressure, so as to seek a longer range.

And if it is a horse, the pull of a high-grade Central Plains war horse is only one-fifth of that of a unicorn. This means that ten horses can pull a large heavy cannon, and two or three unicorns will do.

Regardless of the bearing capacity of the road surface, theoretically how bold people are, how productive the cannon is, so in recent years, it has been rumored that a giant copper cannon weighing 9,000 catties and a range of 10 miles has been developed, just like a giant cannon.

Due to the competition of various countries to develop copper cannons, and by increasing the tonnage and body shape to enhance the chamber pressure, the problem of exploding chambers was largely solved, and the existence of unicorn overcame the problem of transportation.

If you don't consider the caliber, efficiency and hitting accuracy, the firing range of some copper cannons is close to, or even surpasses the early carbon steel cannon of the Xianguo State and the general cannon of the Changsun Guotianwei.

Nowadays, countries are competing to produce artillery with good surface data, and the sales of artillery have naturally been greatly affected.

As a result, the Changsun Kingdom paid a high price for its years of blackmail, not only did the foreign exchange and precious metals plummet, but also the domestic rebellion was repeatedly banned, and the financial situation shrank sharply, and the national strength was weakened.

However, in the face of the latest artillery of the Xian State, the solid projectile fired by the simple and cumbersome copper cannon is not worth mentioning at all.

In the first half of 644, after obtaining the platinum-based copper-nickel-iron-based alloy, after testing and smelting process adjustment, the six-catty cannon was produced in small batches in the following year.

In view of the fact that there were no large-scale forging and large-scale cutting machine tools, let alone the self-tightening technology of breech threaded closed bolts and electroslag remelting tubes, the production of breech guns could only continue by casting.

As a result, the platinum-based nickel-iron alloy with excellent texture could not give full play to its excellent performance, and after full consideration and performance trade-offs, Bailiyan decided to increase the wall thickness and weight of the barrel in exchange for the safety bore pressure and maximum firing range.

At the same time, the platinum-based nickel-iron alloy has excellent performance, and the increased thickness of the pipe wall can leave processing potential for the future transformation of the new breech thread gun.

At the same time, for the first time, safe smokeless gunpowder after passivation of nitrocellulose, ether and ethanol was used, which not only increased the power of gunpowder, but also did not need to be repeatedly cleaned, and the loading speed was greatly improved.

The 36-degree elevation angle shelled the safety charge, and the maximum firing range of the six-kilogram gun was as far as eight miles, while the barrel weighed only 670 kilograms. Of course, you don't have to count on accuracy.

Because it is casting, it must be subject to the inherent shortcomings of the breech gun and the limitations of processing and forging technology, if the electroslag remelting tube body self-tightening and breech loading is adopted, the propellant and the eight-mile firing range remain unchanged, the weight of the six-pound gun body should be less than 500 catties, plus the iron gun carriage and wheels, it will not exceed 600 catties.

In view of the limited power of solid projectiles, Bailiyan developed shrapnel and fragmentation bombs after freeing his hands as early as 642.

After trial and error, the breaking rate of about 78 percent can be guaranteed, that is, only 78 of the 100 rounds of shrapnel have successfully exploded, and the remaining 22 cannot explode because of reliability problems, so they form duds.

The reason is actually quite simple, breech gun loading projectiles cannot be used in most cases with a head-impact fuse, so only tail exogenous delay fuses can be used.

The spherical projectile needs to be cast with a round hole, which is hollow inside, and a lead bullet with a diameter of 10 to 15 millimeters is loaded into it, and then charged, and finally inserted into the lead tube, which is filled with delayed gunpowder sticks.

In order to ensure that this round hole is always facing the side of the propellant in the chamber, it is necessary to use a wooden support, which is opened in the wooden support, and the round hole of the wooden support is aligned with the projectile fuse, and the wooden support is connected with the projectile with an iron sheet, so as to ensure that the fuse passes through the hole left by the wooden support and is always aimed at the gunpowder in the gun chamber.

When the projectile flies out of the barrel and flies over the local infantry, the delay fuse finally ignites the explosive in the projectile, and the explosive explodes the shell and sprays the lead pellet, thus killing the cluster infantry.

Because it is an open fuse, and at the same time affected by the projectile manufacturing, loading and transportation, the explosion rate of this kind of wooden tray structure is not high, 78 percent is still in the case of fine workmanship, if it is mass production, 50 percent can be considered God bless, but there is better than nothing.

Of course, there is also an option, the use of a striking fuse. In terms of technical conditions, Yongxing City has all the conditions for the production of impact fuzes.

First of all, after the successful development of the trapezoidal threaded rod in 643, after a year and a half of research, the first thread processing machine was produced at the end of 644, and at the same time, it is tackling the thread rolling plate, tap, and plate tooth to facilitate the large-scale production of threads.

Secondly, after the Lincheng Chemical Industry Workshop was put into operation, regardless of the scale of production, only in terms of technology, it not only has the ability to produce nitrocellulose, smokeless gunpowder, ammonium chlorate, ammonia, but also thundermercury and potassium chlorate two kinds of impact gunpowder.

After mixing potassium chlorate with magnesium powder and red phosphorus, a relatively safe impact powder can be obtained, but the sensitivity is lower than that of thundermercury, and the impact pressure required is greater. At the same time, the industrial production of springs has all the conditions for the production of impact fuzes and trigger fuzes.

Red phosphorus and potassium chlorate are not sensitive chemicals, but when they are together, they can produce a wonderful chemical reaction, and they are impact ignition reactions in the state of solid powder.

The modern starting pistol, the impact principle is to fill the red phosphorus, and the instantaneous deflagration passes through the gas pipeline of the starting pistol, making the sound of air explosion.

When the oxygen and phosphide gas in the confined space reach saturation, the explosion phenomenon will occur, and the addition of magnesium powder can improve the formula, better deflagration, so as to detonate the gunpowder in the shell.

However, due to the shortcomings of breech guns, under normal circumstances, the impact fuze can obviously only be loaded from the breech, which means that there is only one type of gun that meets the breech loading and the fuse is installed at the same time. [Note 1]

The mortar has a simple structure, a fast rate of fire, a low technical threshold, and convenient production, and at the same time can launch projectiles by hitting the primer.

Almost as long as it is a machining enterprise can produce, there is no technical bottleneck, as far as the current situation is concerned, the emergence of mortars is obviously a crazy advanced technology.

However, at the moment, Lincheng's chemical industry has just started, and it is far from being enough to mass-produce "advanced" gunpowder and open a separate ammunition production line.

At the same time, Yongxingcheng machining has just started, the number of steam engines and processing machines is still insufficient, and the annual industrial technology output value [Note 2] and the man-hours that can be allocated are very limited, which is not enough to give up the precious time to expand industrial processing capacity in order to support additional technical production.

In view of the fact that high-speed steel and tool steel have not moved for a long time, and the thread washboard, taps and other processing tools have been seriously hindered, it is still necessary to slow down the pace appropriately and consolidate the foundation of the basic industry.

In addition, the "firearm", a single weapon that is more important than mortars, after years of hard work, in the summer of 645 Shengyuan, five breech-loading paper-shell fixed-loading smoothbore rifles with a caliber of 14.5 millimeters (about 13.05 millimeters) were manufactured. [Note 3] [Note 4]

Bailiyan gave up the inherent route of the traditional front hall flintlock pistol and went directly to the back hall to order a rifle. Due to the constraints of stamping technology, it was still impossible to produce metal-shelled ammunition, so paper-shell ammunition was used to load, and one round was loaded at a time.

Using a round-headed projectile, the projectile, propellant and firing charge are wrapped in paper, and the shape of the chamber is roughly the same after being shaped with a mold, and the bolt is pulled open to load a round when used, and then locked, and the hammer hits the firing pin in the bolt, and the firing pin is nested and the spring is reset, so as to complete the entire firing action.

[Note 1] The processing technology required for mortars is extremely simple, but it can be produced by any mechanical processing factory, even if it is a small private factory at home, as long as there is a license and steel, there is no technical threshold.

If the index is lowered a little further, even if it is cast, there is no high-quality steel, and it can be manufactured by simply stacking the wall thickness and reducing the propellant.

In a word, mortars are the magic of the poor, and there is really no threshold. But I don't know why I don't see anyone writing about mortars in a lot of ancient industrial texts, if so, please leave a message.

Of course, once the mortar is made, and the bronze and iron farming civilization is abandoned, it is basically invincible.

[Note 2] Regarding the industrial technology output value capacity, in short, it is all industrial equipment, such as 10,000 lathes, 30,000 lathes, which work in three shifts a day, and 10,000 lathes produce 240,000 hours a day, which can be used to produce parts, and a year is 240,000 hours multiplied by 365 days, so a year's working hours are industrial capacity.

Assuming that it takes 100 man-hours to produce a rifle, 10,000 pieces of equipment can produce more than 2,400 units a day.

When technical equipment and metal cutting machine tools are limited, how to arrange and schedule production man-hours to produce more cost-effective products, or to produce more metal cutting machine tools, is a technical problem that tests operators and rulers.

As long as there is a small metal cutting equipment, mechanization will begin to develop slowly, when the metal cutting machine tool reaches a certain scale, it means the industrial scale effect.

Although World War II seems to be a fight against a large number of people, a large amount of ammunition, and a fight against the country, it is still fundamentally a metal cutting machine tool and the size of the industrial population. In World War II, in addition to China, Japan's metal cutting machine tools ranked at the bottom, followed by the Soviet Union, and the total number of various metal cutting machine tools in Germany almost crushed the Soviet Union, so the Soviet Union wanted to crush Germany on the scale of weapons, it was necessary to produce rough, but practical, and less man-hour equipment, such as Bobosha, T34, Katyusha, etc.

Of course, if you run into the United States, you won't have to play.

[Note 3] As for whether to build a breech gun or a breech gun first, as far as the processing technology is concerned, there is not much problem with the machining of the breech gun and breech gun bolt machine, once the metal cutting machine tool appears, anything can be processed, as long as the concept and ammunition technology are opened to keep up.

The reason why humans have to go through the breech gun during this period is largely constrained by the propellant and processing technology.

Black powder is slag and pyrotechnic powder, after firing the muzzle needs to be dumped downward, breech firing is obviously not conducive to dumping, and the earliest musket is actually really a breech charge, but subject to processing technology and mechanical concepts, only existed for a very short time, faded out of history, and returned to the breech.

The breech launch needs to hit gunpowder and smokeless gunpowder, so it is the processing technology and gunpowder technology that restricts the development of breech guns, not the lack of human intelligence. When the technology comes naturally, breech guns will naturally come into being.

Therefore, in the case that the protagonist's concept and technical means are already available, the development of breech paper shell custom rifle is the inevitable result.

[Note 4] It should be pointed out that the earliest breech fixed rifles, that is, firearms loaded from the rear, were the first to have no cartridge cases, how to load breech guns, and how to load breech guns, because mercury thunderate, that is, mercury thunder has not yet appeared, so it cannot be fired by needle puncture impact.

Until the appearance of mercury thunderate, there was no bulk cartridge case, and loading became a problem, so in 1836 breech fixed paper shell ammunition rifle appeared, the earliest cartridge case was paper soaked in nitrate, then dried, and then wrapped in bullet head and gunpowder and primer, in 1841, this kind of breech fixed rifle was first equipped with the Prussian army.

Moreover, the breech-loading rifle of 1836 could only be loaded with one round, and it could be fired with one shot, and there was no magazine.

Because the magazine needs to be spring-fed, and paper-shell ammunition is already fragile, multiple rounds pressed into the magazine can cause the projectile body to rupture, which is unreliable.

Moreover, in 1836, smokeless gunpowder was not yet popular, so the breech cartridge fixed rifle still used black powder plus mercury, so the design of the magazine will cause the black powder residue to remain in the magazine and the bolt, causing mechanical failure.

Therefore, the breech fixed rifle of the 1836 model adopts a through-tube rotary pull structure, which has the same diameter as the ammunition combustion chamber and the barrel, and has no stepped holes.

It wasn't until 1855, when the British invented the metal cartridge case, that the modern breech rifle in the true sense of the word gradually got on the right track. Moreover, even if the metal shell is modern, it is still an extremely difficult processing technology, and the industrial countries in the world that have mastered the technology of manufacturing the shell are conservatively estimated to be no more than 20.

Therefore, at the beginning of the birth of the shell, it was not popularized and developed quickly, because it was difficult to manufacture.

Moreover, the nest of the earliest revolver was actually a split ammunition instead of a cartridge case.

In the early days, the concept of engineering and technology constraints, the breech gun period of the gun caliber is generally very large, fifteen or sixteen mm, seventeen or eighteen mm or more is extremely common, even the early breech fixed rifle, its caliber is restricted by processing technology, in the absence of seamless steel pipe and inner diameter deep hole processing machine, it is difficult to do very small. At the same time, the restriction of tool materials also restricts deep hole machining.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the caliber of the early breech rifles was larger.