Early science, in a pejorative sense, was called witchcraft; Praise is called supernatural powers. The early scientists, who had no power and no money, looked ugly and mixed with the people, were derogatorily called Duangong witches; Those who have the right to be rich and handsome and enter the temple are respected as immortals and bodhisattvas.

Zhu Pingjin and his wife are all right, and they also have great power and wealth. The worship of money and power in human society and the awe of the unknown world naturally pushed them to the altar.

From the Buddha worship of Miss Luo Daci Temple to the renaming of Zhenwu Palace to Tianpeng Palace, the god-making movement of Shu is like riding on a rocket, soaring into the sky with one shot, flying into the unknown deep space, but I don't know where to brake.

Zhu Pingjin and Luo Yuhong, as well as many Confucian ministers who were silent and confused, were very clear about all this, but they invariably used the state apparatus to deliberately connive and even preach and guide.

There is no other reason.

A new vigorous god-making movement means that "the destiny of heaven is mine". Since then, Zhu Pingjin has succeeded to the legitimacy of the Ming Dynasty, and in addition to the three sharp weapons of bloodline, legal system and Taoist system, there is a more unpredictable providence!

The illiterate people of the Ming Dynasty are synonymous with ignorance. The vast majority of knowledge was monopolized by a small class of gentry.

Shu had just begun to implement literacy classes at the county and village levels, and the culture of ordinary people was not higher than the average of the Ming Dynasty.

For the miracles of Shu Shizi and his wife, 99% of the people will be surrounded by the secret thoughts of the above, and they are willing to act as a small loudspeaker to start broadcasting. The remaining hundredth is either absorbed, utilized, or simply clicked.

For the people, the god-making movement is equivalent to a stimulant and a pair of narcotics. Stimulants, narcotics, fart people can't get high or not. Nowhere is this more evident than in the group of craftsmen of the Great Powers of the Firearms Bureau.

The administrative relationship between the upper and lower levels, the interpersonal relationship between master and apprentice, the semi-military enterprise management model, and the preferential treatment far higher than the living standards of ordinary people make the glorious image of Zhu Pingjin and his wife incomparably majestic here, and then plated with glittering gold edges. Their words have been infinitely amplified, and they have become the embodiment of God's will and the spokesperson of the gods and Buddhas.

At the Firearms Bureau, this is naturalized as a guide for all production and scientific research.

As a result, the accumulation of knowledge in 500 years has clarified the direction of scientific research in advance, avoiding the waste of resources in complicated explorations.

The military management model of orders and prohibitions ensures the efficiency of scientific research and puts an end to the self-righteousness and freedom of engineering men in the scientific research team;

The investment of resources regardless of cost has consolidated the material foundation and the foundation of people's hearts, and promoted the parallel development of scientific research projects in all directions.

The advantages of system and resources have allowed the Sichuan Firearms Bureau to sweep all competitors with unparalleled strength. It started from scratch and developed into the pioneer and leader of the industrialization of the Ming Dynasty at an astonishing speed in just over a year.

According to the intelligence research and judgment of various aspects, the intelligence bureau determined that by the autumn of the 15th year of Chongzhen, the military industry in Shu had been ahead of the Tartar and the Jingshi imperial court in terms of production capacity and technical level. As for the thieves, it is said that except for the quantity of gunpowder produced (Note 1), the others are only allocated to Shu Di to lick the little toes.

……

The successful trial production of the five-and-a-half-inch cannon and the new gun tube and the rapid mass production are the all-round embodiment of the comprehensive advantages of hardware and software of the Sichuan Firearms Bureau.

The five-and-a-half-inch cannon was the first artillery named after the inner diameter of the barrel in Shu. The name of the barrel inner diameter itself shows that the accuracy of the barrel inner diameter manufacturing has been greatly improved.

The Firearms Bureau originally planned to try out the production of a five-and-a-half-inch cannon using the casting method of a fifteen-pound copper cannon. However, the five-and-a-half-inch cannon weighed more than 1,500 catties with only the barrel, and the fifteen-pound cannon and the seven-and-a-half-pound cannon could not be compared at all, and the firearms bureau's copper stock was certainly not enough. Therefore, even if the prototype is successful, it is difficult to put it into mass production.

Just when the mass production plan was facing difficult birth, the middle-aged blacksmith Feng brothers, who were suddenly needed by the country one day a year ago, led a huge team of apprentices with a strong sense of mission and pride, and set up a research team with the scholars of the research institute to carry out three combinations. This combination is ten days and a half months. In the end, the research team finally came up with an incredible artillery-making process plan:

Replace bronze with ingots and hot stamping instead of casting!

The cannon, whether it is made of copper and iron, is essentially a hollow metal tube with a bottom. In the Ming Dynasty and even the whole world known to the Ming Dynasty, the common method of making cannons can only be casting, that is, pouring molten iron and copper liquid into the prepared mold. When the molten iron and copper juice are cold, the mold is removed, and it is an almost complete cannon.

Copper is expensive and iron is cheap, and cheap cast iron is of course preferred for casting cannons. Although the fluidity of cast iron is good, it is hard and brittle after cooling, and it is used to make cannons, and explosives have become commonplace. Coupled with the bubbles and eyelets that are inevitable in the rough casting process, the danger rate of firing work is close to suicide. Therefore, in order to reduce the probability of exploding cannons, bronze cannons have become a reasonable substitute for cast iron cannons.

But in addition to being expensive, bronze cannons also have an inherent flaw: low thermal strength. In other words, the bronze cannon is not heat-resistant, and it is easy to deform and jam at high temperatures, and the larger the cannon, the more serious the deformation!

The 30,000-pound furnace uses fried steel as raw material to smelt high-quality steel, which lays the foundation for replacing copper with steel. But with steel, the red-hot and softened steel ingots were directly stamped and formed in the mold, which did not have any successful precedent in the blacksmith world of the Ming Dynasty, and nothing was known in the world of Xiyi's cognition. Therefore, as soon as the plan was proposed, it immediately caused a huge controversy in the Firearms Bureau.

Although the controversy revolves around the technical feasibility of the process, everyone knows that the technical debate is only a façade.

Without a huge investment, it would have been impossible to provide the huge equipment necessary for hot stamping. So at the heart of the debate is the economic viability behind the technical debate, where the huge investments come from. Who will bear the heavy losses and strict accountability that will inevitably come from failure?

But in the end, the whimsy of the research team was still adopted.

The reason for the good start is that the Feng brothers, the leaders of the research team, as the descendants of the prince, can send their opinions directly to the heavens, which is the most fundamental institutional foundation.

More importantly, the development of technology reserves and equipment provides the necessary support for the vision of the research team.

After more than a year of development, the Firearms Bureau has accumulated relatively good and perfect production conditions and production technology.

The completion of the 30,000-jin furnace, the core project of the third phase of the project, can produce high-quality large-quality casting ingots. With a furnace that can turn iron into water, it is not difficult to build a high-temperature forging furnace that can turn steel ingots red and soft. Based on the man-powered forging machine for forging armor and guns, it can be made into a man-powered forging machine that can forge steel ingot cutting heads (Note 2) or even directly stamped into gun barrels.

In addition, important technologies such as sand bunker casting, crane lifting, rail car transportation, machining and heat treatment of seven-and-a-half-pound and fifteen-pound guns have been popularized and used in the Firearms Bureau, and the relevant technologies and equipment can be used in the production of five-and-a-half-inch guns.

Of course, the support of Shizi and Miss Luo's instructions is the Dinghai Shenzhu.

The above words not only enhance the confidence of the below, unify the understanding, and unite the team, but also solve the problem of indispensable funds and personnel.

Shizi clearly pointed out that the development of the five-and-a-half-inch cannon was the "Tianzi No. 1 Project". Through the development of the five-and-a-half-inch cannon, it should become a leading project that drives the development of the whole industrial chain such as mineral processing, metallurgy, machinery, and equipment manufacturing, a starting point project for reserving technology and quenching talents, and a project to optimize scientific research and production management.

Shizi also reminded the research team that the five-and-a-half-inch cannon is a naval gun, and the weight of the gun is not a veto indicator, but the recoil of the gun is. Therefore, an attempt should be made to apply the concept of a spring barrel remount machine, which has been proposed for a long time. This also has the added advantage of the fact that the barrel of the gun does not have trunnions, so the outer wall can be easily machined.

After getting the will of the prince and Miss Luo, the whole firearms bureau was as excited as if they had been drugged.

Soon, a larger-scale scientific research and production team composed of administrative officials, soil experts and craftsmen from major countries was formed. This team is personally led by Wang Kunshan, director of the General Armament Department and general office of the Firearms Bureau, and the members have broken the administrative establishment and treatment level, crossed the professional boundary, and covered all aspects of design, testing, production, human resource deployment, logistics services and social coordination.

An efficient system has yielded fruitful results.

In mid-May, the experiment of hot stamping of heavy embryos was initially successful in Chengdu factory, taking a critical first step.

The core technology of success lies in the rational use of steel molds.

The traditional artillery casting of the Ming Dynasty used disposable clay molds, which were inefficient and of poor quality, and the production speed was far from keeping up with the expansion of the scale of the war. Later, the Firearms Bureau used the traditional lost-wax method to successfully trial-produce a two-petal inner and outer steel mold that was opened and closed with bolts, which could be reused many times, and then developed a large-scale precision machine tool that could finish the inner and outer steel molds (Note 3).

The trial production of high-weight steel embryos is based on the production experience of casting steel molds. The hot-stamping steel die has high requirements for the strength of the die body itself and the fixing method, so it is very large and heavy, but the internal structure is greatly simplified, and the original double-layer cylinder is changed to a single-layer cylinder, and the technical difficulty is limited. The use of the spring barrel retraction machine allows the gun barrel to remove the trunnion, making the internal structure of the steel mold simpler.

Wang Kunshan roughly explained the production process of the five-and-a-half-inch cannon in "The Successful Trial Production of the Five-and-a-Half-Inch Cannon":

…… The hammer-forged blanks are reheated and softened and transferred to a large punch press.

The heavy, round-headed punch moves vertically from top to bottom, squeezing the red-hot embryo by the pressure created by the rotation of the screw. The embryo is deformed under the double constraint of the steel die and the punch, and due to the incompressibility of the solid, while the inner hole is formed, the embryo has to grow in reverse along the annular space between the round punch and the steel die, and it is longer and longer until the completion of the stamping process.

At this point, the outer diameter of the embryo has filled every minute of the gap in the mold, and the inner diameter of the inner hole is equivalent to the diameter of the punch. Therefore, when the round-headed punch is pulled out of the embryo, the embryo installed in the steel mold is already the same as the body tube of a five-and-a-half-inch steel cannon.

With the body tube embryo, heat treatment and finishing are also carried out.

The first is the cooling of the body tube, and the mature method of internal coolant comes into play. Relatively cheap soapy water replaces expensive vegetable oil and is continuously injected into the inner hole of the embryo with a manual pump to maintain the temperature and speed of cooling.

The inner wall of the embryo tube is cooled first and then cooled from the inside out. Due to thermal expansion and cold contraction, the inside and outside of the embryo tube will shrink to the center of the tube wall, forming a two-way internal stress, making the embryo tube tissue denser and more durable.

After the thoroughly cooled embryo tube is removed, it is hoisted onto a large vertical machine for precision boring.

The final step is to polish the bore by hand. After that, a five-and-a-half-inch cannon barrel was completed......

At the same time as the trial production of the five-and-a-half-inch barrel barrel hot stamping was successful, the trial production of the spring barrel retreat machine was also successful.

The spring barrel retraction machine is also a revolutionary design.

The concept of a stand-and-retreat machine (reentry machine plus cradle) is well understood, and a fist smashing on a brick wall certainly does not feel the same as smashing on a cotton bale. But how to cushion the huge impact generated by the backseat of the artillery, there can be many schemes.

When the fifteen-pound cannon reached the Centipede II boat, in order to prevent the hull from overturning and capsizing caused by the two guns firing at the same time to the side of the boat, and also to reduce the damage to the hull structure caused by the recoil of the gun, a simple anti-recoil reset device was formed with slide rails, gear sets and twisted cables above the seat ring. However, this set of devices has a complex structure, difficult maintenance, and poor results.

The structure of the spring cartridge retractor is much simpler than that of the twisted cable mechanism:

A concentric steel cylinder with a welded trunnion was attached to the barrel of the gun, and between the barrel and the barrel was a thick, strong annular concentric spring.

When the gun barrel starts the recoil, the spring provides cushioning for the barrel; When the reseat of the gun barrel ends, the spring is responsible for the re-entry of the barrel; When the gun adjusts the pitch and pitch angle up and down, the concentric steel barrel is responsible for controlling the direction of the barrel.

Therefore, this seemingly simple cylindrical stationing and retreating machine plays the triple role of stationing and retreating aircraft, reentry machine and cradle at the same time, greatly reducing the recoil of the gun, and also reducing the damage of the recoil of the gun to the hull structure.

But in everything there is a disadvantage.

The body barrel of the five-and-a-half-inch cannon is short and thick, and the spring barrel is also only a short foot. Because the weight of the coarse concentric springs alone has increased by more than 200 catties, and the army's equipment places special emphasis on carrying weight, it has almost reached the point where it must be compared. Therefore, the Ministry of Armament believes that the direction of continuous improvement of the stationed and retired aircraft should be to reduce weight. Before there was no breakthrough in the weight reduction of the garrison aircraft, the army field artillery continued to use rigid trunnions.

At the same time, after solving the production process of the gun barrel, the Firearms Bureau should promptly shift the focus of artillery development to the auxiliary equipment such as gun mounts, aiming mechanisms, and gun accessories, so that the artillery equipment of the protection of the first class is truly proud of the world.

Note 1: It is very clear in the historical documents that Li Zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong and other peasant rebels have widely used the method of gunpowder blasting to attack the city in the fifteenth year of Chongzhen. Li Zicheng blasted Kaifeng, and Zhang Xianzhong blasted Chongqing and Chengdu, which are two famous examples.

Note 2: Cutting head refers to cutting off the upper part of the cast steel ingot. Because the residual steel slag will float and solidify on the upper part of the ingot, the quality of the ingot head is poor, and it is generally not used in hot forging production.

Note 3: The steel mold (clay mold and sand mold) cast by the artillery body tube, whether it is a straight cast or a reverse cast, is divided into two parts: the inner mold and the outer mold. In order to ensure the accuracy of the casting, the outer mold of the steel mold needs to be finished on the inner diameter, and the inner mold needs to be finished on the outer diameter.