Fan Yubin and Fan Gui glanced at each other and smiled slightly. Fan Yubin said: "That's the old yellow calendar. This afternoon I will show you the musket that the gentleman has prepared for you. Is it stronger than a bow and arrow, let's let the facts speak. ”

After Mrs. Fan's birthday, the Fan family noticed that Fan Yubin, the eldest grandson of the Fan family, had a new strange habit. He chose a remote, uninhabited compound. I drew some more drawings and asked the housekeeper to customize a batch of strange things, along with some coal and other fuels, all of which were pulled into the yard. also set a rule that no one is allowed to approach except Fan Gui, otherwise the family law will serve.

Every day, almost without moving, Fan Yubin would take an hour or two to enter the small courtyard, and at this time, there would often be a foul smell in the small courtyard, permeating the courtyard of Fan's mansion. Young Master Fan Yubin and Fan Gui were covered with a thick white cloth on their faces every time they came out of the courtyard, and only two eyes were exposed, which was very scary.

In fact, Fan Yubin is doing a crucial thing: he is experimenting with the production of picric acid. Yes, you read that right, it's picric acid. Picric acid, which is an extremely powerful explosive, far surpasses black powder in terms of explosion speed and explosion energy. The energy of one pound of picric acid is equivalent to the energy of sixty pounds of black-gunpowder. This was undoubtedly epoch-making at the time.

Fan Yubin first used coal and high-temperature dry distillation to extract coal tar, and then refined phenol, an important raw material for the production of picric acid. Hydrochloric acid is also extracted from saltpeter by dry distillation. Fortunately, there was already sulfuric acid in the Ming Dynasty, and it was called "alum oil". In the eighth century, when our Chinese Taoist priests were alchemizing, they used green alum (ferrous sulfate) as a raw material and calcined it in a distillation kettle. It is a pity that the concentration of "alum oil" is not high, and it needs to be purified. But for Fan Yubin, it's a gesture of effort, and it's much simpler than remaking sulfuric acid.

With phenol, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid, picric acid was naturally born. Looking at the small bag of pale yellow crystals, Fan Yubin deeply understood what its appearance would mean to the world.

When Fan Yubin first walked into the underground armory where the Fan family collected guns, even if he had crossed over from the afterlife, he was dazzled, a little confused, and a little shocked by the situation inside. The treasury is densely packed with muskets, and it is simply a firearms expo library. Among them, there are assault muskets, pear flower guns, arquebuses, three-eyed guns, bird guns, etc., covering almost all the varieties of muskets of that era, and there are nearly 200 of them. These are well-made, high-quality, and the best of the best. They were neatly stacked on rows of wooden shelves, and they were kept very well.

"Groundless wind may not be without cause. It seems that the legends of the Jin merchants led by the Fan family in history who smuggled weapons and ammunition were not all fabricated and false. Fan Yubin thought evil in his heart. He looked at it carefully, a musket, a musket. Suddenly, Fan Yubin's eyes lit up, and he finally found the target he was looking for: a dozen smoothbore flintlock pistols and a few rifled flintlock pistols.

Fan Yubin is like a treasure. He stepped forward, gun in hand, and examined it closely. These flintlock pistols are of the highest quality in terms of steel quality and craftsmanship, and they should be high-priced products purchased from the Franco.

In the next few days, the Fan family's compound was not quiet. "Bang bang" gunshots are often heard on the playground. I heard that even the old lady of the Fan family was not very happy, saying that the voice was too noisy and affected her to worship the Buddha. We must punish this grandson who does not do his job. In the end, it was Mrs. Fan who came forward to intercede, and Fan Yubin escaped.

However, the place where Fan Yubin practiced guns had to be moved from the Fan Mansion compound to the field. It wasn't until Fan Yubin broke several guns that his gun practice came to an end.

Of all the muskets, Fan Yubin chose the flintlock rifled gun. (The so-called rifle, also known as the compound line, yin and yang line, windmill line, etc., is actually the barrel chamber is cut or cut into a spiral concave and convex surface, the purpose is to form a violent rotation after the gun is ejected, so that the flight trajectory of the bullet is stable, and the hit rate is greatly improved.) As the name suggests, a smoothbore gun is a barrel with a smooth inner hall. ）

The advantages of the flintlock rifled gun are simply too obvious: not only can it hit far and accurately, but it is also powerful. Someone said that the flintlock rifled gun had such advantages, so why did not an army have equipped it for a long time after it was invented? And that's exactly what happened. The reason why the flintlock rifled gun was shelved for a long time after its invention was because it had two fatal shortcomings.

One of the disadvantages: the so-called flint is flint firing ignition, but due to the limitations of steelmaking technology at that time, the spring tension of the flintlock line boring gun pulling the hammer is not enough, so that the success rate of the flintlock rifled gun firing is not high, resulting in a high dumb firing rate of the flintlock rifled gun. Especially on the battlefield, when muskets are fired in unison, the sound of which is so loud that soldiers simply cannot figure out whether their guns have been fired or not, and if they continue to discharge gunpowder and load guns, it is easy to cause explosions.

The second disadvantage is: because the musket has higher requirements for air tightness, and the chamber of the flintlock rifled gun is concave and convex, so its bullet is generally slightly larger than the inner diameter of the chamber, and the installation of lead bullets has become a very troublesome thing. Not only is this a rush, but it is too slow, which is a fatal thing on the battlefield.

Fan Yubin used his brains to solve these two problems well: First, the method of using the built-in duplex spring to solve the problem of insufficient spring tension. To put it simply, it is a small spring in a large spring to form a built-in duplex spring, and the common force of the two springs is used to increase the tension of the spring. 2. Wedge a two-centimeter sharp steel needle on the breech of the flintlock rifled gun. In this way, the outer diameter of the lead bullet used in the flintlock rifled gun can be slightly smaller than the inner diameter of the flintlock rifled gun, and when the lead bullet is installed, the lead bullet can easily slide into the chamber, and after the lead bullet is in the end, as long as you use a bucket of hard with the whole strip, the steel spike on the back seat will pierce the back of the lead bullet. The extremely sharp steel needle pierced the tail of the lead bullet under the action of external force, and the lead bullet expanded and tightly stuck the bore of the rifled gun, forming a good air tightness.

In addition, Fan Yubin also designed the lead bullet into a cylinder, the bullet is elliptical, and the rear is engraved with the same spiral line as the back and forth line, which can greatly increase the rotation of the lead after the ejection of the chamber, and the bullet trajectory is more stable, the bullet shoots farther, the hit is more accurate, and the power is greater.