"Finally an update......

Ferdinand was not lamenting the author, he was referring to the new weapons of the Castilian and Aragon armies.

The flintlock factory has been initially established in Sardinia, and the production is no longer so pitiful, with several hundred guns per year...... Strive to exceed a thousand in 1495, anyway, you can't use it back then, and in 1496, you can impact thousands or tens of thousands.

In addition, Ferdinand decided to revolutionize the technology of artillery.

According to a number of sources, at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century, the pass rate of European artillery was quite high, for example, the scrap rate of casting a barrel was only ...... About 80%......

How can this be endured?

Regarding the manufacture of gun barrels, on the one hand, the use of the previous development of steel smelting technology, the promotion of the use of medium and low carbon steel to make gun barrels, and the use of wrought iron to cast guns is also a very important barrel, the quality must be strictly guaranteed.

As a result, Sardinia employed a number of carefully vetted, dragging English craftsmen - at this time, Castile and England were still on good terms, basically a honeymoon period of good-neighborliness, and the two countries would be jointly engaged in the Italian war against France for twenty or thirty years, and the biggest dispute between the two sides at present was how much dowry Spain (Castile and Aragon shared) should pay at the time of marriage.

Historically, the English have inadvertently demanded that the dowry be doubled as previously agreed, citing the high prices of goods in England...... (The exact words of the Ambassador of England were "The smallest coin in our country is also worth eight Spanish Malawidi")

"Ask them what the price of salt is, isn't it 4 shillings per quart, as we are?" Ferdinand wrote a letter to the Spanish ambassador.

Queen Isabella was not as informative as Ferdinand, and took a simple and crude approach, instructing the ambassador in her reply that "reduce the amount of the dowry we promised to a quarter of ......"

……

Well, it's not a big deal. At present, Aragon's imports of coal and steel from England were increasing, and the English government and merchants were very happy about this, and the little dowry money was nothing.

I have to thank the West for the time when Catholicism was still unified, and there was no religious and ethnic hatred in England and Spain, so it was easier to bring in craftsmen.

It seems that when the Supreme Act was introduced, it was necessary to attack England as soon as possible, extinguish it before the signs of Protestantism began to erode independent English Catholicism, and even try to annex the British Isles to Spain. During the Thirty Years' War, he even had to realize the ideal of extinguishing Protestantism, which, of course, could not be achieved by Ferdinand.

These two tricks did not solve the problem fundamentally, and now Ferdinand used his own advantages to learn from (copying) the artillery manufacturing technology of later generations.

Ferdinand decided to refer to a certain (and all of its kind) a common method – the iron mould casting method and the Rodman casting method.

As early as the New World, Ferdinand copied his memory of the iron mold casting artillery method (once the cannon and the diagram are combined, it leads to harmony).

Where did this book come from? This is a method invented by Gong Zhenlin, but it is included in great detail in Wei Yuan's "Atlas of the Sea Kingdom, Volume 86" - Wei Yuan is really a good comrade!

"First use the inner surface of each petal, mix water with fine wheat bran ash and fine sand mud, and brush it thinly with a broom, like a powder wall. The second is brushed with high-grade ultra-fine kiln coal, and the two petals are combined, such as the shape of a tile. Tightly bake with iron hoops, and continue to do so. The rest of the methods are the same as those used in clay molds. ……”

Ferdinand sent the transcribed methods and pictures to Isaac Abravanel and others in Sardinia as Christmas presents for the year.

The iron mold casting cannon method was invented by Gong Zhenlin during the Opium War when the British army invaded, which greatly improved the speed and efficiency of the cannon.

Since Western craftsmen were paid on a monthly basis, not by the number of cannons cast, this method helped to reduce costs considerably, up to twenty or thirty times, and of course, due to the bumper wheat harvest and the progress of cotton textiles, Sardinia was now not short of money, and even led to a 25% reduction in the average price of grain in Europe, and grain dumping in parts of France (see "Sardinian Agriculture" below).

However, there are also defects in the iron mold casting method, such as the whitening of iron.

Ferdinand began to tinker with the "Rodman Casting Method", also known as the "inner membrane water cooling technology".

The most important and fundamental reason for such a high rate of artillery casting scrap is the difference in cooling rate between the inside and outside of the barrel. Moreover, the larger the caliber of the barrel, the thicker the barrel wall, and the more obvious the difference between the cooling speed inside and outside the barrel. And the barrel with a crack in the barrel is naturally a scrap.

The internal mold water cooling technology can ensure that the cooling rate of the inner and outer tubes is the same, or after experiments and adjustments, the speed difference can be controlled within a safe range, so that the body tube will not cause internal injuries. This immediately reduced the scrap rate to a single-digit percentage, or even to zero, resulting in a significant reduction in the price of a cannon. And the cannon itself is also relatively strong and has no dark wounds, so the average life span is increased by five times.

Moreover, when casting super-large caliber guns, since the larger the caliber, the greater the difference in the rate of cooling between the inside and outside. Therefore, in the era of natural cooling, the higher the rejection rate of the cannon cast, and the higher the weight and price - not proportional, almost exponential. To a certain extent, it is almost 100% failure, and Rodman's "internal mold water cooling technology" solves this problem.

However, hot blast technology is a difficult problem, and each invention has a corresponding technical basis.

The concept of hot blast was invented by the Englishman Nelson and applied to the ironworks in Glasgow in 1829. The thermal blast technology used in Ferdinand's plan used a regenerative chamber of much the same technical level as the British steel mills of 1850, using cast-iron tubular hot blast furnaces. The cold blast passes from the upper branch of the blast main to each furnace, and through the arched cast iron pipe located over the fire into the tube on the other side of the heat exchanger chamber, and then into the air outlet of the furnace. The plant is sealed in a thick arched furnace made of bricks and refractory materials to preserve and reflect as much heat as possible, and the blast air is heated directly to a temperature of 300 degrees Celsius, enough to melt the lead. In addition, another measure is exhaust gas heating, from the top of the iron-melting furnace with ceramic pipes to the exhaust gas of the iron-making furnace out, from the upper part into the regenerative furnace, and then from the lower part of the exhaust gas outlet.

"The good news is that the search for diatomaceous earth minerals in Denmark is going well...... "Diatomaceous earth is very important for the firing of refractory bricks.

The bad news is that the initial use of the open-hearth method of steelmaking began in the second half of 1495, after the initial application of the open-hearth method of steelmaking (the second half of 1494).

In other words, it was only at the end of 1495 that the artillery cast by the Rodman casting method could be put into service for the first time...... I don't know how much maddening effort there is behind this – like a group of craftsmen who can't even rest this Christmas, who are tasked with making U-shaped pipes based on Ferdinand's drawings, as well as some of the devices necessary for Rodman's cannon casting method......

There is also the calculation of some parameters, for which Ferdinand first copied the empirical formula given by Rodman, and then arranged for the "mathematicians" (if they were mathematicians) and craftsmen of the time to carry out intensive tests and calculations, in short, it will be thankful that the results will be produced next Christmas...... Powerful ass plump and charming body! WeChat public: meinvmeng22 (long press for three seconds to copy) You know, I understand!