Sun Chengzong, Minister of Military Aircraft, Nan Juyi, Shangshu of the Ministry of War, Bi Maokang, Shangshu of the Ministry of Industry, and Sun Yuanhua, Director of the Military Armament Institute, were already closely behind Emperor Chongzhen.

Li Tianjing and Song Yingxing walked in front of Emperor Chongzhen on the left and right, carefully maintaining a distance from each other.

The two of them listened to the emperor's words, and a stone fell to the ground in their hearts, whether the emperor's consideration of the engineering college or the development of this hot air balloon, it was not a whim, but a long-term plan.

At the same time, it is not to seek immortals and ask questions, but to use this kind of unheard of thing in the war and when the two armies face each other.

A hot air balloon made by an engineering college, with such a sentence of Emperor Chongzhen, suddenly had the status of a heavy weapon of the Ming Dynasty's military state.

Li Tianjing and Song Yingxing are not ordinary nerds, otherwise they would not have become famous scientists in the last years of the Ming Dynasty.

Soon after the hot air balloon they had built and experimented with had been successfully lifted into the air, they had already recognized the military use of this thing.

Now, hearing that the emperor really has such a plan, the hearts of the two people are excited, the era of "rather being a centurion than a scholar" has passed for them!

Song Yingxing stood next to a huge hanging basket under the hot air balloon, and loudly explained to Emperor Chongzhen and the accompanying ministers the distance of the hot air balloon and its basic structure.

Emperor Chongzhen looked up at this hot air balloon similar to the shape of later generations for a while, and looked at Song Yingxing, who was already middle-aged and in his forties at this time, and listened to his Beijing official dialect with a strong Jiangxi accent with great interest.

At this time, Song Yingxing was about forty-four or five years old, and his appearance was different from when he entered the palace to participate in the palace examination, not only the hair on his temples was a little gray, but his body was already a little fat, and his forehead was slightly hunchbacked.

Song Yingxing's thick Jiangxi accent and crackling fast speech speed made Emperor Chongzhen and the ministers hear the clouds, mountains and fog, and they were not very clear.

Li Tianjing, who was standing on the side of the Institute of Engineering, added a few words and explained from time to time.

However, for the current Emperor Chongzhen, he didn't need much explanation from others.

The principle of hot air balloon is not complicated, and its structure is also very simple, with the current level of technology and craftsmanship of the Ming Dynasty, it is not a problem to manufacture it at all.

Otherwise, Emperor Chongzhen would not have put forward a request for the development of these people in the Institute of Engineering.

And Song Yingxing led a cadre of apprentices and craftsmen from the College of Engineering to make this hot air balloon, which is basically the same as the simple hot air balloon in later generations.

In addition to a huge drop-shaped sealed balloon with skeleton support inside, it is a huge gondola used to carry people and goods.

Between the hanging basket and the balloon, there is a fixed "furnace" used to burn out the flame to heat the balloon air, and its shape is more than one person high, which looks like a furnace used by Taoist priests for alchemy.

However, this furnace has many fire doors for adding fuel or insulating air, and the purpose is to control the height of the Wanhu by adjusting the size of the flame.

As for the direction of the "Wanhu" hot air balloon's flight, of course, it is completely out of control at the moment, and everything can only depend on the direction of the wind.

This level of hot air balloon, of course, is still in a relatively primitive initial stage, but at present, it can achieve the degree of manned floating and flying downwind, and Emperor Chongzhen is already very satisfied.

He won't let Song Yingxing and others go beyond this era to do things they can't do at all, such as internal combustion engines or something.

Even if it was something like a steam engine, he wouldn't force it.

He believes that with the development of history and the passage of time, the Ming Dynasty that he is trying to create now will naturally develop such technological achievements in the near future, perhaps decades later, maybe a hundred years later.

If some things are not forced, they are forced to come, and if they do not meet the needs of the country and the times, they will also die out because of the unadaptation of water and soil.

In the afternoon of the same day, Emperor Chongzhen personally watched the Wanhu hot air balloon made by Song Yingxing and others on the experimental field of the Engineering College in Dongshilibao, Tongzhou, and personally watched the manned ignition and liftoff experiment of the Wanhu hot air balloon.

Finally, Li Tianjing, Song Yingxing, Yang Zhihua, Huang Hongxian and the people in the School of Engineering who participated in the development of the "Wanhu" hot air balloon and performed well were praised on the spot.

According to Emperor Chongzhen's dictation, Li Tianjing, the priest of the College of Engineering, was promoted to the rank of squire of the Ministry of Engineering on the spot, and continued to serve as the sacrificial wine of the College of Engineering.

Song Yingxing, the director of the College of Engineering, while continuing to serve as the director of the College of Engineering, was promoted from a member of the Mining and Metallurgical Officials Department of the Ministry of Industry to Langzhong, a newly established department of the Ministry of Industry, that is, a new Qing Officials Division established by Emperor Chongzhen on the spot, that is, Lang Zhong of the Hundred Workers and Clearing Officials Division.

In addition to the main job of the Department of Engineering, he began to take over the identification, promotion and evaluation of the qualifications of various craftsmen in various parts of the Ming Dynasty by the Ministry of Engineering.

Now before the Chongzhen Emperor succeeded to the throne, the Ministry of Industry of the Ming Dynasty should be said to have always been a small department, in addition to Shangshu and Shilang, there are a total of four economic divisions:

The first is the Department of Camp and Cleaning Officials, which is in charge of the construction and repair of palace officials;

the second, the Yu Heng Qing Division, which manufactures and receives all kinds of official utensils, and is in charge of weights and measures and coinage;

the third is the Department of Water Cleaners, who is in charge of water conservancy projects;

The fourth is the Tuntian Qing Officials Division, who is in charge of the affairs of the reclamation in various parts of the imperial court.

At the level of each division, there is a member of Langzhong, a number of non-members, and a number of directors under its jurisdiction.

Carefully calculated, there are not many people in such a department, and it is definitely a small amount compared to later generations.

After Emperor Chongzhen restored the iron and steel smelting industry run by the government of Baiyecheng, the Ministry of Industry quickly moved towards most of the imperial court, first restored the Yamen of the Ministry of Industry in Baiyecheng, and then added a new Department of Mining and Metallurgical Officials, specializing in the management of the mineral mining and smelting industry in the imperial court and the world.

Since then, the Ministry of Industry has not only had dispatched agencies such as the Ministry of Industry, but also directly affiliated institutions, such as the School of Engineering, and the Ministry of Industry and Economic System Department has also increased to five.

This time, Emperor Chongzhen's engineering college set up a new department of 100 workers, which can be regarded as increasing the number of economic and clean officials of the Ministry of Industry to six.

And Emperor Chongzhen also took this opportunity to hand over the affairs of the world's hundred craftsmen to the newly established Hundred Craftsmen to manage, and at the same time, while not adjusting the positions of other officials of the Ministry of Industry, he also solved the promotion and reward of these meritorious people in the Institute of Engineering.

Emperor Chongzhen did this without consulting the cabinet, but everyone was happy with this approach.

On the morning of March 16 in the fourth year of Chongzhen, Emperor Chongzhen's imperial car left Tongzhou and embarked on the return journey back to Beijing.

On the morning of March 15, before leaving Tongzhou, Emperor Chongzhen once again visited the Huangming Zhongyi Lecture Hall in person after three years, and followed the previous practice, first reviewing the procession of 300 students in the Lecture Hall, and then having lunch at the same table with the carefully selected outstanding students.

Among these outstanding students who were selected, there were several characters that Emperor Chongzhen had heard of but had never seen.

One of the young students in his early twenties was none other than Fu Shan, who was famous in later generations.

However, now this Fu Shan is only Fu Dingchen from Taiyuan, Shanxi.

It was not until the Manchu Qing Dynasty entered the customs and the Ming Dynasty fell that he changed his name to Fu Shan, and then became a Taoist priest, running around, contacting the anti-Qing Dynasty, and going down in history with this name.

These things, except for the current Emperor Chongzhen, naturally no one knows about them in this life, and no one will be able to foresee the outcome in the future.

When having lunch with the group of outstanding students who were about to graduate from the Lecture Martial Arts Hall, Emperor Chongzhen looked at Fu Dingchen, who was carefully sitting on a bench with half a buttocks, and he was really full of emotion in his heart.

After having lunch with the students of the Jiangwutang that day, Emperor Chongzhen's imperial driver left the Jiangwutang and went to the first town camp of the Luhewan Guards in the north of Tongzhou City.

That night, Emperor Chongzhen was staying in the courtyard where he had stayed when he had last come to the Luhewan camp of the Guards to inspect the first town of the Guards.

Everything in this courtyard is still the same as it was at the beginning, the green bricks on the floor are clean, and the furnishings in the small second floor are the same as they were back then.

It's just that everything outside the courtyard has changed, and today's Ming Dynasty is no longer the stormy Ming Dynasty of three years ago.

From the end of February to leave Beijing for Tianjin, Emperor Chongzhen walked along the way, the more he looked at the future, the more he was full of confidence in the future, and more and more convinced that with the current situation of Chongzhen's four years of the Ming Dynasty, it is almost impossible to repeat the mistakes of history.

Although the Tianjin Dagukou Shipyard has introduced imitations of this kind of Daifuku-class naval warship, there are only two copycats such as Dinghai and Zhenhai, and the Zhenhai has not yet undergone sea trials, but the problem of large naval warships has finally achieved a breakthrough from scratch.

At the same time, the finalization and mass production of the Chongzhen four-type front-loading flintlock rifled gun, the finalization and mass production of the Shenwei Capture General Cannon, and the finalization and mass production of the "Wanhu" hot air balloon that the College of Engineering took more than a year to do, all of which made the Chongzhen Emperor full of confidence in the future.

As long as the military maintains the current leading momentum, continues on the road of developing hot weapons and military firearms, and then develops several killer weapons, then perhaps in a few years, the Ming Dynasty will be invincible in the face of any enemy.

This is after Emperor Chongzhen left Tongzhou,