The price difference between iron and copper is several times, and if it is placed in the Southern Song Dynasty, which lacks copper, it will be higher. However, Hong Tao still does not have the data on these artillery, they are only experimental products, and they need to be finalized before they can be mass-produced and then assembled. It's a tedious and important job, and you have to keep an eye on it yourself. And Qi Zu and those craftsmen are the great heroes of Jinhewan, and it is precisely because of them that they have helped themselves and the entire Jinhewan system survive a big crisis!

With a battleship equipped with artillery, Hong Tao really dared to say that he was invincible in the world's oceans, and as long as he was close to the ocean, it was his own territory. Compared to grenade launchers, although they are all fired by one thing, the power of the gun is obviously many times greater. The range is the most important, even with a large slingshot, it is impossible to throw a grenade a kilometer or two away, but artillery can do it easily, and the accuracy is another matter. With the range, the means of attack will be diversified, originally only by hanging the way to attack the enemy's ships, now you can change to solid bullets to shoot directly, the efficiency will be much higher, the attack distance will be much farther, for your own ships, safer.

Once these cannons are equipped, the question of whether to go south or north, which originally bothered Hong Tao, will be less tricky. Relying on artillery to destroy cities is much more efficient and deterrent than using grenade launchers. He could pacify Jawa Island in less time, and then turn around and head north to cause trouble for the Mongols. And if you go again this time, you won't be afraid of those strong crossbows and trebuchets, even if they spray each other face to face, they are not opponents.

Throughout May, Hong Tao barely showed up in Jinhewan, and he had been nesting in the dense forests on the south bank, even eating and living with the craftsmen. Every day is spent with the sound of rumbling explosions. The ears are a little back. This effort is not without rewards. By mid-June, the three guns were officially finalized and entered the production stage.

155 mm howitzer, 285 cm long, 18 times diameter, total weight 2,100 kg. A solid bullet weighing 12 kg is fired using a standard medicine kit (3.5 kg), which can penetrate a 30-centimeter-thick hardwood board at a distance of 200 meters, and can effectively fire directly at a distance of 300 meters; Launching a hollow flowering grenade of the same caliber can be carried out at a distance of up to three kilometers.

135-mm howitzer. It is 253 centimeters long, 18 times the diameter, and weighs 1,560 pounds. A solid bullet weighing eight kilograms is fired using a standard medicine pack (two kilograms), which can penetrate a 20-centimeter-thick hardwood board at a distance of 200 meters, and can effectively fire directly at a distance of 300 meters; Launching hollow flowering shells of the same caliber can also hit about three kilometers.

80-mm howitzer, one hundred and sixty centimeters long, twenty times the diameter, and a total weight of four hundred and ten kilograms. It can fire grenades and shotguns at targets within 200 meters and within 1 kilometer.

These three guns were intended to be used in different places, and the heavy guns of the 155 were mounted on the lower gun deck of the Jinhe. Thirty-two in all; On the upper gun deck were twenty-four 135 mm caliber guns. One of the advantages of this configuration is that it allows the center of gravity of the hull to be lower. Seaworthiness is better. Don't underestimate these cannons, a 155-mm gun plus a gun carriage weighs nearly three tons per unit, and thirty-two guns are ninety-six tons. One 135-mm gun plus a gun carriage also weighed two tons per unit, and twenty-four guns were nearly fifty tons. Coupled with hundreds of tons of shells, dozens of tons of gunpowder, and dozens of extra gunners, if it weren't for a large ship with a displacement of thousands of tons like the Jinhe, it would not have been able to equip so many large-caliber guns.

The Jiaosha class could not be equipped with 155 mm guns on a large scale, it could only have seventeen 135 mm guns on each side of the ship, and two 80 mm guns in the stern.

The 80mm howitzer is not specifically designed for warships, it is a dual-purpose gun for land and sea warfare, which can provide some fire support for the marines after landing. Relying only on hand crossbows and earth mines, Hong Tao felt that the offensive ability of the Marine Corps was not enough, and it would be perfect if there was a small cannon that could be carried. The naval cannon was too heavy for the marines to carry, so he specially made a small cannon that was not too powerful and not too long-range, but it was heavy enough to be dragged by horses. Put it on a two-wheeled gun carriage, and as long as the ground is not too rough and pothole, one or two horses can be dragged and run.

This thing can not only attack the enemy's fixed targets, but also provide fire support to the Marine Corps, and can have a killing distance of more than 100 meters after loading the shotgun. If you encounter a small group of cavalry of the enemy, three or four cannons will fire a salvo, and there will be basically no one on the opposite side. Of course, this is not for the Marines to fight head-to-face with the enemy, if they encounter a large number of cavalry, they can fire once after entering the firing range, and then they will rush over. The Marine Corps is a special operations squad used by Hong Tao to steal chickens and dogs, and it is okay to bully and bully small towns that are unprepared, and it is their serious job to catch someone and set a fire or something, and they can't fight large-scale battles. Hong Tao didn't plan to go to the land to fight against the Mongolian cavalry, it wasn't because he was strong enough to defeat the enemy, and a fool would do it.

Relying on the current capacity of Jinhewan, the construction will be started at full speed, and about 18 ships can be cast in a month, and it will take another year to equip all the warships with artillery......

Why is it so slow, it is so slow, the sand mold can be made more, and there is no shortage of raw materials, but the cast cannon must be naturally cooled for twenty days before it is completed. Don't worry, the cooled cannon still has to be polished, the burrs in the barrel are smoothed, and after the full charge test gun, it can be used. But the slowest reason is not these processes, but the yield is too low, how low? 70%！ Not 70% finished products, but 70% scrapped products! If you can cast ten cannons, three of them can be used, which is an eye-opener, and the rest are scrap products, and they have to be returned to the furnace.

Why are there so many wastes? Quite simply, there is no proper way to cool it. Relying on natural cooling alone, it is easy to make the shrinkage of the inside and outside of the gun body inconsistent, and then cracks and deformations occur, you can't help with water or other things, otherwise the crack will be faster, because the gun body is too thick, and the surface layer suddenly shrinks when it is cold, but the inside is still hot. Hong Tao is a study of heat treatment, for how to cool the metal is also involved, for this problem, he has some methods can be completely solved, but these methods need to be very rigorous test test, can not be used in a short time.

Qi Zu and they are all busy casting cannons at present, and they can't spare too much time and manpower to study this new technology with Hong Tao, Hong Tao can only draw the principle and general diagram of this technology, and hand it over to Qi Zu, and then think carefully when he has the kung fu, now it's still the old way to cast, one more is one, use it urgently!

In addition, it is not enough to cast cannons, but also to speed up the production capacity of gunpowder and shells, in the past, grenades were fired by launchers, which only required physical strength and did not need gunpowder. Now, every time a shell collapses, a few catties of gunpowder are burned out, and the demand for gunpowder increases several times in an instant.

But no matter how difficult it is, it has to be made, this is Hong Tao's roar on the board! He also used the actual situation to persuade some directors who were distressed about raw materials, telling them what kind of predicament Jinhewan would face in the next few years, without artillery as a sharp weapon, he could not consolidate Jinhewan's position, nor could he obtain more resources for Jinhewan. It's as simple as that, Hong Tao has already begun to threaten people with picking.

This is also something that can't be helped, the current board of directors is really a board of directors, although everyone still respects Hong Tao's contribution to Jinhe Bay, but some directors have begun to consider the interests of the group, not everything is said by Hong Tao just nodded in agreement, at least you have to give them a set of explanations that sound reasonable.

Hong Tao was not idle here, and the Southern Song Dynasty court was not idle. Judging from the news sent back from the whale ship in Lin'an every two months, the Southern Song Dynasty court did not intend to let Hong Tao be too idle, they felt that Hong Tao was so capable, and it was completely impossible to deal with the Mongols, Southeast Asians, and big cannibals, so they also had to intervene and make it more difficult for Hong Tao.

"Holy! I really don't know how many bowls of dry rice I eat, dare to think about such a difficult thing? Lao Wen, look at what your court has done, they are going to exhaust me! "At the beginning of July, Hong Tao, who had been busy tinkering with artillery in Jinhe Bay, suddenly appeared in Ximaozhou, pulled Wen Nan out of the classroom at the Navigation Academy, and threw him a piece of paper.

What is written on paper? If Hong Tao doesn't translate it, no one will be able to understand it, and it is full of small black dots, small horizontal lines and a combination of English letters. This is another stunt of Hong Tao, a stunt of this era, Morse code!

Since Luo Youde's shop opened in Guangzhou, Quanzhou, Lin'an and other big cities in the Southern Song Dynasty, Hong Tao sent out a few children from the Tan family who were the first to learn modern knowledge with him, and asked them to work as bookkeepers in Luo Youde's shop. In fact, their main business was not to settle accounts, but to become Hong Tao's informants, who would regularly write down the information they had collected about the changes in the policies of the Southern Song Dynasty and the war situation in the north in the form of cipher code, and then brought back by fast ships that transported whale oil goods for various stores. At present, this intelligence network can only be installed in coastal cities, because Luo Youde does not have shops in the mainland. However, since last year, Luo Youde has also opened a whale oil shop in Jiankang City, and Hong Tao's intelligence officer has followed him, as long as Luo Youde's store is opened, Hong Tao's intelligence officer will follow him.

Although there will still be a time difference of one or two months to transmit information in this way, it is better than nothing, and it is better to know than not to know. At present, Hong Tao can't think of a more effective way to collect intelligence, he has been raising carrier pigeons for too long, and he has no people who can train carrier pigeons, and he doesn't even know if there are suitable pigeons for carrier pigeons in the Southern Song Dynasty. The carrier pigeon is not an ordinary pigeon, it must be slowly cultivated by one in a hundred miles and one in a thousand miles, and it can be bred after several generations. (To be continued.) )