After researching and completing no less than 30 technologies, the system can already produce a lot of goods, but they are basically bulk materials, and there is no profit if they are sold less, and there is no channel for wholesale in large quantities. And because most of these goods are military-related, there is a risk in selling them privately.

Theoretically, Li Hui could recruit biochemical soldiers from the system to take care of this work, but among the twelve optional classes, only "agents" can earn money as part-time merchants, and as the highest-level 5th class, even Level 1 agents need to pay 5 kilograms of gold to recruit one

"Alas, this system is good, but the threshold is too high, it seems that for the time being, it can only be regarded as a portable library with an automatic search engine, if you want to make money from it, you have to accumulate enough capital to do it, it's too early to think about this", Li Hui, who had no choice but to give up, could only honestly continue the current military research, hoping to complete the original accumulation as soon as possible, and also help the Beiyang Navy Division by the way, hoping that they could have greater results than in history in the future Sino-Japanese War.

In fact, if we look at it dialectically, the defeat of the First Sino-Japanese War was not all bad, for example, it woke up many Chinese intellectuals and hastened the fall of the Manchu government. However, the price paid by the Chinese people in history was too great, and Li Hui would rather bear this responsibility himself than let the Japanese "help".

Moreover, if Japan's rise accelerates as it has historically, it will have enough ability to intervene in the ********'s civil war, and even if Li Hui has systematic help, it will be much more difficult to unify China.

Rather than this, it is better to take advantage of the fact that Japan is not yet fully strong to directly draw salary, even if it can't help the Qing army win, it is necessary to consume as much of Japan's national strength as possible, this is what Li Hui thinks now.

Historically, the performance of the Qing army in land warfare was too scummy, even if Li Hui systematically helped to get powerful weapons, it would not make much sense to give them estimates, but it might make these first-generation "transport captains" transfer to devils.

Comparatively speaking, the performance of the Beiyang Naval Division was much better, and after coming to the Tianjin Machinery Bureau, which supplied ammunition to him in history, Li Hui learned a lot of inside information, and he felt even more sorry for so many officers and men of the Beiyang Naval Division who sacrificed their lives for the country in history.

Therefore, the focus of Li Hui's research naturally shifted to the navy, and the warships and artillery could not be built under the current conditions of the Tianjin Bureau, so they could only work on ammunition, and this was precisely the biggest problem of the Beiyang Naval Division at present.

Long before the crossing, Li Hui, who was a fan of the hardcore army, knew that the shells used by the Beiyang Naval Division were delayed in the naval battle, and the number of original long-flowering shells with a large charge was very small (for example, the 8 305mm main guns on the two ships in Dingzhen added up to 3 long-flowering shells) Not to mention, the so-called "short-flowering shells" that can be produced in China are also a lot of problems, and only less than one-third can be exploded in actual combat. This means that only 10% of the large-caliber shells fired by Beiyang warships can explode, which is still a fart!

Li Hui had always thought that this was a product quality problem, but after he came to Tianjin Machinery Bureau, he quickly found that things were not so simple. The management of the Tianjin Machinery Bureau is very chaotic, and the quality of the products is indeed not complimentary, but the fact that some of the short-flowered bombs did not explode in actual combat has nothing to do with it, because that kind of shell is difficult to explode, and Li Hui knows it at a glance!

It turns out that the so-called "short-flowering bombs" in later records are not all high-explosive bombs that mainly rely on charge explosions to destroy enemy ships and kill personnel, and a large part of them are actually armor-piercing blasting shells with a much smaller charge but a certain armor-piercing ability. However, the practical time-delay fuse at the bottom of the shell had not yet appeared when this bullet was invented, and the detonation of these shells was not induced by the fuse, but took advantage of the self-detonation effect of the shell charge during the armor-piercing process, which was also the only design that could realize the explosion of the shell inside the hull after penetrating the armor at that time.

As for the mechanism, it is generally believed that the loose black powder particles contained in the cavity of the projectile during the disemboweling are compressed into an extremely tight and hard state at the tail of the projectile cavity due to inertia, and then when the projectile hits the thick steel plate, the huge inertia of the sudden deceleration will cause it to hit the front part (some people believe that it is violently rubbing against the cavity wall) and ignite and detonate.

However, this detonation mechanism is unreliable at first glance, and in fact it is. If the steel plate at the hit site is too thin, this non-fuze armor-piercing projectile will pass through directly, and the effect is no different from that of a solid bullet, and the price is much more expensive; And if the target's armor is too thick, and the shell explodes before it can penetrate, it is also useless

Moreover, the armor-piercing projectile equipped with explosives will detonate in advance during the armor-piercing process, resulting in a large impact on the penetration depth. As a result, if the target has thick armor, they are not even as effective as solid armor-piercing shells, as it is very difficult to cause damage if they explode outside the armor.

You must know that even a high-explosive bomb with a TNT charge can generally only blow up armor with a thickness equivalent to 1/3 of its caliber, and if it is replaced with black powder, it would be good to have 1/5, not to mention that the charge of the piercing bomb is much less than that of a high-explosive bomb, which is even less worth mentioning.

Therefore, this kind of non-fuze piercing shell is both lacking in power and difficult to explode, and if it is regarded as an armor-piercing projectile, the penetration depth is seriously insufficient, so after steel armor (including steel armor and steel-surface-wrought iron composite armor) became the mainstream, it could not even compete with the earlier solid armor-piercing shell, and in the period from the late eighties to the early nineties of the nineteenth century, even the non-fuze piercing bomb that had been built was changed to a solid bullet by the British Royal Navy

Some people may ask, solid shells can only drill holes in the hull, and this damage can sink the enemy ship?

Well, it can only be said theoretically, for example, dozens of rounds hit below the waterline (the actual number of hits must be at least doubled), which will cause the water to enter faster than the enemy ship to displace and sink it, or directly hit the boiler or ammunition and cause an explosion

Although the efficiency was not generally low, it was still much stronger than the high-explosive shells that were still filled with only black powder at the time. Although with the low hit rate of the naval guns at that time, it took almost a dozen ironclad ships to surround one and almost run out of shells before it was more certain that it could be sunk

That's right, the situation is so funny, since the appearance of ironclad ships in history, for decades, it has basically been an imbalance of "the shield is stronger than the spear", the first-class ironclad ships, and even the subsequent former dreadnought battleships, there is no generation difference in technology between the two warring sides, there is no grade difference in strength, and neither side has made low-level mistakes (similar to the Maozi battleship in the Russo-Japanese War when the waterline armor belt completely sank underwater) under the premise that it was almost impossible to be sunk by enemy ship artillery.

It is precisely because of this that the Battle of Lissa, an alternative type of warfare that relies on ramming tactics to determine victory or defeat, has been produced in history, and even as late as the beginning of the 20th century, many warships still have ramming angles