Perhaps in order to keep up with such an international trend, or perhaps just to save money, the large-caliber shells of the Beiyang Naval Division accounted for more than 60 percent of the total number of solid shells, while the short-flowered shells did not exceed 30 percent at most.

But the problem is that European navies are also equipped with a large number of high-explosive shells to deal with those thinly armored or unprotected targets, so it is not too much of a problem to use only solid shells for armor-piercing shells; However, almost all the long-flowering shells that came with the Beiyang Navy Division when it purchased the ship have been used up, and the domestic arsenals are unable to produce large-caliber high-explosive shells, and large-caliber naval guns of more than 150 mm can only use non-fused piercing shells to make up the number, and this is a big problem.

You must know that the main warships of the Japanese Navy during the First Sino-Japanese War generally did not have decent armor protection except for the aging ironclad ship Fuso and the Yoshino, which adopted the new Harvey nickel steel case-hardened armor, so the artillery shells with explosive ability were the most effective, while the advantages of solid shells with strong armor-piercing ability could not be reflected at all, and there was no need for production at all.

In fact, the senior officers of the Beiyang Naval Division in history were generally aware of this problem for a long time, but at that time, Li Hongzhang did not believe that Japan would take the initiative to start a war against China, and did not regard it as the number one imaginary enemy in his heart, so the Tianjin Machinery Bureau mainly produced solid bullets, after all, this is cheap. It was not until after the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War that the Tianjin Machinery Bureau began to produce short-flowered bombs (including high-explosive shells with a caliber of less than 150mm and large-caliber non-fuse piercing bombs)

However, at this time, Li Hongzhang's nephew Zhang Shiheng lost his official position due to the espionage case, which led to the Beiyang Ordnance Bureau (also known as the Gun Bureau), which is the Beiyang Logistics Department, which is not the same organization as the Tianjin Machinery Bureau. For the time being, Xu Jianyin (son of Xu Shou, the most outstanding chemist in China at that time) had already been thrown into the Qingliu line. As a result, under his deliberate delay, it was not until after the Battle of Dadonggou was fought that the hundreds of short-flowering shells made by the Tianjin Machinery Bureau were released by the Ordnance Bureau and sent to the Weihaiwei warehouse

After Xu Jianyin was instructed to investigate the reasons for the defeat in the Dadonggou Battle, he even moved the storage time of the shells to before the Battle of Dadonggou in the investigation report, so as to slander the officers and men of the Beiyang Naval Division for their ineffective combat and shirk their responsibilities.

Obviously, due to his long-term infiltration in the officialdom, Xu Jianyin, a scientist who had made outstanding contributions to China's chemical and military industries, has completely degenerated into a troubled bureaucrat who only cares about the selfish interests of his faction

The non-fused piercing bomb is unreliable, and the high-explosive bomb produced by the Tianjin Machinery Bureau also has many problems, and the large-caliber cannot be produced, and even if the caliber can be produced, the product quality is also miserable.

Historically, only one-third of the explosion rate of the flowering bombs of the Beiyang Naval Division in the Battle of Dadonggou was not only dragged back by the non-fuse piercing bomb, because the Tianjin Machinery Bureau could only produce high-explosive bombs with warhead trigger fuses, and there was no steel with sufficient strength to produce signal tubes, resulting in the fuse being easily damaged and unable to detonate after the high-explosive bomb hit the target, and the explosion rate was also very low. Relatively speaking, because Li Hongzhang attached special importance to the navy, the situation was slightly better, and the pass rate of high-explosive shells used by the Qing army in the First Sino-Japanese War was even more ridiculously low, and less than 30 percent of them could be exploded, so that even some Qing army units collapsed their morale after seeing the devil's shells explode

As for the power of these domestic high-explosive bombs, they are also unsatisfactory. On the one hand, because the Tianjin Bureau cannot produce its own steel, it can only replace it with cast iron, which leads to the lack of strength of the projectile, and the bomb wall must be made thicker, so the charge is greatly reduced, and even less than half or even one-third of its imitation prototype; On the other hand, these shells are still filled with low-power black powder, and the quality of black powder produced by the Tianjin Machinery Bureau is not as good as that of Western products, so the low power of the explosion can be imagined

Compared with the Beiyang Naval Division, the Japanese Combined Fleet can be described as well-armed, and the shells used in the war are all high-quality products imported from the West before the war, and the charge is generally much larger than the "short-flowered bullets" used by the Beiyang Naval Division, and the bottom fuse invented by the West is also widely used, which is not directly in contact with the target, and the probability of damage when hitting the target is infinitely reduced, so there are very few duds, and almost one shot is exploded.

These two points alone allowed the Japanese to win no less than ten times the superiority in firepower, coupled with the fact that the Japanese ships were equipped with a large number of rapid-fire guns and picric acid explosives that had received miraculous results although they were only tested in a small amount, the firepower of the Japanese Combined Fleet was at least 100 times that of the Beiyang Naval Division, and the speed advantage made it easier for the Japanese side to form a situation of fighting more and fighting less locally, and the actual advantage was probably hundreds of times, and it was really difficult to lose!

It was precisely because the problem of artillery shells was so serious that it became the most important factor restricting the combat effectiveness of the Beiyang Naval Division, that Li Hui did not make persistent efforts to complete the smokeless gunpowder project. Of course, having said that, the Tianjin Machinery Bureau does not have the conditions for mass production of qualified smokeless gunpowder at present

Even if he has not yet participated in the internship, and his understanding of how to transition from small quantities of laboratory production to industrial production is still on paper, Li Hui still easily found a lot of problems in the Tianjin Machinery Bureau.

Although it seems that it is not very kind to criticize the ancients with knowledge and vision that is beyond the times for more than 100 years, the facts are the facts, and the reason why Tianjin Machinery Bureau was able to become the second largest military industrial enterprise in China at the end of the Qing Dynasty is not so much how good it is, but because its competitors are worse

To talk about advanced equipment, Tianjin Machinery Bureau has also bought a lot of before and after, many machines are not too backward even in Europe, but due to the lack of amateurs and talents of leaders, these machines and equipment have not given full play to their due role, and there are many chaotic aspects in the bureau that make Li Hui stunned

Among them, Li Hui is most powerless to complain, of course, is the quality of the shells produced by the Tianjin Machinery Bureau, the flowering shells can not be blown up can also be attributed to the material problem, even the size of the shells is not accurate enough, and even most of the products can not be loaded into the matching artillery chambers, which is really too much to say.

What makes Li Hui even more unbelievable is that the Tianjin Machinery Bureau does not have the level of product self-inspection at all, and it has to wait for the shells to be sent to the Beiyang Naval Division, and those shells with unqualified dimensions will be detected. If it is too outrageous, it can only be sent back to Tianjin Machinery Bureau for rework, and in such a back and forth, I don't know how much time and freight are wasted