Could it be that the second largest arsenal in the country does not even have the ability to detect the size of artillery shells? That's a large-caliber shell with a diameter of at least a dozen centimeters! And isn't it a much smaller machine gun with extremely tight bullet tolerances that you have to wait until reloading?

More than a hundred years later, this problem became well-known with the TV series "Beiyang Naval Division" directed by Feng Xiaoning (of course, the details are exaggerated, in reality these substandard shells will not be on the ship, let alone file the shells in battle. In the end, it can only be thought that someone in the Tianjin Machinery Bureau deliberately made trouble with the Beiyang Naval Division, but after crossing the Tianjin Bureau, he realized that he was thinking too much, and he has been firmly controlled by Li Hongzhang since he became the governor of Zhili, and the current general office Pan Junde is also a close confidant of Lao Li, how can it be difficult for Li Hongzhang to build up the baby navy with great effort and difficulty over the years?

It turned out that all this was due to the fatal flaw in the evaluation system of military enterprises in the late Qing Dynasty, and the tasks were only mentioned in quantity, but there was no rigid requirement for quality that must be up to standard. This not only leads to the general neglect of quality management by the managers of these enterprises, which directly affects the quality of products, but also leads to the negative mentality that the products are completed even if the products leave the factory.

In such a state of mind, the more labor-intensive quality inspection work is naturally ignored, anyway, there are more defective products and more waste products do not affect the evaluation, even if they are sent back for rework, it is just an ugly face. As for the dilemma of the Beiyang Naval Division falling into a shortage of ammunition as a result, as well as the money and time wasted in reloading and correcting and reworking back and forth, anyway, it does not affect their careers, so the bureaucrats will not care!

The bureaucrats below don't care, Li Hongzhang should always care, right? After all, it is actually his interests that are harmed. But Lao Li also has two difficulties, one is that he does not understand industrial management, and his subordinates also lack talents in this area, and do not know what kind of quality standards should be formulated, and too high standards will affect output and price, which is even worse, so he can only lower the requirements; On the one hand, the law does not hold the public accountable, and on the other hand, if the Tianjin Bureau is strictly managed, it is likely that not many talents will run to other enterprises, and at the end of the Qing Dynasty, when there was a shortage of technical personnel (no matter how low the level), it was so easy to be strict with them?

If Li Hongzhang has the determination of a strong man to break his wrist, there may be some possibilities, but he has never been the kind of character who can get out, and even those related households in the bureau who are completely mixed with rice can't make up their minds to clear out, so it's no wonder that the management of Tianjin Machinery Bureau can be good!

Speaking of which, Li Hongzhang had a way that was not a way before, and when it really didn't work, he could import arms to put pressure on these old oilmen, but in the past two years, it didn't work because of Weng Tonghe's twists and turns, so the quality of the Tianjin Machinery Bureau's products was even worse

The production management is so bad, it is obviously impossible to ensure the quality of smokeless gunpowder, you must know that only a few countries in the world that have completed industrialization have this ability, and even Japan, which has reformed more thoroughly, cannot do it now, and if the quality of smokeless gunpowder is not good, it is easy to spontaneously combust and explode, Li Hui did not want to die so unjustly, so it was natural to choose to improve the shells first. Compared with the more complex fuse, it is obviously easier to replace the shell with a new charge, so this has become a breakthrough point for Li Hui's new project.

In fact, the Tianjin Machinery Bureau of high explosives has long been able to produce, that is, the cotton wool that is still known as cotton gunpowder, but unfortunately the stability is too poor, unless a suitable stabilizer can be found, otherwise it will be loaded into the shell and wait to explode! Moreover, the density of the cotton is too small, and the explosive power of the same volume is insufficient, and from this point of view, it is not suitable for use as a cannonball charge, so Li Hui can only choose another one.

Influenced by some of the materials and online articles he had read before the crossing, Li Hui first thought of the picric acid explosives that played a miraculous role as the secret weapon of the Japanese army in history, which is not only powerful, almost equivalent to four times the mass of military black powder, but also has a strong arson effect. and the Maozi Navy in the Russo-Japanese War have suffered big losses, and there is no need to say how easy it is to use. As for the safety of picric acid, Li Hui, who knows the know-how, is not worried, and since picric acid was still widely used as a yellow dye at the end of the 19th century, even if it cannot be produced in-house, it can be temporarily imported to meet the demand. It seemed that everything was perfect, but soon Li Hui realized that he had overlooked an important factor

Tianjin has been a treaty port for many years, and bulk commodities such as dyes are still not difficult to buy, which saves Li Hui a lot of work, but when he asked the price at the foreign bank, he was taken aback, "Why is this picric acid so expensive?" The price is actually dozens of times that of (military) black powder? ”

However, Li Hui thought about it carefully and realized that he was actually not thoughtful, and it was not normal for the bitter acid sold to China in this era to be inexpensive. First of all, at the end of the nineteenth century, the technology of synthetic ammonia had not yet been invented, nitric acid could only be made from natural saltpeter, so the output was limited, and the world's known saltpeter mines were still concentrated in Chile to form a monopoly, and the price was naturally extremely high; As for the phenol object, which is nitrified, it can only be obtained directly from coal tar, and it cannot be synthesized artificially for the time being, and the output is limited, so it will naturally not be cheap.

Moreover, phenol has a wide range of uses, and dyes are currently a lucrative commodity, which further raises prices. In addition, the production of picric acid is more dangerous, which will inevitably increase the cost of safety measures and personnel compensation, making picric acid more expensive, after all, it is not the beginning of the industrial revolution when the average life expectancy of workers is no longer than 30 years

However, the main reason is that at present, picric acid can only be produced by Western powers, and China can only import from thousands of miles away, and it does not even have the ability to directly purchase a large number of goods from the production area.

In particular, at present, the major Western powers have begun to enter the stage of monopoly capitalism, and the increasingly highly concentrated production and sales have made market prices more easily manipulated, and there is also a "principle of unanimity among the great powers" in the Chinese market, which is more convenient to coordinate. Therefore, as long as China cannot produce its own goods, the price will basically be greatly raised (this problem has even continued into the 21st century), and the highest price will even be raised by more than ten times, such excess profits will be added to the already expensive cost price, and the selling price will naturally be frighteningly high