After successfully persuading Chen Zilong, Ren Siqi devoted all his attention to the development of Chongming. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 infoNearly 100,000 people retreated to Chongming Island in Songjiang, Jiading, and more than 20,000 new recruits were recruited.

Soldiers need to be trained, ordnance and equipment need to be produced, grain needs to be purchased in large quantities, people need to be resettled, and everything is extremely complicated.

The veterans of the first battalion of the first town were selected as the backbone, and the recruits from the four towns were newly trained, and Chen Mingyang, Yang Bin, Li Xingjiu, and Jia Yuanyin were appointed as the town generals, and the work of reorganizing and training the recruits began. Under the leadership of Li Yanzhi and others in the General Staff Department, a large-scale military training began.

Soldiers can be easily recruited, but it is not so easy to form combat effectiveness, requiring high-intensity training, strict military discipline, and even more well-equipped armor and weapons. Over the past month or so, a large amount of materials have been purchased in Jiading, Songjiang and other places, and Ren Siqi instructed Chen Yujie of the Ordnance Department to produce weapons and equipment as soon as possible.

There is no iron production in the Songjiang area, but as early as when Chongming was just occupied, Ren Siqi sent ships to pretend to be civilian ships to Nanjing to Wuchang, Zhejiang, Fujian and other places to purchase copper, iron and charcoal. Now that the Qing army has just occupied the south, the place is not yet stable, and all kinds of strength are intertwined, as long as there is silver, there is no problem in buying enough raw materials.

In the past month or so, he spent 230,000 taels of silver to buy more than 10 ships of copper and iron, including more than 500,000 catties of pig iron and more than 100,000 catties of refined copper, and also purchased a large amount of charcoal. The price paid was not small, and the amount of silver spent was two or three times as much as before, but considering the war everywhere, it was also necessary to pay more.

Chen Yujie had already ordered several blast furnaces to be erected on Chongming Island, and after there was ore, the furnaces were immediately opened to make steel, and then the guns were cast. The ordnance workshop in Daishan was moved to Chongming, and Chen Yujie led the craftsmen of Chongming Island to imitate and design a new machine tool on the basis of the machine tools purchased from the Portuguese in Macao. And with several newly built machine tools, the speed of drilling the barrel is getting faster and faster. According to Chen Yujie's report to Ren Siqi, if the raw materials are sufficient, an average of 200 barrels can be drilled every day, so that more than 6,000 muskets can be produced in a month. At present, there are more than 2,000 craftsmen of various kinds on Chongming Island, and there are more than 200 blacksmiths who can make muskets.

Ren Siqi requires strict management to ensure the quality of each musket.

"Rest assured, each musket will be engraved with the name of the maker, if there is a problem with the musket such as explosion and boring, you can immediately ask the craftsman." Chen Yu stepped on.

"What happened to the flintlock pistol I asked everyone to study?" Ren Siqi asked, he contributed his two flintlock short guns, and asked Chen Yujie to lead people to test shoot and develop flintlock pistols. Now the muskets in the Daishan army are all arquebuses, and there is no problem in fighting on sunny days, but if they encounter rainy weather, they will be caught blind, and the arquebuses cannot be lit on heavy rainy days. If a flintlock pistol can be made, it will undoubtedly greatly enhance the combat capability of the army.

"The principle of this flintlock pistol is not complicated, but there is one point that is more difficult, that is, the hardness and elasticity of the main reed excitation are relatively high, and the reed made of steel produced by us is not elastic enough, which makes the success rate of excitation too low. If flintlock pistols are produced now, I am afraid that the production capacity will be low. Chen Yujie reported to Ren Siqi the problem of the flintlock pistol.

Ren Siqi also knew that the level of steelmaking at the end of the Ming Dynasty was relatively backward, which made the power of the muskets and artillery produced worse than that of the Westerners in the same period. However, flintlock pistols were the trend of the future, and arquebuses were completely replaced in the West after the eighteenth century.

"Let's start with arquebuses in large quantities and flintlock muskets in small quantities." Ren Siqi instructed, after all, for craftsmen who have just come into contact with flintlock pistols, it is not feasible to master this production technique in a short time. And what the Chongming Army lacks most now is time.

Pig iron was re-smelted into steel, which was used to make muskets, armor spears. In order to refine good steel, Ren Siqi spent a lot of money and sent people to Zhejiang to purchase a large amount of charcoal. Because he knew that the quality of steel made from charcoal was much better than that made from coal. Because of the high sulfur content in coal, it is still relatively difficult to produce coke suitable for steelmaking in this era. In addition, most of the iron ore in Daming is of poor quality, and the ore contains more sulfur and phosphorus and other substances. The Ming Dynasty has not yet mastered the desulfurization technology in the steel refining, which also makes the quality of the weapons of the Ming Dynasty soldiers poor.

Ren Siqi knew that it was very simple to get rid of the sulfur in the iron ore, as long as limestone was added to the ironmaking process. Chen Yujie did what Ren Siqi said suspiciously, and added limestone to the iron-making, and the result was that the cast iron was extremely malleable.

In the past, the steel made was extremely brittle, and for example, because the malleability of steel was not good, it was impossible to make large pieces of iron armor, so it was only possible to make small pieces of armor leaves, and then weave them with leather ropes to make fish scale armor. After the new iron was smelted, the blacksmiths found that both the hardness and toughness were much higher than before. So at the suggestion of Ren Siqi, he began to produce plate armor.

At the eastern end of Chongming Island, craftsmen made more than a dozen huge windmills, which were blown by the sea breeze and drove the windmills to rotate, and then drove the forging hammer through the axle and smashed heavily on the cast steel below. As the forging hammer continued to smash, the cast steel block stretched out in all directions, slowly turning into a large steel plate. Then the steel plate is beaten into a certain shape and riveted to form a set of full-body armor.

At the end of July, the first set of plate armor was produced and tested. Tests have found that it can effectively withstand the fire of a strong bow within 50 paces. A one-stone strong bow within twenty paces can penetrate the plate armor, but it can only inflict minor injuries on the soldiers inside the plate armor.

Of course, a set of full-body plate armor weighs fifty pounds, and the non-strong can afford it. But if such an ironclad infantry can be formed, it will definitely be a nightmare for the Manchurian Eight Banners. The defensive power of the plate armor determines that the strong bow of the Eight Banners is not threatening at all, perhaps only heavy weapons such as maces and hammers can give the ironclad soldiers a heavy blow, and the ironclad soldiers with spears in their hands can not let them get close to them.

As long as in the right battlefield, a thousand ironclad infantry is enough to decide the victory of a battle.

According to Chen Yujie's introduction, the current production capacity of plate armor can produce more than 100 sets per month. Ren Siqi began to order the selection of strong men in the whole army, requiring that they must be more than 5 feet 5 inches tall and able to carry heavy objects of 200 catties.

The height of the Ming Dynasty was generally shorter than that of later generations, with an average height of about 1.6 meters. And five feet and five inches in later generations was about one meter seventy-five, which was already very tall in the Ming Dynasty. The whole army was selected, but only more than 1,500 people were selected.

Ren Siqi took Xiong Er as the battalion and began to prepare for the construction of the ironclad battalion. The establishment of the ironclad battalion is 3,000, in addition to the 1,500 ironclad infantry, another 1,500 auxiliaries to assist the ironclad soldiers in combat.

ps: I don't know how to write about the development of science and technology, if there are fallacies and unreasonableness, please understand. I wish you all a happy new year, good health, family happiness and good luck in the new year! (To be continued.) )