The development process of human muskets is roughly as follows: smoothbore muskets, rifles, rifled powder guns, and then breech guns.

The powder gun that really changed the course of human warfare should be the breech rifle, because the first two stages of the powder gun had their own flaws, and they were serious ones.

First of all, let's talk about the smoothbore gun, this gun is indeed the first large-scale single-handed hot weapon used in large-scale warfare, and it is quite famous.

But the wars fought in the era when guns were the main weapons were also quite hilarious, and can often be seen in some movies that reflect this era.

The two sides met in a neat line of troops on the battlefield, and when they were about a hundred paces away from each other, both sides listened at the same time, and then began to clumsily reload the barrels of their guns.

After reloading, everyone on both sides shoots at the other at the same time. After the gunshot, he was surprised to find that the other party had more people dead than his own.

This formation is the famous dense line formation. Of course, there is also an improved version of this formation, that is, in the case of a large number of people, people are divided into three rows, the first row shoots, the second row prepares, and the third row reloads. This method of warfare is called three-stage shooting, and of course it was invented by the Chinese.

However, the three-stage shooting can only make up for the firing speed of the line array, but it cannot make up for one of the biggest drawbacks of the smoothbore gun, which is the shooting accuracy.

The reason for the formation of a line array that seems a little funny to later generations is because the shooting accuracy of the smoothbore gun has a really bad range.

How bad is the shooting accuracy of a smoothbore gun, that is, whether or not it can hit a person when the projectile flies out of the muzzle depends only on God's will. The trajectory of this gun can only be described as erratic, and it is highly susceptible to external factors, and it is possible that a gust of wind can blow a projectile to a place that you have never thought about.

Therefore, it is necessary to use the seemingly unscientific formation of line formation to make up for the shooting accuracy of the guns, and to make up for it with the majority and large area.

And the smoothbore gun also has a big disadvantage is the breech loading, there is a very important step when loading, that is, the gunpowder and projectile are loaded into the chamber, and then they must be stabbed with a whole strip.

This means that the butt must be pressed against the ground to borrow force, so the gun bearer must stand while loading. Standing on the battlefield means that the person is a non-moving target, at least for a short time.

However, the problem of shooting accuracy was later solved, and the solution was to improve the barrel and bullets. There is something called rifling in the barrel, and the bullet is no longer a spherical projectile, but a combination of a cone and a cylinder. This type of gun was what came to be known as rifled guns or rifles.

The advent of rifles greatly improves the shooting accuracy and range of firearms, because the rifling gives the bullet the ability to rotate, so that the bullet can fly out of the barrel to maintain the established direction of flight, reducing the interference of the outside world in the bullet, especially the wind.

However, although this gun has such a good accuracy and range, the reload speed of this gun is still worrying, even slower than the reload speed of a smoothbore gun.

Because the rifle is the same as the smoothbore gun, it is still a breech gun, but due to the presence of rifling, the inner wall of the barrel is no longer smooth, which leads to a serious increase in friction. When reloading, the projectile is no longer thrown into the barrel, but it can wait for it to reach the bottom of the barrel directly by gravity.

Instead, each bullet had to be wrapped in a cloth soaked in lubricating oil and then hammered into the barrel with a mallet, making it more time-consuming to load.

This means that even though rifles have been around since the fifteenth century, they were not widely used until the eighteenth century.

And what really saved the rifle in the eighteenth century was another new gun technology, that is, the birth of breech gun technology.

When breech gun technology was introduced, all the shortcomings of the rifle were avoided. Ammunition is loaded directly from behind the chamber, eliminating the need for a cumbersome reloading process.

Because it is a breech loading, all gun bearers no longer need to load bullets from standing, and can also be loaded with ammunition in a lying position, which greatly enhances the survival probability of the gun holder when loading.

In this way, after the weakness is avoided, all the advantages of the rifle are infinitely magnified, with high precision and long range, and the war has finally entered a new chapter, that is, it has become very easy to take a person's life on the battlefield.

However, this was not really completed until the eighteenth century in the original human history.

However, in this historical time and space, there is a guy who has traveled through time, and Zhao Weiji, who is from the 21st century, naturally does not need a smoothbore gun, a rifle, and a breech rifle so step by step.

Although this guy doesn't have the ability to directly make Makqin now, it is no problem to directly point out the breech rifle in the tech tree.

When the Central Plains was in a mess about changing the emperor, Zhao Weiji silently made a breech rifle in Xinhua City.

And after Zhao Weiji assessed the production capacity of Xinhuacheng, he jumped directly to the later classic rifle Mauser. Although Xinhua City is still in the era of steam engines, it already has a very high technical level for the forging ability of metals, and Zhao Weiji has almost concentrated the most brilliant blacksmith doors in the Central Plains in Xinhua City.

Coupled with batches of students who graduated from science and engineering, the combination of the two has made the forging level of steel rapidly improved.

This made Zhao Weiji have enough confidence to step directly into the Mauser gun. However, Zhao Weiji was still subject to certain technical constraints, so the Mauser he produced was only the initial version, that is, it could only be loaded with one bullet at a time.

But it was the same gun that caused a huge sensation in Xinhua City, and when the first Mauser came out, no one except the people in the workshop knew what it was.

However, when Zhao Weiji brought the gun to the school field, found a door panel to erect in the center of the field, and then stood two hundred meters away and shot through the door panel, everyone present gasped.

That door panel was removed by Zhao Weiji from his own house, and the thickness was as long as half a thumb, and ordinary bows and arrows were nailed to it at most at the same distance, and it was almost impossible to shoot through.

Even the Iron Arm Crossbow couldn't necessarily shoot through the door panel, and this thing that I don't know what it was actually shot through the door panel directly.

This made those who had joined the army and been on the battlefield shudder. If you can pass through such a door panel, ordinary armor may not be able to block it.

Soon, Zhao Weiji made their nightmare come true, because he found a scarecrow, and then put a basic armor on the scarecrow's body.

Then Zhao Weiji changed the gun with a bullet, and stood at the distance where he shot just now, aiming at the scarecrow and also shot. In addition to hearing the bang of the gunshot, the crowd also heard another sound of metal hitting each other.

At the same time, he saw the wooden pillar supporting the scarecrow break, and the scarecrow flew backwards a foot away.

At this time, someone stepped forward to check on the scarecrow's condition and found that the armor on the strawman's chest had been shot out of a hole. After seeing the hole, the inspector pulled the armor off the scarecrow, and then found a deformed warhead in the position of the scarecrow's body corresponding to the hole just now.

This made the entire school field completely speechless, and Zhao Weiji smiled with satisfaction.

For this, Zhao Weiji's staff have not figured out why, in their impression, although Zhao Weiji has repeatedly performed miraculous feats on the battlefield, he himself is not a person who loves to kill.

If he himself was a murderous person, then there would not be so many Indians working peacefully in Xinhua City today, because in the face of those Indians, with the military strength of Xinhua City at that time, as long as the men were armed, it was completely easy to defeat these Indians and then capture them.

But more often when there is a conflict, Zhao Weiji seems to prefer to solve things through stratagem rather than force. Although sometimes it can be easier and faster to use force.

So when the demonstration ended, the staff asked Zhao Weiji why he wanted to make such a terrifying weapon at this time, did he want to kill back to the Central Plains by force?

However, the explanation given by Zhao Weiji is that this kind of gun is not used to kill the Central Plains, but to deal with the Khitans.

This makes people very curious, because this Khitan people are too far away for Xinhua City, so far away that everyone almost forgets that there is such a kind of person.

And just when everyone had forgotten the existence of the Khitans, Zhao Weiji suddenly brought them back to everyone's memory, and also invented such a terrifying weapon to deal with the Khitans.

So at this time, there were already smart people who guessed Zhao Weiji's intentions, and at this time, Zhao Weiji no longer concealed some of the thoughts in his heart.

He clearly told everyone present that there would definitely be another big war between the Khitans and the Great Song Dynasty. It's just that he didn't tell you about the time of the war.

But Zhao Weiji made it clear that when this battle broke out, it was time for Xinhua City to fully show itself in front of the Central Plains, that is, the time for them to return to the Central Plains.

This made everyone here a little excited, although they were doing well in Xinhua City, but who wouldn't want to be able to return to their hometown.

It's just that when I first immigrated, many people didn't think that they would be able to return to their hometown one day, because in many people's minds, this is not immigration, but exile.

So even if life in Xinhua City is good, that concept of exile has always existed, so no one thought of going home. But if Zhao Weiji, the top leader of Xinhua City, said that he could go home, then he would really be able to go home.

But before that, there is still a lot to prepare, and in addition to the Mauser, the cannon should also come out.