In the valley behind the mine, Jia Hao and Wu Ya led the teenagers in three rows, each holding a shotgun, with a smoking rope on his body, a gourd on his left and right waists, and a leather bag dangling under his stomach. Two gourds, one for gunpowder and one for primer[1], and lead in the leather pocket.

The teenagers twisted their eyebrows one by one, and their expressions were quite strange. Seven or eight steps before the first row of people, a wooden plank one foot high and one foot wide stood on the ground, and the shape of a person was shallowly outlined with charcoal.

Seven or eight steps......

Wu Ya quietly muttered to Jia Hao beside him: "Fourth brother treats us as blind, right?" At this distance, I won't lose my head when I spit......"

Jia Hao frowned and said, "Can you spit out dead people?" ”

Wu Ya pursed his lips boringly, raised the shotgun, and according to the three-point and one-line aiming method he had just learned, he turned his head and closed his left eye, looked for the door with his right eye, aimed at the crosshair, and adjusted his arms so that these two points were aligned with the human head on the wooden board.

"First shot, I'm going to make a blockbuster."

He was muttering this in his heart, but he didn't notice that there were nearly twenty teenagers in the front row, including Jia Hao, and the muzzles of their guns were raised high. Obviously, they were all thinking with him, and they were all aimed at the target's head. In their opinion, it would be unreasonable to miss such a distance.

"Fourth brother, according to common sense, you should first practice the charge to familiarize yourself, then practice empty bullet shooting, and finally live ammunition."

Behind the three rows of shotgun formations, Xiao Sheng was nagging Li Shi like this.

"There are more than 20 rings of charge, if you don't practice well, the front ring is broken, and the back ring will be messy, and you have to practice until you can complete it within a maximum of 30 breaths to be qualified. This is followed by an empty shot to familiarize yourself with the feel, and finally a live shot. According to this routine, a shotgunner can generally go into battle with ten rounds of live ammunition. Look at your number, do you want them to shoot a hundred rounds? ”

Xiao Sheng sighed, feeling sorry for someone's wallet.

"Three hundred taels of communication, three hundred taels to buy guns and drugs and lead, half of the stock of the town treasury, the person in charge of the treasury also asked me if I plan to prepare enough for the left battalion for ten years, you ...... spent this money."

Li Xi sneered: "Common sense? According to common sense, you can train a shotgunner in ten days? ”

He shook his head and said, "A hundred rounds is not enough, in the past ten days, I want them to keep their guns in their hands, all the time, and shoot a thousand rounds each!" ”

Xiao Sheng rolled his eyes: "A thousand rounds? People can stand it, but guns can't. ”

Li Xi chuckled: "So I only let them fill one-third of the dose." ”

He waved his hand, and on the left and right sides of the team, Zhang Ying and Liang Deguang gave an order, and after a while, a fluffy explosion sounded, mixed with the sound of hard objects hitting wood.

The smoke cleared, and looking at the wooden target in front of them, the teenagers let out a lament. Almost none of them hit the heads of the wooden targets, some of them left the lead bullets in the torso, and many of them were clean.

Even if it only fills one-third of the dose, it is only ten meters away, and it will not miss. The reason why the teenagers lost their heads was because they didn't withstand two interferences. First, when the primer ignited the primer, many people's hands began to tremble, and second, when the primer ignited the gun in the chamber, the gun body failed to stabilize the gun, and the muzzle was deflected again.

Later generations were accustomed to playing with guns, and Li Xi paid more attention to these details. In his opinion, the charge is a fixed process, and the arquebus has a slow rate of fire, as long as you are familiar with the process, you don't expect it to be much faster, and there is no point in spending time on it.

The shotspearmen he wants to train are not those of the Green Battalion who count on the sound of guns to frighten off the enemy, but those who can actually shoot and kill. Although this wish is more dependent on shotguns, if people don't even have basic accuracy, then the platoon guns are not very powerful.

Now his own shotguns have not yet been made, except for the dozen or so captured, the rest are all borrowed from Xiao Sheng's battalion soldiers to eat, each branch is rented for three taels of silver, and the battalion soldiers are naturally happy. The gun-powder lead was also bought privately from the town treasury through Xiao Sheng's relationship. For ten days, the entire valley was covered in gunfire.

The shape of the shotgun is different, the quality is good and bad, it doesn't matter, it only contains one-third of the amount of medicine, which is equivalent to the iron firecracker that Tian Dayou said, basically will not explode, it is really unbearable, Xiao Sheng still has channels to borrow, and afterwards Li Shi promised to return one, or even better quality. As for the difference in the size of the caliber, the clearance of the lead is difficult to master, and there is already a solution, that is, to wrap the lead in oil paper and put it into the chamber. If the loading is small, there is no point in shooting with live ammunition, and it doesn't matter, move the target closer, as long as you can ensure that you can hit the aiming point at a distance of ten meters, you can practice basic accuracy.

Li Xi's training plan is actually just one: each person will shoot 1,000 rounds in ten days! On average, it costs more than ten taels of silver per person, and he doesn't care at all. Now he has "hooked up" with the Peng family again, and his waist bag is bulging again.

"When can I have this condition to train my soldiers......"

Xiao Sheng looked at these teenagers with envy, he, the head of the shotgun, had never seen a training method of piling up shotgunners with silver in his life.

"You can also pick sixty trustworthy shotgunners and train with my people, I will cover all the powder and lead and the wear and tear of shotguns."

As soon as Li Xian spoke, Xiao Sheng's old face suddenly became as bright as a flower, rubbing his palms and saying, "I'm also one myself!" ”

Zhang Yingliang shouted loudly, and the young man in the front row stepped back, walked from the gap in the ranks to the end, and began to reload and reload. The boy in the second row took two steps forward and stepped on the boundary where the ground was sprinkled with lime.

Two rounds of puff guns rang out, and the first shot was finished. Li Shi gathered all the teenagers and began to explain their problems. At the same time, he personally went into battle to demonstrate to the teenagers how to stabilize the gun and resist the two interferences. Unlike later firearms, shotguns are measured not in milliseconds but in seconds from the moment the trigger is pulled down to the bullet discharged, so the stability of the gun body is more critical.

"This damn butt and damn arquebus!"

Li Shi's confident demonstration almost messed up, and the lead was shallowly embedded in the cheek line of the wooden target's head, attracting Xiao Sheng and the teenagers to applaud and cheer, but he himself secretly shouted that it was dangerous.

With Xiao Sheng and Zhang Yingliang Deguang's guidance, and sixty shotguns to join the training, Li Xi didn't have to stay on the training ground all the time. He had something more important, and that was to oversee the building of his own shotgun.

Of course, the butt of his own shotgun had to be changed, but the arquebus could not be thrown away. This is to follow the officers and soldiers to fight the bandits, and let the officers and soldiers see the batch of self-made muskets, in the eyes of the imperial court, it may be more worrying than the bandits.

The problem is not only the butt of the gun, let's just say that the muzzle of the gun is unstable, originally Li Shi also wanted to use the stunt of his uncle of the People's Liberation Army: hanging bricks on the muzzle, so as to practice the stability of shooting with a gun. But looking at these shotguns, this idea had to be abandoned. In the shotgun of this era, the barrel was tied to the body of the gun with hemp rope! The more elaborate ones are just using copper hoops, bricks, and most of the barrels have to say goodbye to the body of the gun......

Only then did Li Xi understand why the bayonet did not appear on the Qing Dynasty shotgun, this thing did not have the conditions for a bayonet at all! Originally, in the early Ming Dynasty, many of them were welded with several bases under the barrel, and then rivets were used to cross the body and the base, so that the barrel was integrated with the body of the gun, and thus developed into the era of flintlock pistols. In order to cope with the war, the Ming Dynasty made bird guns in large quantities, and in order to save money and technology, it was changed to fix the barrel with hemp rope and copper hoops.

The shotguns of the Green Battalion are all locally made, and the quality of the barrel can barely be guaranteed, but the overall design has never been moved. It is completely in accordance with the idea of how to get cheaper, it is still a common practice to tie with hemp rope, and even in the Qianlong period, Gansu Luying also "invented" the trick of replacing the fire rope with paper-wrapped medicine, which made Li Xian involuntarily think of the various "inventions" of the Chinese people in later generations.

Turning out of the valley, walking a mile or two is the training ground, but now Li Xi has a means of transportation, no longer an expert on footing, and is a donkey under his crotch......

Originally, he had money, and he wanted to buy a few horses for transportation and communication, but he was reminded by Guan Tian and others that he had no identity to ride a horse, which was an excellent target for the Xun soldiers and yacha.

So Li Xi had no choice but to ride on this little donkey that was always humming, he felt very embarrassed, but the eyes of the villagers and the teenagers were looking up. Thinking about it carefully, Li Xi was also relieved, the horse is like a car in later generations, and the donkey under his crotch can barely count QQ...... The people of the hillbilly village who can't even ride a bicycle are naturally full of stars.

Before entering the mine, the sound of an argument came from the blacksmith's shop.

"Splicing is the way to go! Your double scroll technique is a crooked way! In the Ming Dynasty, those shotguns that could not shoot thirty or fifty rounds were all made by your double scroll technique! ”

"Rice stove, the old is old, the reason is reasonable, this matter has to be clarified. It should be fine for you to use the splicing method yourself, but how many rods can you build alone? Haven't you made it any other? Speaking of the Ming Dynasty, many of the shotguns produced by the War Bureau are splicing, not to mention thirty or fifty rounds, ten rounds will be scrapped! ”

It turned out that Tian Dayou and Mead were arguing, after all, they were going to make a hundred shotguns, and Tian Dayou was not enough for one person. It just so happened that Mead was also a blacksmith who was familiar with guns and guns, and he still had a group of apprentices under him, so Li Shi also pulled him over and came together to carry out this birdgun leap forward.

Li Shi was busy promoting the training of shotguns, and when it came to making shotguns, he first only drew drawings of the body of the guns for Carpenter He, and asked him to make the body of the guns, and at this time called the gun bed to make them first, and at the same time prepared another key technology for making shotguns. Tian Dayou and Mead were in charge of building the barrel of the gun, and today Li Shi only asked them to come up with a plan for working together. If you sharpen your knife and don't cut wood, you can't straighten out the manpower, and no matter how many people you are, you won't be able to play a role.

Unexpectedly, the two bumped into each other, but it triggered a sword qi battle about the barrel forging technology, the two have different technical schools, and they both insist that they are authentic.

Li Xian has a headache, no wonder the land of China can't be industrialized, this intellectual property is like martial arts, let alone exchanges, then it is the same as Confucian academics, there must be a distinction between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy.

By the time he entered the blacksmith's shop, the dispute between the two sides had progressed from the basic process of barrel forging to the distinction between the tools of the forging table.

"My crescent moon table is the most sophisticated technique! If you want to make the barrel round inside and out, you have to rely on this crescent platform to practice your skills! ”

Mead is in his fifties, his beard is all white, and when he came to Li Shi with the miners and craftsmen before, his attitude was quite respectful, but when it comes to this technique, he is full of spirit, like an emperor, and he will never be subordinate to others.

"We don't have time to practice for another thirty years! My cloud ditch platform is the most suitable! ”

The two of them even have different forging platforms for forging gun barrels, and it seems that there is a complicated saying in them. Tian Daiyu's technique is another school, and he refuses to bow to Mead.

Li Xian was furious when he heard this, now he didn't make a hydraulic forging hammer, otherwise the two of you will all get out, what if this is Huashan on the sword?

[1: The gun-medicine granulation technology has been formed in the Ming Dynasty, don't think that it is a Western patent. It's just that in the details, such as the fine density of the particles, the uniformity of mixing and the smoothness of the surface, they are not as good as the post-industrial level of the West. Granular gunpowder is used as propellant, and powdered gunpowder is used as primer, the former is called gunpowder and the latter is called primer on shotguns. The middle and early Qing Dynasty were still relatively exquisite. After the middle period, firearms were abandoned, and the emphasis on this aspect was much more sparse, and there was even a situation where the primer was directly used as a propellant, so as to spread falsehoods, and many people in later generations believed that the granulation technology was transmitted from the West. 】