Duke's next stage plan is to let the Storm Castle Wall find a way to temporarily close the farmland on this side of the Monster Valley to ensure that the upcoming autumn harvest is going on normally, which is related to the food problem of Storm Castle next year.

Back at Stormcastle, Duke begins to focus on something else: the Storm Musket!

Previously, although Duke attached great importance to the development of firearms in Storm Castle, he even developed and equipped the Storm Musket against public opinion. But in fact, it was also in a stage of laissez-faire, letting the musketeer stove develop on his own, and Duke himself only gave a little key construction.

Now, with the miraculous effects of the muskets in several battles, Duke is starting to set his sights on hot weapons. Before, he thought that the time was not ripe to change the direction of warfare in this era, but Duke felt that there was a certain foundation now, and as long as the historical process of the development of muskets was taken one step further, perhaps it could directly change the history of war in this world.

Previously, Duke improved the barrel process, making the iron coiled barrel or manual boring of the barrel a thing of the past, which increased the production efficiency of the musket barrel by dozens of times, directly reduced the cost, and greatly improved the quality, making the musket a practical weapon.

The rifling developed later, to a certain extent, improved the disadvantages of the musket shooting accuracy to see fate, and finally it can be said to be very successful, so that the practicality of the musket has once again improved a notch, it can be said that the current musket has reached an equal status with the bow and arrow, if you add the training cost to keep up with the degree of hand, the current storm musket can be said to be completely able to eliminate the bow and arrow.

But now this level of development is not enough, Duke thinks that it is not enough, and has the determination to improve again. According to the historical development trend of muskets, Duke's musket has developed to the current stage, and the next development direction is to change from front-loading to rear-loading, and the bullet has changed from the current gun to Nimi bullet.

In addition to the reform process of the musket itself, Duke actually set his sights on another improvement direction, that is, the gunpowder process!

The current black powder technology is so unbearable that Duke even sometimes wonders if the current level of black powder can reach the power of firecrackers in his later life?

In addition, he is not very concerned about the development of muskets before, just this kind of front-loading smoothbore gun, even if it is a high-yield gunpowder higher than that of later generations, the range and accuracy will basically not change qualitatively, and there is a great chance of direct explosion, so Duke does not put forward any hard requirements for the gunpowder technology of Storm Castle, and even the dwarves do not think that their gunpowder is less powerful.

But now it's different, with the popularity of rifling, there will be better control over the range and power, and Duke intends to change the current disadvantages of firing gunpowder separately from the gun to a faster and more integrated Mini round. Suffice it to say, gunpowder reform is already on the agenda, and once the time comes and goes, once the Prince of Andorra is angered by Alpine City, then the Storm Army will need more powerful weapons.

So Duke recalled the development process of gunpowder in his mind, for the mixture of gunpowder ratio in later generations, and even the composition of smokeless gunpowder, Duke did not intend to recall, because he didn't know what the composition of these gunpowder was, after all, things like smokeless gunpowder are one of the military secrets of various countries, and the First Sino-Japanese Naval War in that year, there were also factors of generation difference in gunpowder, which led to the Beiyang being far inferior to the Japanese navy in terms of range and power, and finally caused the fiasco of the First Sino-Japanese Naval War.

The latter gunpowder technology is even more out of the scope of the civilian understanding, even if you know the composition and proportion, it is impossible to purify it without complete chemical equipment, so Duke's focus is on wet gunpowder and particle gunpowder, using the existing process to maximize the power of gunpowder.

Searching for a solution, Duke arrives at the Musket Factory, where the Dwarven Musketeer Furnace is leading the craftsmen to forge the barrel. After all, the demand for muskets in Storm Castle has increased exponentially, and there is also the fact that in the previous battle of the Storm Musket team in the north, many of the rifling of the barrels were also worn out and needed to be replaced, etc., so the demand for firearms in Storm Castle has increased dramatically for some time.

Seeing Duke coming, he was very excited and proud that the furnace had realized, because he had finally proved the power of his dwarven musket in front of the lord, and from then on, the name of the musket burning stick would be completely abandoned.

More importantly, he is very grateful to Duke, if it weren't for Duke's support in his development of the Dwarven Musket, and the continuous improvement of the Storm Musket, far beyond the range, accuracy and power of the previous Dwarven Musket, then the Dwarven Musket will exist forever in history, and when batches of former Dwarven Musketeers die in battle and grow old, then there may be no such term as a musket in the future.

Seeing the excited appearance of the stove, Duke was very surprised, why is this dwarf so excited, it can't be that he just drank alcohol?

Dwarves are notoriously alcoholic on Europa, and they can even give up everything and exchange the last copper coin on their bodies for wine, and live such a drunken life. And the reason why the dwarven tribe is so loyal now is because Duke vigorously promotes the cultivation of sweet potatoes, corn and other crops that were not available before in the mountains, and these coarse grain crops have high yields, but the requirements for land are relatively low.

More importantly, these coarse grain crops can replace ordinary grain winemaking, whether it is sweet potato wine or corn wine, can greatly reduce the food consumption generated by winemaking, especially at the difficult stage when Storm Castle itself needs to import a large amount of grain. Moreover, Duke also told the dwarves about the distillation technology, which can directly purify those coarse grain wines with low quality and poor taste as baijiu.

There was no such thing as liquor in this world before, and if you want to buy drunk, you can only rely on quantity to forcibly get yourself drunk. But now after the advent of baijiu, the high-count liquor simply makes these dwarves love it, and everyone is eager to sell themselves to liquor stores. This situation leads to the fact that even during working hours, some dwarves can't control their alcohol, and even if Duke strictly prohibits it, they can't completely control it, so Duke has this suspicion. 8)