Under the preparation of Zhu Shuren, in just one or two months, the "Institute of Magnetism" in Jiangning Town was established.

Countless craftsmen used the soil method of hot forging and quick quenching recorded in the "General Essentials of the Wujing" and "Tiangong Kaiwu" to produce magnetic materials, and actually put them into mineral processing production.

On the other hand, the researchers are slowly climbing the distant scientific and technological line of electromagnetism, which can be regarded as a idle chess deployment first.

With the first batch of high-quality steel and copper smelted in Ma'anshan, Wuchang and Daye also sent technical backbones to copy the original arsenal of the Huguang army to the vicinity of Nanjing, and built it in Jiangning Town.

In the autumn of July, Jiangning Town has gathered the first batch of science and engineering research talents in China who are interested in "strange skills and ingenuity", all of whom have been hired by the prince of Hubei with a lot of money, as long as they have been tested and have a skill in science and technology, they can get a good salary.

In August, the first batch of guns from the Jiangning Arsenal also officially rolled off the assembly line, announcing that the second set of military industrial system of the Ming Dynasty had sprouted.

Perhaps it is the ore and coal refined by the magnetic separation method, and the quality of the high-end steel refined has improved a little compared with before, and the quality of the first batch of guns and forged steel cuirass in Jiangning Town has also been slightly improved compared with Wuchang.

In particular, the water hammer forging cuirass, which has obvious feedback on the toughness and quality of steel, has obviously broken through the level of the cuirassiers of the Western Napoleonic era - the overall forged cuirass of the Western Napoleonic era, the steel used is not screened in advance by the magnetic separation method, and the West will basically go on the horse after the second industrial song, that is, after there is electricity.

After the latest water-forged cuirass rolled off the assembly line, Song Mingde asked people to test it with a musket, and in the case of a steel plate thickness of one and a half minutes (about 4 mm), it could actually withstand the single-headed shot of the new "Wuchang-made" musket!

This "attacking the shield of the son with the spear of the son" can be regarded as ending in a complete victory for the shield side.

Fortunately, the Qing army on the opposite side still couldn't make such a high-quality overall forged steel armor, and could only put a maximum of two layers of iron cotton armor on the iron cavalry.

……

Because Jiangning Town is not far from Nanjing, just outside the city, Zhu Shuren can certainly inspect it at any time.

When he learns that there are so many new developments, he often goes to the scene to learn about the latest situation as soon as possible.

Jiangning Arsenal really never disappointed him, every time he inspected, in addition to the results reported in advance, he was also able to have some unexpected surprises and small discoveries.

Maybe it's because there are too many achievements, and some people below don't bother to show their merits at the first time, and want to do a more solid job before reporting.

For example, this time in August, Zhu Shuren originally went to inspect a new batch of "Wuchang-made" and water-forged cuirass made in Ma'anshan, but he saw the prototype of two new gadgets in the Jiangning Arsenal.

First of all, the flowering shell artillery that began to be developed and put into actual combat last year finally had new optimization progress - at that time, the Ming army's artillery wanted to use flowering shells, mainly relying on low-pressure mortar guns, and the rest of the ordinary heavy Hongyi cannons wanted to use flowering shells, and there was still a problem of low fuse reliability.

Now after more than a year of moisturizing and silent development of boiled frogs, the reliability of the flowering projectile fuse has been improved, and the most important thing is that after the arsenal technicians find out the doorway of the fuze, they can also make the flowering projectile of the delayed fuze on the relatively small and lightweight shell, so that the threshold for the use of the flowering bullet is greatly reduced.

The shell of the original flowering shell must be at least an inch thick cast iron to isolate the internal and external gunpowder, so as to avoid the violent shock, high temperature, and overload brought by the external propellant when the cannon is fired, and the blasting charge inside the shell should be detonated in advance.

Now, after improved processes and repeated tests, the thickness of the iron shell of the shell can be barely reduced to less than an inch, and the cast iron used has also been slightly improved.

In this way, under the same weight of the shell, the heavy artillery can be stuffed with more explosives inside, increasing the power and killing radius, and it can also increase the number of fragments in the shell itself after the shell is exploded, killing and injuring more soldiers.

This is not the most critical, the most critical thing is that when the fuse quality of the original flowering shell is poor, the bulky and huge thick shell makes it impossible to use the high-mobility artillery of the six-pounder cavalry gun.

Because the caliber of the six-pounder gun was too thin, and the iron shell was so thick, there was no room for gunpowder and iron slag shrapnel inside. Therefore, even in the last battle against Duoduo, when Jiang Shoude and Lin Chengcheng bombarded Li Chengdong's troops across the Hengtang River, the cavalry artillery deployed in the front fired iron balls. As for the small number of flowering shells on the main battlefield, they were all fired by mortar artillery.

Now the fuse shell double improvement, finally enough to allow the cavalry gun to fire flowering shells, although the charge is still very small, the number of fragments formed after the explosion is also very small, but after all, this is a qualitative change from scratch, can be called a milestone.

Anyway, at the moment it is still in the farming period of the truce with the Tartars, and Zhu Shuren still has time to continue to iterate and improve.

When he learned of this breakthrough, he immediately offered another heavy reward, demanding that he continue to optimize the technology of cavalry artillery with flowering shells, as long as he could increase the killing radius of high-mobility artillery shells by one foot, he could offer an additional bounty of 1,000 taels of silver.

If the killing radius can be increased by one zhang, can the R&D personnel be directly rewarded with 10,000 taels? This number is not capped, of course, it is necessary to ensure the safety and reliability of the artillery, and it is not possible to blindly force the charge to lead to explosion, which is the bottom line.

……

In addition to the improvement of the stability and lightweight success of the flowering shells, another new achievement of military farming that made Zhu Shuren's eyes shine this year is the "rifled gun" that he used to explain as a step of leisure.

After all, Zhu Shuren is not the protagonist of an online article, so there is no need to consider the problem of "reversing the golden finger to press the protagonist's upgrade speed, so as not to grow too fast, the plot has no conflict, the rhythm collapses, and the writer makes less money".

He is a real traverser, of course, how to benefit himself! The benefits of fishing should be eaten and wiped clean, and try to fish!

There was no rifled gun before, not because he didn't want to, but because the industrial base couldn't do it, and he didn't understand the technical details.

Therefore, since two or three years ago, Daye had just started to build a military factory, and he casually mentioned it as an idle move, asking the craftsmen to ponder the problem of "how to make the cone-shaped projectile also fly stably".

And as a kind of inspiration, he casually mentioned "through rifling to make the tail of the projectile groove and stabilize the airflow", it is not necessary to do this, let the craftsmen do their own experiments.

The rifled gun is really not easy to do, Zhu Shuren only needs and pays, but does not provide process ideas, and the things that the craftsmen initially made are naturally very different from the models that have been tested by history.

For example, this time, Song Mingde vowed that after more than two years of leisure and debugging by Zhou Tiedan, he finally created a projectile that draws a straight rifling on the inner wall of the barrel and can carve grooves in the tail of the conical lead bullet to stabilize the airflow.

It is also said that after test firing, the range of this projectile can reach three or four hundred steps! It is directly doubled compared to the maximum firing range of the current round projectile smoothbore gun! The accuracy is not very good, but it is barely acceptable.

When Zhu Shuren heard about it, his first reaction was to be shocked: Aren't rifled guns all spiraled? Isn't the purpose to make the projectile spin and self-stabilize? What is the use of straight rifling?

But this is actually because he didn't learn history well, and in real history, in the early days of rifled guns, there were really straight rifling. Any technology has a relatively primitive and clumsy stage in the infancy of the newborn.

In the West, until the time of the American War of Independence, the British army still used rifled rifled guns to fire long-range projectiles to snipe French officers, and the "Kentucky Long Rifle" of the Mi Army also had a rifled version.

This kind of straight rifling, if it is a spherical projectile, is really useless, but when firing a conical projectile, it is possible to carve a few grooves in the tail of the projectile, forming a stable airflow effect similar to the arrow feather when the arrow is lost, but it is not obvious.

The number of rifling of rifled guns in the early history is also varied, and the version made by the craftsmen under Zhu Shuren is obviously influenced by Zhu Shuren's description, and imagines the "bullet tail pressure groove" as the tail feather of the arrow, so he made four rifling lines that are symmetrical up and down, left and right.

When firing, it is equipped with a lead bullet with a slightly hollow bottom and a cork plug, and the wooden plug is pressed forward to squeeze the soft lead into the rifling wire to ensure that the tail of the bullet is pressed out of the symmetrical four grooves when discharged.

To put it bluntly, that is, to adapt to conical ammunition similar to Mini bullets, this projectile structure is not difficult, Zhu Shuren has also dialed it in advance, and the craftsmen have already made it.

After inspecting the effect of live firing, Zhu Shuren could only admit that with rifling and conical mini shells, the range had indeed increased, and the flight stability was slightly better, and the accuracy still had to be found again.

However, he also knew that the winding distance of the spiral rifling was a big problem, and he could only let the craftsmen try it slowly and improve it slowly. Anyway, there is still time before the next large-scale war, and it should be able to be done in another year or two.

Compared with the shooting accuracy, when Song Mingde reported this achievement, he said that there is another technical indicator that cannot be greatly improved, that is, the loading speed of this rifled gun.

After all, with rifling, it is much more difficult to load ammunition from the muzzle. Moreover, rifled guns were all high-pressure firearms, and with the level of technology at that time, it was impossible to reload like pistols and short-barreled sprays, otherwise the leakage of gunpowder gas could directly burn the gunner to serious injury.

The use of Mini bullets can only solve part of the problem of "the lead bullet is too tightly attached to the pipe wall when it is stuffed in", but it cannot solve the problem of cleaning up the black powder residue in the rifling after the shot.

Fortunately, Daye Arsenal made the earliest version of nitrocellulose last year, that is, fire cotton, but the cost was still very expensive at that time, and no particularly suitable application scenarios were found, and only a small number of elite revolver cavalry were equipped with nitrocellulose propellant ammunition.

Until the previous battle against Duoduo, the mainstream revolver cavalry of the Ming army still used black powder ammunition.

If there is progress in rifled guns in the future, Zhu Shuren can consider spending more costs and expanding the production capacity of "local method of sulfuric acid to regenerate nitric acid", so as to expand the production capacity of cotton wool, popularize smokeless propellant for rifled guns, and reduce the workload of cleaning the breech.

But no matter how it is optimized, Zhu Shuren assessed that when the war against the Manchu Qing Dynasty is launched again in the future, it is estimated that the rifled guns with black powder will be fired at most three or five shots in a battle, and the loading speed of each round will be several times slower than the current smoothbore guns.

The Ming army's current "Wuchang-made" rifle can already achieve a rate of fire of three to four rounds per minute, and the breech-loading spray can reach six to eight rounds per minute.

The black powder rifled gun can only be fired once in two to three minutes, and after firing five shots, it must be slowly and carefully cleared, that is, it will be withdrawn from the battlefield ten minutes after the start of the battle.

Switching to nitrocellulose smokeless gunpowder can only ensure one shot in two minutes, and a dozen shots must be sent back to the rear for cleaning.

The rate of fire and multiplexability are so poor, as a large-scale troop aimed shooting, it is definitely not suitable, and ordinary troops do not need to shoot in line with such high accuracy.

Therefore, the future positioning of this weapon can only be used as a pre-sniper attack on the battlefield, striving to concentrate a dozen or even dozens of sniper rifles three or four hundred steps away to cover the important generals of the Qing army.

In fact, during the War of Independence of the United States, both sides also used rifled guns like this, who was willing to use them to fight the lobster soldiers, not to stare at the general and snipe, at least to snipe a lieutenant colonel major or something.

Originally, before the Jiangning Town Arsenal was launched, Zhu Shuren assessed that relying on the Daye Arsenal alone, it would produce a maximum of 20,000 or 30,000 "Wuchang Manufacturing" within two years.

Now Jiangning's side is also rising, although the initial output is certainly not as good as Daye, but by the end of the third year of Longwu, the two sides together can make at least 50,000 new smoothbore rifles.

The production capacity of rifled guns will be several times more than that of smoothbore guns, and with the current level of technological maturity, at least seven or eight smoothbore guns will be occupied by manpower and equipment man-hours in exchange for the production of one rifled gun. In the future, it may be more efficient after the run-in matures, but if you want to pursue the spiral rifling entanglement problem, there will still be repetition.

Generally speaking, Zhu Shuren's estimate of the scale of the construction of rifled gun units in the future when the war starts again will be controlled to the extent of several hundred or thousand, which is at least an order of magnitude lower than that of smoothbore guns.

……

The industrial and military departments were steadily farming step by step, and the time soon entered September of the first year of Longwu.

During the autumn harvest, the expansion and construction of the Ma'anshan Iron Mine also slowed down for a time, taking less manpower from displaced people and putting those seasonal laborers back to harvest crops. Just wait for the winter farming to be free, and then speed up the progress.

Anyway, the truce may last for at least two years, and Zhu Shuren doesn't need to be in a hurry. After many years of catastrophe, agricultural production has always been the most important.

In the land of China in the first year of Longwu, although the tide of disasters has not passed for many years, and the north can still suffer from famine for at least two or three consecutive years, the south has been relatively alleviated in advance.

After all, disasters caused by cold are always alleviated first in the south, and this is a natural reason.

This year, at least there were no locusts in the south, and there was no major plague, and the sanitation and management work in various places was okay.

The main way of cold disasters is still floods and droughts, especially drought. However, years of restorative water conservancy construction in the southern region have greatly alleviated this problem.

In contrast, in the areas controlled by the Qing court in the north, the agricultural water conservancy system has almost completely collapsed, and some provinces, such as Shanshan and Shaanxi, have not had water conservancy repairs for decades.

Therefore, after the end of the autumn harvest, Zhu Shuren learned about the situation reported by the provinces, and the famine was basically alleviated in various parts of the Southern Ming Dynasty, and the military food collection work could still be spared.

As for the north, this year's population decay is estimated to be at least a million, with starvation, plague, and spontaneous organization against the Tartars killed, adding up to at least one million. There are also hundreds of thousands of additional northern civilians who will continue to flee south into the Ming control area.

According to the current frequency of Dolgon's exhaustion and fishing, it is estimated that in the second to fourth year of Shunzhi, the population of the north will drop by at least 3 million compared with the first year of Shunzhi. At that time, the total population under Dorgon's control was estimated to be more than 15 million, and the enslaved Han Chinese were at least squeezed to less than 12 million.

After the Ming court in the south had some surplus grain, Zhu Shuren would naturally not be idle. Although the large-scale use of troops against the Qing Dynasty will not be resumed now, the troops must intensify their training, and the newly reorganized troops of Nanzhili, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang will have to run in their combat effectiveness, and they will not be completely denied the opportunity for actual combat drills, even if it is good to suppress bandits.

】

Therefore, Zhu Shuren pondered that taking advantage of the upcoming winter and next winter, he might be able to carry out a small-scale purge of the areas in the south that have not yet been naturalized, and by the way, it is also to eradicate internal troubles, further unite and gather forces, and strengthen the control of the imperial court.

It is also acceptable to engage in small-scale combat training similar to the Laoshan Wheel War in later generations, as long as the cost is not much higher than the army's daily off-duty training-

Of course, Zhu Shuren definitely didn't want to attack Vietnam in such an old age, that thing was a quagmire, and how much manpower and financial resources Mongolia and Zhu Di had spent at the beginning was definitely not something that the current Zhu Shuren should consider.

What Zhu Shuren thought of was to take advantage of the cool winter to further integrate the Yunnan-Guizhou region that had not yet been fully controlled, and by the way, Li Dingguo and Sun Kewang, the generals and troops of the Western thieves who had lost their lives, would further integrate with the Ming army.

In the southeast, it may be possible to take advantage of the winter to let Zheng Chenggong regain the Dayuan area that the Dutch had completely occupied the year before last, which can be regarded as completely building the south into a complete body.

Historically, the Ming court at the end of the Ming Dynasty has not been able to control the Dayuan, but the Dutch have not always been able to fully control it. Until the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, Dayuan Island was occupied by both Spanish and Dutch forces, and was entrenched in important seaports in the south and north of the island.

Fifteen years after Chongzhen, the Dutch completely expelled and forced down all the Spaniards on the island by force, and now they have only gained a firm foothold on the island for two years, so it is definitely much easier to fight now than in the same period in history.

Historically, it took another 16 years for Zheng Chenggong to plan to recover Dayuan, when the Dutch had been operating the whole island for nearly 20 years, and the Western-style castle fortresses in these places had also been built for more than ten years.

If you go to fight sixteen years in advance, where will the fortresses such as Chichicheng City come from on Dayuan Island? Today, they are still simple fortifications made of wooden fences. (The Spaniards built the "City of Santo Domingo" on the island in 1628, a Western-style stone fort, but when the Dutch stormed and destroyed the Spaniards in 1643, they did so under bombardment.) In 1644 the Dutch began to try to rebuild it on the original site, which was later known as "Fort Antony", which is now only the second year after the Dutch started construction)

Considering these favorable factors, in September, Zhu Shuren decided to convene the main confidant generals and staff to discuss the winter operations in the past two years, and set a timetable for the integration of Yungui and the big staff.

Moreover, it is necessary to take into account cost savings, not to lead to an emptiness of the national treasury, and not to affect the great cause of resisting the Qing Dynasty in the future.