Capital, inside the Ordnance Bureau.

Bi Maokang is now seventy-one years old, and he is an out-and-out old man in this era.

But under the careful care of the imperial doctor, and the fact that what he has learned all his life has finally been reused, the old man Bi Maokang, who was originally full of old age, is indeed very energetic at the moment.

Originally, when Lao Zhu was there, because he was worried about the old man's age, and because he knew that the old man would die in two years according to the original historical trajectory.

So for this old man's health condition, Lao Zhu usually attaches great importance to it.

In the past, when Lao Zhu was here, he had issued a strict order not to let Bi Maokang get involved in the construction of weapons, and only let him discuss with Song Yingxing which direction they should develop, at most, let him watch from the sidelines, and never let him do it, and even the casting office of the Ordnance Bureau rarely let him go.

But because Lao Zhu gave them too many privileges, after Lao Zhu left, no one could control this old man.

In order to develop new firearms, he almost lived in the foundry, and at the critical moment of research, he even did not sleep all night, like young people.

If Song Yingxing hadn't taken care of the old man's body and forcibly interrupted his research a few times, I'm afraid the old man's body would have been unbearable.

And these people have worked hard for so long, and now it is finally time to bear fruit.

"How's it going, Migne's rifle, have you made it?"

Bi Maokang's clothes were covered with stains, and his hair was a little scattered, but he was in good spirits, his eyes were blazing and looking at Song Yingxing, his eyes were full of anticipation.

Originally, at this moment, he should have been staring at it all the time, but he hadn't slept all night, and Song Yingxing was worried about his body and forcibly let him go to sleep.

In the end, Bi Maokang couldn't resist Song Yingxing, so he had to go and rest first, just because the old man didn't feel much in the first place, and he had something in his heart, so he only slept for four or five hours and woke up.

And after waking up, the first thing he did was to ask Song Yingxing if the rifle casting had been completed.

"It's done, but there are still some problems."

Song Yingxing nodded first, then shook his head again, and said, "The accuracy requirements are too high, and it can't be mass-produced for the time being." ”

During this period, the Ming Dynasty and even the whole world made weapons by hand.

Because of this, the firearms created are extremely crude and have little accuracy.

The Minne rifle is the pinnacle of breech guns, and its biggest advantage over those musket guns is rifling.

For guns, rifling and not rifling are two different things.

Those firearms without rifling, even if they were optimized by Song Yingxing and Bi Maokang, had a maximum range of less than two hundred meters.

As for its accuracy, taking the relatively high accuracy of the bird gun as an example, it can shoot a fixed target within 100 meters, and shoot seven out of ten shots, which is considered a good achievement.

If it is out of a distance of 100 meters, whether it can be hit generally depends on whether the enemy's formation is dense, if it is not dense, it can only depend on the luck of the person who is beaten.

As for the reason for the low accuracy of the gun, it is also very simple, that is, the firing method of the gun is to fill the barrel with gunpowder, then compact the gunpowder, and then put a round steel marble in the barrel.

Finally, the gunpowder is ignited from the rear, and when the gunpowder burns rapidly in the chamber, a huge thrust is created, and then the projectile is pushed out.

But as we all know, there is resistance in the air, and a round projectile will be subjected to huge resistance in the air, just like an arrow shaft without feathers, after flying to a certain distance, under the action of air resistance, it will lose its stability and thus shift its direction.

However, the rifled gun of the Migne rifle is different, its projectile is a pointed conical bullet, and its shape is not much different from that of later bullets, except that the threads on the bullet are more obvious.

Because of its pointed shape, it will definitely experience less air resistance, and most importantly, with rifling, the bullet will rotate and fire forward when fired.

And the rotating bullet, both in terms of stability and penetration, will be greatly enhanced.

Therefore, the range of this Minne rifle reached an astonishing 900 meters, and its effective range reached 550 meters.

Compared with the Minne rifle that Da Ming is using now, the range has almost increased fivefold, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is an artifact.

It's just that such an epoch-making firearm is not so easy to build.

First of all, rifling the barrel is a big problem, because rifling is related to the rotation of the bullet when it is fired, and it is the most important place, and there is no room for error.

The second is the problem of bullets, after many experiments, they found that the gap between the Minne bullet and the barrel must be controlled to a very small range, in the words of later commentaries, it should be between 0 and 0.35 mm.

Such a small gap is simply thinner than a piece of paper.

Although the Ordnance Bureau has craftsmen who can control this kind of accuracy, this kind of craftsman is the kind of master craftsman who has reached the peak of his skills, and there are not many such people in the entire Ming Dynasty.

If they were to forge the Mingne rifles by hand and exhaust them to death, they would not necessarily be able to build many of them, let alone equip the army in large quantities.

And for the whole country, if it can't be mass-produced, then no matter how strong it is, it is still garbage.

But Bi Maokang didn't care about what Song Yingxing said that he couldn't produce in large quantities, he looked at Song Yingxing with some excitement, and then asked, "Try it...... Have you tried it? Is it as powerful as it is written in the books? ”

"Well, pretty much the same."

Hearing Bi Maokang ask this, Song Yingxing's eyes were also a little hot, he really didn't expect that the range of a small firearm was about to catch up with some small-powered artillery, it was simply amazing.

"It's good to be the same, it's good to be the same."

When Bi Maokang heard this, he couldn't help but nod his head again and again.

To be honest, even though many of the annotations in the book had been confirmed by them, he still had doubts about the fact that this musket could shoot nearly a thousand meters away.

And after hearing Song Yingxing say this at this moment, he immediately dispelled all doubts, and his expression began to become a little fanatical.

"Since this musket is real, the wooden standard lathe and bullet mold in the annotation can be solved as long as we follow it."

"In this way, as long as I rely on the help of those tools, my Daming will soon be able to fully replace this artifact, and even the forging speed will be faster than before."

Speaking of this, Bi Maokang couldn't help but shed two lines of tears in his eyes.

As a native of Longqing, Bi Maokang has experienced a total of four emperors, Wanli, Taichang, Tianqi, and Chongzhen, and has witnessed almost the entire process of the decline of the Ming Dynasty, and has also seen the natural and man-made disasters experienced by the Ming Dynasty over the years.

At this moment, with such a powerful weapon, it almost means that the Ming Dynasty is hopeful, and it means that the countless Li people who have been affected by the disaster in the Ming Dynasty are about to usher in new hope.

As an old man who is about to enter his old age, as a Ming man, how can he not be excited.