Early morning of September 29th.

This day is the 15th day of the eighth month of the traditional lunisolar calendar, which is the Mid-Autumn Festival, and even in places like prisons, indispensable customs are not absent.

"Hey, where's the mooncake?"

As soon as Zhou Changfeng and Mu Yu walked into the cafeteria, they heard someone asking the gendarmes next to them for moon cakes.

The gendarmerie sergeant on duty replied with a straight face: "It's still hanging now, and it's sent at night." ”

"Why bother, don't you eat the same at any time? Bring it up. ”

"yes, it's not bad for food."

Many people followed suit, and the scene was slightly chaotic, but soon fell silent with the "thump" of sticks hitting the table.

Yuan Huai, who learned about this, didn't care about it, but suddenly had a plan.

"Bold! Do you dare to have no fear during the festival? Didn't they want to eat moon cakes, so they took the breakfast of those guys who took the lead and handed them out to the moon cakes baked last night. ”

"Order!"

Half a quarter of an hour later.

Dozens of people in the cafeteria had just lined up to receive breakfast, and before they could get their chopsticks back to their seats, several gendarmes rushed in from outside the door.

After a period of muttering, the three people who had taken the lead in the coaxing were confiscated of their rice bowls and chopsticks in public.

"What is this for? What does it mean to receive a job? ”

"Aren't you guys clamoring for mooncakes? The breakfast was put away. ”

Someone strode forward with a bamboo basket, took out a mooncake and put it on the table.

The two collided and made a crisp sound of "pop".

？？？

Isn't there something wrong with this sound?

While everyone present was stunned, several gendarmes had already given each of them two mooncakes, and then turned and left.

One of them picked up the mooncake and wanted to eat it, but he immediately froze because it didn't feel right.

He hesitated for a moment and tried to take a bite, but the hard mooncake did not move, it was as hard as a brick.

Zhou Changfeng, who was very interested, also reached out and took one, he looked left and right, and found that there was nothing to smash, because the tables and chairs were all mortise and tenon structure.

It was not easy to find a small bench with nails and the head of the nails cocked, and he smashed it hard, and the nails were slapped down, and only a mark was left on the mooncake.

"The moon cakes that haven't returned to oil yet, the iron teeth and copper teeth can't be gnawed." Mu Yu sneered.

"Hahahaha-" Everyone present burst into laughter.

Zhou Changfeng sat back in his place, and Mu Yu next to him stretched out his chopsticks and grabbed a salted duck egg, and explained casually: "This Cantonese-style moon cake is very hard after it is baked, and it usually takes a night or two to wait for the oil in the filling to seep out, so that the skin will be soft." ”

There is no need to hide it, Zhou Changfeng really doesn't know the reason, or that the surrounding group of big men cook in person is only a few, and there are even fewer moon cakes.

A fat man at the next table asked curiously, "Brother Mu, do you know this?" Are you good at cooking? ”

Mu Yu, who was embarrassed, coughed dryly twice, and said leisurely: "My wife is strong, and she smashed her head with a moon cake and stitched four stitches when she came home from Qinfen Pavilion on the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival last year. ”

Hiss......

Everyone bared their teeth in amazement.

"You deserve it." Zhou Changfeng scooped a spoonful of white porridge with a spoon and said disdainfully: "Since you dare to steal, you must be ready to be beaten." ”

Mu Yu, who was not convinced, immediately replied: "Brother Zhou, according to the past experience you said, I am far inferior to you in terms of romance." ”

"That was all before."

"Heh, Brother Zhou, your nature is hard to change, at least I don't believe that you will be able to defend yourself like a jade in the future!"

"Who taught you to use words like that?" Zhou Changfeng glanced at him and said indifferently: "If you don't behave properly after marriage, my wife can hang me up and beat me." ”

"I'll remember it for you. Hey, all the ranks present are witnesses to our Brother Zhou's words. ”

At this time, it was just time for the official radio station to broadcast the morning news.

「…… After more than five years, the first self-made Wanjun heavy machine was completed and put into operation, and the large-scale hydraulic press made by Yanjing First Heavy Machinery Group has been completed recently, with good trial operation and a pressure of up to 10,000 tons. These militaristic weapons ......"

Aha? 10,000 tons of hydraulic press?

For the history of heavy industry development, Zhou Changfeng naturally doesn't know much, he thought that this thing should be the standard of the industrial country, and there are no more than a dozen units at home are embarrassed to go out, but I didn't expect it to be the first one produced by Daming?

"The first self-produced? How many are there in China now? ”

"I don't know." Mu Yu also didn't know.

A small middle-aged man in front of him probably heard the conversation between the two of them, so he replied: "For the time being, there is only one one for 10,000 tons, and there are four for 5,000 tons and one for 8,000 tons." ”

"Well, I see." Zhou Changfeng nodded, then turned his head sideways and asked in a low voice, "Who is this person?" ”

"He, from the Jinzhou Navy Arsenal, embezzled more than 100,000 yuan without permission, and he was lucky to recover most of it, so he was only sentenced to five years." Mu Yu replied.

The hydraulic press is one of the core processing tools of heavy industry, and it is a type of hydraulic press with the hydraulic press.

After the metal workpiece is forged under high pressure, the metal structure will be denser and the mechanical properties will be significantly improved due to plastic deformation and secondary crystallization.

The hydraulic press is divided into two types: free and die forging:

The freestyle hydraulic press simply means that there is no restraint around, and a red-hot forging is directly put on it, and then the pressure is applied hard. It is usually used to forge large, high-strength parts, such as the crankshaft of a ship's propeller and the gun barrel of a battleship, which can easily be hundreds of tons.

As the name suggests, there is a mold in which the blank is put in, and then the mold is closed, and the blank can be pressed into the desired shape after applying pressure. Generally, it is suitable for machining parts with slightly smaller weight and a large number of requirements, such as alloy steel plates, aircraft parts, steam turbine parts, etc., because it is impossible to use only a few times to make molds.

Historically, in order to build the Yamato-class battleships, the island country not only expanded the length of the dock and slipway, but also added a lot of new equipment to the shipbuilding industry - a 15,000-ton hydraulic press and three 70-ton open-hearth furnaces were purchased from Germany to make 460mm naval guns and high-quality armor steel.

The Germans were even more violent, in order to expand the production of the aviation industry, the demand for aluminum alloy forgings for manufacturing aircraft was very large, so they developed a 7,000-ton die forging hydraulic press, and then built an unprecedented 30,000-ton hydraulic press and three 15,000-ton die forging hydraulic presses.

In addition, only Britain built a 12,000-ton die-forged hydraulic press before the war, and other countries only had a 10,000-ton free-type hydraulic press at most.

In just a few years, the Americans have exploded more than 100 small and medium-sized die forging hydraulic presses, but the largest of them is only 5,000 tons.

The small middle-aged man sighed: "The construction of giant presses is not easy, time-consuming and laborious, if you want to improve the overall industrial strength, you must seize the time to build a few more." ”

Decades ago, in 7893, the first 10,000-ton free-type hydraulic press in human history was completed at the Bethlehem Steel Company in the United States.

This kind of pressure machine with huge pressure, stable pressure application process and high production efficiency quickly replaced the old-fashioned steam hammer and became the key equipment for Western industry to manufacture high-quality large and medium-sized components, and it is also the embodiment of a country's industrial strength.

Today, there are only more than 40 large hydraulic presses larger than 5,000 tons in the world, and there are only a handful of 10,000-ton hydraulic presses.

In order to have this capability, Daming introduced the first 4,000-ton hydraulic press as early as 30 years ago, and soon mastered the independent production capacity of 4,000-ton and below freestyle hydraulic presses. In order to meet the demand, several heavy machinery companies have successively built more than 30 small and medium-sized hydraulic presses and hydraulic presses of 4,000 tons, 2,500 tons and 1,000 tons.

The introduction of 10,000 tons of hydraulic press was in the 22nd year of Zhichang, the Ministry of Industry instructed the government-run Taipingfu Iron and Steel Plant (Ma'anshan) to order a plant from the French company Oper-Dewar, which took four years to build, and it was 27 years to put into operation after the arrival of thousands of miles.

Next, the Ministry of Industry suggested self-research and self-manufacturing, and the Ministry of Industry obtained a huge amount of money from the Advisory Council through lobbying in many ways, and the wealthy chose to walk on two legs - and order another one at the same time as the development.

However, due to its own scale and limited production capacity, the delivery speed of Czech Skoda is very slow; In the thirty-second year of Zhichang, the "10,000 tons" hydraulic press developed by Daming has been tested and put into production, and the Czechs are still struggling with how to disassemble the big guy into parts and transport them to the port for loading.

But in fact, because the atmosphere of quick success was very common at that time, the R&D team that was eager for limelight and rewards was also subject to multiple external and internal pressures.

This led to many flaws in the "10,000 tons" hydraulic press, the unreasonable design of beams and columns, and the unstable pressure application process at full power output. In the second test operation, there was an accident in which the high-pressure valve was damaged, and the high-pressure water shot out, resulting in two deaths and seven injuries. Later, it was restored and continued to be used, but it was limited to 8,000 tons.

The emperor was very unhappy, believing that this was a serious dereliction of duty and a disguised deception of the emperor.

Therefore, the right attendant of the Ministry of Works, who was ordered to supervise the matter back then, is still in prison with two years left in his sentence.

Counting the ones that have just been put into production in recent days, today, there are three 10,000-ton free-type hydraulic presses in the north and south of the river; The 11,000-ton die forging hydraulic press ordered from Demag Maschinenbau in Germany has also been loaded into the Port of Hamburg.

As an experimental ship integrating many advanced technologies, the battleship Longshuo has verified that many technologies are mature and reasonable, and the specifications of the Ming Navy for the next class of battleships have been roughly drafted.

But there is a great deal of disagreement within the Navy about what class of main guns the new battleships will carry.

One faction proposed to go up to 14 inches (448 mm) directly, but the opponents thought that this would greatly increase the displacement and increase the cost, which was not cost-effective; The other school thinks that thirteen inches (416mm) is sufficient, full of power, and not too expensive; There are also a small number of people who think that the existing twelve-and-a-half-inch (400mm) main gun can be slightly improved, and the performance is not weak, and the overall cost performance is the highest.

Although the Ming Navy is still tearing apart, the industrial department of the Ming Dynasty has made sufficient preparations and is waiting for the requirements of Party A's masters.

Fourteen inches is not the limit, and fifteen-inch (480mm) guns are theoretically feasible.

The same day, in the afternoon.

This year's Mid-Autumn Festival is a good thing for Zhou Changfeng.

Maybe the people at the bottom don't care about the country's important weapons, but for the meat eaters whose own interests are tied to the country's strength, this is indeed good news worth celebrating.

It was also on this day, after nearly ten days of waiting, that the Air Force finally replied.

With an excited heart and trembling hands, Zhou Changfeng tore open the envelope and pulled out the letter paper at a glance, and breathed a long sigh of relief after the corners of his mouth rose.

The gist of the reply was almost as follows:

Lieutenant Colonel Zhou Changfeng, your ideas are very forward-looking, and you also have detailed and effective theoretical arguments and practical basis. Our paratroopers today are equipped with light weapons mainly semi-automatic rifles, submachine guns, and light machine guns. But semi-automatic rifles are not easy to carry, and with only a submachine gun and a light machine gun, there will be a gap in fire in the middle of a few hundred meters. Intermediate power ammunition and corresponding guns seemed to be an effective solution to the current problem, so the Air Force decided to adopt this proposal after preliminary discussions.

"Brother Zhou, your eyebrows are dancing, what's wrong? Agreed? Mu Yu rolled the newspaper into a cylinder, threw it on the bed, and then walked over.

"Yes, I thought that if I really couldn't do it, I would go to the navy bosses to grind and soak it," Zhou Changfeng, who looked relaxed, sighed: "I didn't expect the Air Force to be very open-minded." ”

"Paratroopers are so expensive, no matter how pedantic and stubborn they are, they have to be carefully weighed, they are not ordinary consumables."

“……”

However, the Air Force is not a big pie either, it is clearly well thought out.

They have no intention of changing the existing production line, and said that they will issue a request to the Daming National Arsenal and Weapons Company in the form of bidding that can be used by both government and private companies, and the caliber should preferably be consistent with the current 23 cents.

After testing and evaluation, the design with the best performance or other sufficient advantages will be adopted.

Because Zhou Changfeng's report not only mentioned semi-automatic rifles that fire intermediate-power ammunition, but also talked about automatic rifles, the Air Force was very interested in them.

It is not that automatic rifles cannot be fired in a single shot, and they can fire at a distance and at close bursts, and the well-trained elite soldiers can use them with ease, rather than firing indiscriminately and wasting ammunition.

As a result, this weapon can take the place of semi-automatic rifles and submachine guns, and the flexibility of squad tactics will also be greatly improved.

Moreover, the man-hours and cost of automatic rifles are actually similar to those of semi-automatic rifles, and the number of elite paratrooper units does not need to be too large, so the Air Force considers whether it is possible to equip all personnel with automatic rifles and light machine guns that fire intermediate-power ammunition.

Such an idea is not unadvanced, and in Zhou Changfeng's opinion, it is worth boasting.

His pleasure faded slowly, and remained so until dinner.

"Huh? Is there only osmanthus wine tonight? Zhou Changfeng, who came to the cafeteria, was surprised.

"It's good if you have, if you don't drink it, I'll drink it." Mu Yu looked him up and down, "Why are you so happy today, it won't be like this if your idea is approved." ”

"Uh...... You are the commander of the aviation force who doesn't understand this," Zhou Changfeng stared at him and thought for a few seconds, and said metaphorically: "It's like a new type of fighter with extraordinary performance that you proposed is adopted, can you not be happy?" ”

"Oh, but Er'er."

"You kid, hard mouthed?"

"Ahem, don't dare, don't dare."

(End of chapter)