Liu Yan walked quickly to the front yard of the Hundred Household Official Hall, saw Tan Xiaoda waiting here, and said with a smile: "Chief Tan came late at night, there must be good news, right?" ”

Tan Xiaoda clenched his fists and said: "Lord Qiyu, my subordinates are fortunate to live up to their mission, and finally succeeded in developing the flintlock bird gun, I have come to report the good news to the adults, please move to the Firearms Supervision Office for inspection!" ”

Liu Yan was overjoyed, and immediately said: "Master Tan has worked hard!" ”

Then Liu Yan directly asked the guard on duty next to him to tell Miao Shao and Xu Ming, and he pulled Tan Xiaoda and said: "Chief Tan, let's go to the Firearms Supervision Office, I want to take a look at the successfully developed bird gun!" ”

"Now?"

"Yes, now!"

Firearms Supervision Department.

At this time, although it was already late at night, the firearms supervision office was still brightly lit, Liu Yan, accompanied by Tan Xiaoda, came directly to the firearms workshop and saw a bird gun in a room.

Liu Yan took the bird gun in his hand and looked at it carefully, and found that the original long fire rope had disappeared, and instead a fire sickle and fire sickle spring were installed near the medicine pool, and the flint was installed behind the fire sickle and fixed by flint clips.

"Your Excellency, please see, this flintlock bird gun uses a trigger to drive a hammer through a spring, strikes at the flint flakes, and produces sparks through rapid friction with the flint flakes, which in turn ignites the gunpowder in the fire gate's powder pool. Therefore, this flintlock bird does not have to be like the arquebus, which must drag a long lit fire rope during the battle, which can really be fired at any time in the rain, snow, wind and frost, and also avoid the shortcomings that the light of the fire rope is easy to be exposed at night! ”

Tan Xiaoda said proudly: "The flintlock bird gun developed by this pole is basically the same as the one captured by the adults before, and under the meticulous work of subordinates and others, the power of this flintlock bird gun is even better." The subordinates estimated that the range of this bird gun was about 100 paces, and it could break through heavy armor at a distance of about 80 steps! ”

"Good!"

Liu Yan listened to Tan Xiaoda's introduction, his eyes never took off this bird, and then said, "Let's go, take me to see the situation of the building." ”m.

"Yes."

Then Tan Xiao took Liu Yan to the firearms workshop, only to see that the craftsmen here were still working in full swing. According to the regulations formulated by Liu Yan for the Firearms Supervision Department, as long as these craftsmen manufacture more qualified firearms, they can get more wages, so even if it is late at night, these craftsmen are still enthusiastic about building firearms, and they don't need Liu Yan and Tan Xiaoda to supervise them at all.

Liu Yan, accompanied by Tan Xiaoda, first came to the place where the gun pipe was built.

Regarding the creation of the gun pipe, it has been recorded in "Tiangong Kaiwu": a short pipe is forged with several wrought iron bars, and then two or three short pipes are welded into a long pipe, which is the splicing method. The advantage of this method is that it can make long pipes, and the cooling of the segmented pipes is relatively uniform, and the degree of solidity is guaranteed. But the shortcomings are also obvious, the quality of the tube is determined by the welding of sections, and this welding technology depends on experience, without more than ten years of accumulation, can not produce qualified products, this is the so-called Seiko route.

What Qi Jiguang recorded in the "New Book of Ji Xiao" is another kind of double-layer steel plate direct rolling. The advantage of this method is that the barrel does not have to be welded, but the disadvantage is that the long barrel cannot be made, and the cooling of the whole tube is not uniform when forging. As a result, there is a difference in the texture of the front and back of the pipe body, and if the cooling difference is too large, it is easy to blow up.

At this time, the bird gun in Liu Yan's hand was different, and I saw Tan Xiaoda introduce it.

Liu Yan saw that several craftsmen in front of him were using a cylindrical steel core to make cold bones, first burning the wrought iron used to make the pipe until it was red-hot, then taking out the blank, using a hammer to knock the hot wrought iron outside the steel core, and rolling it into an iron pipe.

And in the process of cladding iron, the steel core is constantly extracted and cooled with water to prevent the steel core and wrought iron from being welded together. The thickness of the rolled iron pipe should also be about one centimeter. Several craftsmen are very skilled in this step, and the movements are like flowing water in the same way, and several people next to them are also cooperating tacitly.

At this time, if you follow the method of making bird guns in the Ming army, the second step is welding.

The Ming Dynasty lacked knowledge of ballistics, and believed that the longer the firebolt, the more powerful it was, so that in order to increase the length, the firebolt body was rolled into a single barrel, and then welded section by section, which developed to the later Manchu Qing Dynasty's lifting gun, and the barrel was even two meters long. Pipes made by this welding method are easy to blow up and bor, and craftsmen regard whether or not they are welded seamlessly as the key to the success or failure of guns.

This is how the flintlock bird gun that Liu Yan captured from Haikou was made in this way.

At this time, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the craftsmen of the Ming army were opportunistic and caused many accidents. Ji Xiaoxin recorded in the new book: "Recently, there are few people who are ill in this area, and they do not complain and instruct the craftsmen to listen to them rolled into iron cylinders, uneven in thickness and thickness, and even rolled into a single cylinder, which will be damaged by explosion." ”

The easier it is to blow up, the more reluctant the soldiers are to use it, so that at the end of the Ming Dynasty, a total of tens of thousands of bird guns were manufactured, but very few of the actual equipment troops could be used in actual combat, and the most elite Guanning iron cavalry still used the original three-eyed guns!

At this time, the method of the firearms supervision department is a completely different double-layer composite gun, different from the single-barrel welding method, the method of the firearms supervision department is to wrap red iron on the steel core, when the first layer of iron is wrapped, another layer is wrapped on this layer of gun, so that the joint of the inner gun is wrapped by the outer layer of guncorps to form a composite body.

From a technical point of view, the double-layer composite gun is more scientific than the single-tube welded gun, and the gun body joint is stronger, although this kind of gun tube can not make a very long bird gun tube, but the caliber can be made larger than the first bird gun, so the power is also greater in a limited distance.

In the process of building the gun, although many craftsmen believe that the short pipe is not as far as the long pipe according to past experience, even if the gun pipe is not too short, Tan Xiaoda is not too short, but believes that the bird gun can not only pursue the range, but should be the product of the integration of range, power and quality.

Then Liu Yan saw the second step in building the bird's gun, which was to trim the inner chamber.

At this time, the barrel is still a rough embryo, and the core is not straight, and the inside of the chamber is also rough and uneven, in addition to polishing the outside of the tube body smooth, the most important thing is to use a drill bit to drill the barrel big, drill smooth.

In the Ming Dynasty, the general drill bits are made of fallen steel, the rigidity is not very hard, and they are all manual drills, so half of the time required to build the bird gun is in the drill chamber, and only one inch can be drilled at most every day, and it can be as long as a month when you want to finish drilling.

Ji Xiaoxinshu recorded: "The original hole of the bird is drilled with a steel drill, and the drill is a few inches a day, until the end, and the drill is light in January." ”

In Liu Yan's view, the production efficiency of the Ming Army's bird gun is outrageously low. There are two ways to solve the problem, one is to improve the drill bit, and the other is to change the drilling method.

The steel used to make drill bits is very easy to solve, and now the Firearms Supervision Department can refine high-quality steel, which can not only be used to make drill bits, but also can be used to build lathes, punches and other equipment that must be developed in the future.

As for the drilling method, what makes Liu Yan feel relieved is that Tan Xiaoda has already thought of an effective method, that is, a simple lathe using animal power. In the future, when the conditions are ripe, Tan Xiaoda even plans to change the proposed lathe to stainless steel.

The so-called simple lathe is an enlarged horizontal hand drill, but it uses animal power instead of hand cranking.

The original drilling is a manual inch by inch drilling, and vertical drilling, time-consuming and laborious, the use of simple lathe is to fix the barrel horizontally on a shelf that can be rotated by itself, the drill bit cutter is fed horizontally, so that the efficiency of drilling is several times higher than the original, it was originally necessary to drill a month to drill out a gun tube, now it only takes five or six days to drill a high-quality gun tube with smooth inner chamber.

The successful production of the gun tube can also be regarded as an improvement of the original process, and the next production is a revolutionary improvement.

At this time, the guns equipped by the Ming army belonged to the original arquebus, and there was a metal hook on the gun, and one end of the hook was fixed on the gun, and could rotate around the axis; The other end holds a burning fire rope, and when firing, push the metal hook into the fire door with your hand, so that the fire rope ignites the black ~ gunpowder, and then launches the projectile contained in the chamber.

Compared to full-fledged flintlock pistols, arquebuses have many drawbacks, the most obvious being that the firing process is very complex and slow.

Qi Jiguang once recorded more than a dozen procedures for using arquebuses in "Qi Jiguang's Art of War", and in Europe at the same time, there were also relevant documents describing the firing steps of arquebuses, which were divided into 25 steps, which were more cumbersome than the arquebuses of the Ming Dynasty.

The second is that the arquebus cannot be used in rain, snow and windy weather, the rain will wet the ignition of the medicine door, and the wind will blow away the ignition powder of the medicine door. Once this happens, it will be fatal on your life-and-death battlefield!

Liu Yan was accustomed to all kinds of advanced firearms in later generations, and he hated the cumbersome steps of arquebuses.

In Liu Yan's words: "The speed of firing two shots in one minute is intolerable and even more deadly!" ”

So in the process of this development, Tan Xiaoda specially designed the mechanism of the flintlock pistol to solve the above shortcomings of the arquebus.

The flintlock pistol is actually not complicated, it is a flint clamped on the jaws of the hammer, and there is a blow anvil on the side of the fire hole. When the gunner fires, as long as the trigger is pulled, the flint is struck on the edge of the fire door under the action of the spring, and a spark can be generated, which can ignite the gunpowder and fire.

In this way, the steps of shooting are greatly simplified, the firing rate and shooting accuracy are improved, so that the shooting speed of the firecracker catches up with or even surpasses that of the archers, and truly forms a suppression of firepower!

Moreover, what made Liu Yan even more amazed was that Tan Xiaoda not only imitated and learned, but also carried out a certain degree of innovation.

In order to make the new bird pistol he designed can be used in windy weather and reduce the impact of rain and snow on the flint, Tan Xiaoda also deliberately installed a lid on the top of the medicine pool, and when the fire pistol pulls the trigger, the lid on the medicine pool will automatically open, so as to protect the flint and keep the flint dry at all times.

After reading the manufacturing process of the barrel and firing device, it means that the main part of the new bird gun has been completed, and the next step is to further improve the performance of the new bird gun.

For example, steel is used to make the body parts to enhance the strength and durability of the new bird guns, and hardwood is used to make wooden butts and body guards.

At the same time, in order to shoot effectively, Tan Xiaoda also deliberately designed the butt of the new bird gun as a rooster neck butt type, which is easier to hold and aim close to the cheek. In addition, Tan Xiaoda also prepared to install two movable gun strap buckles made of stainless steel to facilitate the long-distance march of the soldiers of the Dun Army.

Liu Yan was in a good mood at this time, Tan Xiaoda's imitation of this bird gun is already very similar to the shape of modern rifles in later generations, although there is still a big gap in range and rate of fire, but compared with the firearms of this era, it can already be said to be an epoch-making product!

Coming out of the firearms workshop, Liu Yan smiled and said to Tan Xiaoda: "Next, does Chief Tan have any plans?" ”

Tan Xiaoda was affirmed by Liu Yan at this time, and felt that he was full of energy, and immediately said: "My subordinates are going to recruit another batch of craftsmen, and the number of people should be controlled at about 100 people." In addition, five more lathes for making flintlock bird guns will be added, and the subordinates are preparing to rapidly expand the production of flintlock bird guns, so that the old-fashioned bird guns in the hands of the officers and men of the sentry dun army can be replaced in the shortest possible time. ”

Liu Yan said with a smile: "Okay, then let's have a big production!" ”

Some people died, but not completely......