As for the production of artillery and rocket artillery, thanks to the self-sufficiency of knife steel and the improvement of the level of machine tools, as well as the extensive use of steam engines, great progress has also been made, at least to be able to produce military artillery on its own.

The production of rocket artillery is not enough, there is no technical difficulty in itself, it has always been a good product with good quality and low difficulty, and there are a few words about artillery.

During the Opium War, the Qing army invented the iron mold casting method, which greatly increased the casting speed of artillery, and the performance also increased, while the production cost was greatly reduced.

This technology was also mastered by the military factory of the Huaxia Army, but it was found that the artillery cast by this method had many problems, and could only be used for commercial artillery, but not for military artillery, and finally could only be used cautiously.

On the issue of iron mold casting cannon method, if you want to talk about it seriously, you can talk about at least five or six chapters, but then I'm afraid that no one will read this book, so let's briefly explain it.

The artillery made by the iron mold casting method can indeed be smooth in the barrel, and the performance is stronger than that of the artillery made by the traditional clay mold casting method of the Qing army, but it is much more difficult to check than the artillery made by the sand mold casting method in Britain and European countries.

To put it simply, the material of the cannon made by the iron mold casting method is white iron, and it is necessary to cast it in sections according to the process, which leads to the uneven material of the final cannon body, and the biggest problem caused by this unevenness is that the heat dissipation performance is particularly poor.

When the texture of the iron material is uniform, the heat dissipation performance is very good, and it can dissipate heat quickly, but once it is uneven, it cannot dissipate heat quickly, and it must be placed for a period of time or even cooled with water.

As a result, every time two or three guns are fired, the body of the cannon will become red due to friction, and it cannot continue to be used for gunpowder, and must wait for dozens of minutes before use.

The sand casting cannon casting method is to directly cast the entire gun body, and then dig a hole in the middle to use, from the process to ensure uniform texture, heat dissipation performance is very good, almost after the gun is fired, the heat dissipation can be completed instantly.

As a result, the rate of fire of the guns made by the iron mold casting method and the sand mold casting method is very different in other situations, that is, the rate of fire of the former is 8 to 10 rounds per minute, while the rate of fire of the latter can reach the high speed of 90 rounds per hour for heavy guns and 120 rounds per hour for light guns.

In any case, with a high-power steam engine, Li Xian was able to create a high-power drilling machine that could dig the barrel of the cannon, and he would be able to imitate real military artillery, and the production technology of the iron cannon with high difficulty had been mastered, and the relatively easy production technology of bronze cannon and brass cannon was naturally available.

In the process of producing firearms and artillery, a large amount of waste is generated, some of which is used to continue the production of weapons, and most of which is reused to make tools and agricultural tools such as axes, sickles, saws and pickaxes.

These scraps are waste materials for weapons with extremely high performance requirements, but they are excellent raw materials for tools and farm tools, and with the assistance of carburizing technology, the Huaxia Army has a large number of high-quality farm tools and tools.

In this era, the Qing Dynasty actually mastered a more systematic carburizing process, but the entire smelting industry is still in the era of small workshops, and the technical secrecy is very serious.

As for the military factories of the Huaxia Army, even tool steel can be produced, and there are a large number of Western science and technology books as auxiliaries, if even the carburizing process cannot be made, it will be a real joke.

In short, during this period of time, the military industry and heavy industry of the Huaxia Army achieved tremendous development, which was almost a world away from when it first occupied Guangzhou.

Under such circumstances, Li Xian hoped to continue to increase investment in technological research and development, master the construction technology of steam engine ships and ocean-going ships of more than 1,000 tons, and then produce a large number of warships, sweep the world, and take all the flowers and rivers of the Qing Dynasty.

However, at this time, reality played a huge joke on Li Xian, and just when Li Xian was full of ambition and wanted to make persistent efforts, he suddenly found that further research and development could not be done, and the reason was that he had no money and could not continue to invest.

Moreover, what is even more worrying is that if a large amount of capital inflow cannot be obtained soon, then the entire capital chain of the Huaxia Army will be tempered, and even the army's salary will be released.

"What the hell is going on, how can we have no money on our accounts?

Whoever it is, who embezzled my money, find out for me, I'm going to kill him. After hearing the news that there was no money, Li Xian immediately roared, and the voice was so loud that it could be heard in the entire Blessed Land Research Institute.

"This, boss, seems to have been spent by yourself. Zhao Hu will take Zhang Sicheng and Hu Chong and other administrators in charge of money to visit, bring the account books of this period, tell Li Xian about the depletion of funds, and point out the first person responsible for the incident by the way.

"How is that possible?" Li Xian took the account book without knowing why, and after reading it carefully, he suddenly found that he really had nothing to say.

After the occupation of Guangzhou, the Huaxia army confiscated all kinds of materials accumulated by the Qing court in Guangzhou, plus plundered the property of Qing officials, and obtained more than 10 million taels of materials and gold and silver.

Through the previous pirate warfare and the occupation of Macao, the Mixed Yuan Sect originally had more than one million taels of capital and material reserves, plus the harvest of Guangzhou, it should have more than six million taels of money.

In this era, 6 million taels of silver was quite a huge amount of money, and if you want to buy more than 200 British 1,000-ton ocean-going cargo ships, you can buy 6 million quintals of polished rice under normal circumstances, and you can maintain the consumption of more than 50,000 firearms troops for a year.

It's just that with such a huge amount of money, Li Xian swelled up for a while, and went crazy to engage in some technical research and production capacity upgrades, but he consumed such a huge amount of money, and now there are less than 500,000 taels of materials and money left on the books.

You know, no matter what era, scientific and technological research and development is the most expensive, or there is no one, using a crucible to do a steelmaking experiment, you need to invest a lot of manpower, iron ore, graphite and other materials, and at least hundreds of experiments to obtain a usable steel formula, and one or two usable molten steel, the other hundreds of times are all in vain.

In the case of steam engines and imitations and the manufacture of various machine tools, it is normal to waste a lot of materials to overcome any technical difficulty, and to waste materials that can produce dozens or hundreds of machines before developing a usable model.

Therefore, during this period, the military and heavy industry capacity of the Huaxia Army has indeed improved a lot, and even changed qualitatively, but at the cost of a large amount of materials.