The room goes through the late Ming Dynasty, and the back door leads to North America at the beginni

Chapter 151: 2.0 flintlock guns, difficult to choose
Liu Sheng picked up the matchlock gun in front of him.

It can be seen that its main body is composed of four parts, namely the barrel, the gun bed, the gun stock, and the gun action.

The barrel is about 1.3 meters long, with an octagonal prism shape on the outside and a round shape on the inside.Thin at the front and thick at the back, it looks like a miniature red cannon.

The gun bed is made of wood and is about one meter long.

Including the butt, the entire matchlock gun is about 1.7 meters long, which is about the same height as most soldiers.

The bolt mechanism is a faucet clamped with a match rope, and there is also a covered fire door.

There is also a wooden slot for inserting the passage bar under the gun bed, which is integrated with the gun bed.

Watching Liu Sheng caressing and adjusting the matchlock gun, Kou Gensheng introduced it from the side, perhaps out of professional habit.

"The gun barrel is four feet two inches long and is made of two pieces of fine iron rolled and joined together. In order to prevent the chamber from exploding, the back half is made of slightly more material than the front half.

It is equipped with three coins of granular gunpowder regulated by the leader and three coins of heavy lead bullets. The range can reach up to 180 steps.

Seventy to one hundred steps can break through one layer of armor; forty to sixty steps can break through two layers of armor; if you get within thirty steps, you can break through three layers of armor! "

When he said this, Kou Gensheng's gray beard curled up and down, and he was obviously very proud of the matchlock gun he had built.

In fact, given the sufficient materials used, this matchlock gun can indeed be regarded as a masterpiece for him.

Liu Sheng was also quite satisfied with this matchlock gun.

I feel that except for the lack of a bayonet, its appearance is quite close to that of a modern rifle.This made Liu Sheng, who was used to playing with rifles, feel like he was going to the mountains and seas with his ex-girlfriend.

As far as Liu Sheng knows, most of the barrels of imitation matchlock guns in the Ming Dynasty were between 1.5 meter and 1.3 meters, and the entire gun length was between [-] meters and two meters.

The length of this club built by Kou Gensheng is considered medium.

Although a gun barrel that is too long can increase the range, it is inconvenient for soldiers to carry and shoot the gun; a barrel that is too short will result in a short range and reduced power.

What impressed Liu Sheng most was that the development of muskets took a very strange route before the Qing Dynasty re-imitated Western guns.

There are two types of matchlock guns commonly used in the army. One is a harquebus that is nearly two and a half meters long.

Its advantage is that it has a long range, up to three to four hundred steps, and its power is also good.

But it weighs thirty or forty kilograms, which is equivalent to some light and small models of squatting tiger cannons in the Ming Dynasty.

It requires two people to carry it around, and the other person can be used as a gun stand when the time comes.

The most important thing is that because it is still a front-loading musket, changing the dressing after firing is extremely slow. It takes five to six minutes to fire one round.

That's it, it might as well be a crouching tiger cannon.

The other type of matchlock gun is too short, with the barrel mostly only more than three feet, with low power and short range, making it useless against Western muskets.

Also going astray was Dai Qing's artillery, which was the red cannon derived from the red barbarian cannon.

The level is no longer calculated based on caliber and shell weight, but purely on artillery weight.

In the middle and late stages of the Qing Dynasty, they were obsessed with the weight of artillery - many cannons weighed tens of thousands of kilograms and could not be moved, but the caliber was not as large as others' cannons of several kilograms.

In terms of the development of firearms, Dai Qing typically deceived himself.

Da Meng is actually not much better.

The Jiajing Dynasty began to imitate matchlock guns. Later, instead of thinking about how to develop matchlock guns that were more useful and cheaper, they instead worked hard to develop various firearms such as the Ten-Eyed Gun, the Thunder Gun, and the Five Thunder God Machine.

People who don’t understand it will think it’s really awesome when they look at the relevant information, and they’ll bluff people just by looking at it.

But it's not easy to use in actual combat.

Qi Jiguang has the best say on this point, because he has been tricked by these fancy firearms.

The designers of these fancy firearms were mainly gentry and literati. Most of these literati did not understand what it was like for soldiers to fight with firearms on the front line, so they took it for granted that they designed these fancy firearms.

It would be better if they were all good quality products.

But the problem is that the systemic corruption in the middle and late Ming Dynasty made it easier for such fancy firearms to cut corners, and eventually became synonymous with inferior firearms.

Like the famous three-eyed blunderbuss, many officers and soldiers in the late Ming Dynasty would rather use it as a hammer than try to kill it.

Liu Sheng had the experience of later generations, and naturally he would not go astray in making firearms. He directly stipulated the length, weight, inner diameter and other specifications of the matchlock barrel.

Therefore, he was not worried about the performance of this matchlock gun.

What he cares more about is productivity.

After some debugging, he asked: "How long will it take to build a matchlock gun like this?"

This is the task Liu Sheng ordered.

Kou Gensheng had naturally tried it, and immediately replied: "According to the leader's instructions, the gun bed, gun stock, and gun machine will be separated and handed over to other craftsmen for production. The gunsmith is only responsible for making the iron pipe and assembling it.

Assembly takes almost no time, so making this matchlock mainly depends on how long it takes to build the barrel.

If it is made from fine iron that has been refined for more than ten times and is made by a skilled blacksmith, a qualified gun barrel can be made in five days.

It's at least twice as fast as when we made matchlock guns for the government! "

Kou Gensheng habitually referred to the government in his speech, completely unaware that his son Kou Silang was winking wildly - if the enemy of the rebel army is the government, then what is the rebel army?
The rebels now call them Ming Army and Ming Ting, okay?
Liu Sheng didn't care.

He was thinking about whether he could improve the quality of the musket and further improve the production efficiency if he switched to a hydraulic drilling machine and drilled the gun barrel directly.

As far as he knew, at this time, ordinary craftsmen used pig iron to make blunderbuss, which often took a month - most of the time was spent hammering the iron.

It only takes ten days for a skilled blacksmith to make a gun barrel using high-quality Fujian iron.

Therefore, directly using fine iron of more than ten refinements to make the barrel can save more time.Now that the rebels have sufficient reserves of refined iron (18 kilograms were confiscated), it's not bad.

When the fine iron reserves are gone in the future, the time for hammering the fine iron will still have to be taken into account.

Since there is no shortage of refined iron at present, he can let the craftsmen free their hands and build a batch of muskets first.

Whether it is a matchlock gun or a flintlock gun depends on the test data of the iron workshop.

After Liu Sheng put down his matchlock gun, he picked up the flintlock gun next to him.

The flintlock gun is an improvement on the matchlock gun.

At first, it was a gun mechanism that used a faucet clamped with a match rope to ignite. It was changed to a spring wheel and flint ignition. The principle is similar to that of a grinding wheel lighter, so it is called a flintlock gun.

However, the structure of the spring wheel gun is too complex, difficult to manufacture, and prone to malfunction, and the ignition rate is not as high as that of a matchlock.

The advantage is that it is much less affected than a matchlock gun on rainy days, and has a high chance of being fired or even used normally.

Later, when smelting technology improved and more reliable leaf springs appeared, the flintlock gun evolved into version 2.0.

That is to say, the fire sickle can be installed directly on the medicine pool and the impact flintlock gun relies on the impact of the spring to fire.

Previously, Liu Sheng used his own handmade machine tools and steel pipes in his villa to make thirty flintlock guns by hand, which were basically leaf springs.

The problem is that he doesn't have many leaf springs in stock - before he stocked up on supplies, he purchased them based on personal needs. He had many things, but not much.

Considering that leaf springs would be needed in other places in the future, Liu Sheng was certainly not willing to waste too much on making flintlock guns.

Therefore, there are two important projects for the ironworks to test this time: one is to try to create a leaf spring suitable for making a bolt action, and the other is to test the time required to produce a spring wheel action flintlock gun.

The leaf spring is said to have appeared as early as the Roman era, and the exact written record is from France in the seventeenth century.

But it is only used on carriages as shock-absorbing accessories.

The leaf springs used in the bolts were much smaller than those used in the carriages and were not so easy to make.

When Liu Sheng was observing and debugging the flintlock gun, Kou Gensheng introduced: "This flintlock gun uses what the leader said is a leaf spring impact fire.

However, leaf springs are difficult to make. Master Luo Sanzong, who is the most skilled in the iron workshop today, also needs three or four days of work to create a small leaf spring. "

To reduce the leaf spring, there are material issues involved.In other words, there must be a breakthrough in the smelting process.

In the absence of an industrial foundation, even if Liu Sheng had some relevant information, he could only ask the old blacksmith to waste time to make a small amount of fine steel suitable for the bolt spring.

Luo Sanzong is the most skilled among the seven master-level blacksmiths from Wuyang Ordnance Bureau.

Other craftsmen even agreed that Luo Sanzong's skills were close to the master craftsman standards set by Liu Sheng.

If it takes Luo Sanzong three or four days to make a bolt spring, other blacksmiths may need four to five days, or even longer.

Liu Sheng asked: "According to Master Kou, making a leaf spring flintlock gun takes twice as long as a matchlock gun?"

"Yeah~, more than that." Kou Gensheng shook his head, "The leaf-spring gun is more delicate, and it takes more time to build and assemble. Just this flintlock gun takes about [-] days of work."

Man-hours are not time-consuming.

Because while one blacksmith is making the barrel, another blacksmith can make the leaf spring, and at the same time, someone can use the already made barrel, leaf spring, etc. to assemble the flintlock gun.

Therefore, with sufficient manpower and refined iron of more than ten refinements, it theoretically only takes five days to make a flintlock gun.

Unfortunately, no matter how many craftsmen there are, the number of people is always the same, so the total output depends on the total number of man-hours spent in each manufacturing process.

Liu Sheng put down the flintlock gun and asked again: "How long does it take to build a spring gun?"

Kou Gensheng said: "The quality requirements for spring-making wheels are far lower than those for leaf springs. A skilled blacksmith can make one in a day or two."

"In other words, it only takes a day or two more to make a spring-loaded flintlock than a matchlock?"

"If we all use fine iron as the raw material, that's it; if we use pig iron, I'm afraid it will take more than three days."

After comprehensive consideration, Liu Sheng found it really difficult to make a decision.

So another key question was asked.

"Can the spring wheel or leaf spring bolt be modified after the matchlock is built?"

"If you pay attention when making the barrel, it should be possible."

After hearing this, Liu Sheng made a decision in his heart.

That is, the standing army is first equipped with matchlock guns, and each battalion is scheduled to have one hundred to three hundred guns - that is, all battalions are equipped with one hundred guns first, and then the equipment rate is increased in batches.

It can be up to half. After all, the probability of cold weapons engaging in today's battles is very high.

As for the bayonet, Liu Sheng planned to wait until all the troops were equipped with flintlock rifles before considering it. At this stage, it is more convenient to equip the musketeers with waist knives or spears.

In addition, equip the Guards with flintlock muskets.

The Huben camp has a reservation of [-] rods, and the Shengjie camp has a reservation of [-] rods.

The Cavalry Battalion ordered three hundred lances - also flintlock rifles, but with short and thick barrels, making them easier to carry on horseback and even shoot on horseback (that is, Western carbines).

Of course, the accuracy of shooting from a horse is very low, and you must be close enough to the enemy.Both riders and horses require special training.

Before the training is mature, they can only be used as dragoons, that is, mounted musketeers.

However, in order to truly unleash the power of the musketeers, in addition to adequate training, it is necessary to develop a lance that is more convenient for the rider to use but is powerful.

After learning about the production experimental data of matchlock guns and flintlock guns, Liu Sheng discussed the regulations of the rebel armor with the craftsmen in the iron workshop...
　First more.

　　Thanks to [a passer-by] for the 100 starting coin reward!
　　
　
(End of this chapter)