Dragon's Origin

Chapter 331: From Shotgun to Cannon (Part 2)

Actually, during the crafting process, almost all the components had been simply assembled and tested with other parts to ensure dimensional accuracy. However, due to differences in completion times, they hadn't been fully assembled into a finished product.

But completing this final assembly step wasn't easy. Just stringing the double crossbow arms required Wang Sheng to use a fixed workbench built with leverage principles, and then Wang Sheng, the strongman, had to operate it while the grandmaster responsible for winding the string personally attached it.

The bowstring was made of an extremely fine metal wire intertwined and woven with some kind of spider silk and sinew from a certain type of demon beast. After being treated with the grandmaster's potion, its tensile strength was extremely high. Just as Tie Lao said, it could withstand even the greatest force from the crossbow arms.

With the most strenuous step completed, the rest was much easier. The parts were assembled one by one, fixed in place, and the process proceeded methodically.

Because of the tens of thousands of pounds of force in the crossbow arms, all the parts needed to be fixed extremely strongly and stably. In the end, the entire heavy sniper crossbow weighed dozens, almost a hundred, pounds. If it were Wang Sheng from Earth, he definitely wouldn't even be able to lift it, but fortunately, he didn't have to worry about that now.

Pulling the string up with the stringing device, Wang Sheng carefully observed the path of the bowstring. When the bowstring smoothly followed the grooves on both sides of the barrel from beginning to end, a smile appeared on Wang Sheng's face. From this point alone, it completely met Wang Sheng's design requirements.

Wang Sheng held up the heavy sniper crossbow to test the feel. Fortunately, other than being a bit heavy, the feeling was very good. However, the grandmasters beside him were speechless at the eight-character bracket under the heavy sniper crossbow. Since when did crossbows need a bracket?

Wang Sheng ignored the gazes of the masters. None of them realized how terrifying the range of this heavy sniper crossbow was. To hit a target from miles away, without adding a bracket to increase stability, relying solely on holding it by hand would reduce the accuracy by an order of magnitude.

Since there were no arrows loaded, Wang Sheng aimed the crossbow in an uninhabited direction and pulled the trigger. The trigger force was moderate, definitely a master-level product.

With a crack, a sound like the exploding firecrackers Wang Sheng was familiar with on Earth rang out. The bowstring almost instantly snapped back to its original position, vibrating on its own. Throughout the entire process, the bowstring didn't touch the barrel at all, vibrating entirely in the middle of the groove. It was indeed a grandmaster's work, balanced without a single deviation.

That cracking sound was the sound of breaking the sound barrier. Because it was just a bowstring, the sound was like a cracking whip, only slightly louder. But compared to the gunshots of a sniper rifle that could echo through the valley, it was much quieter.

A small sound meant excellent concealment. What was especially outstanding was that there was no gunshot, no muzzle flash or smoke, and no need for a muzzle brake, reducing the possibility of being discovered to a minimum. If the accuracy and power were as Wang Sheng expected, then this heavy sniper crossbow would be the perfect weapon for a sniper.

There was no arrow testing because although the Marquis's residence was large, it was still far from the range of the heavy sniper crossbow. However, Wang Sheng had prepared in advance. Three days prior, he had already made preparations with the Old Lord Temple to set aside an area of dozens of miles in the Old Lord Temple's private property as a shooting range, making a batch of targets to prepare for testing.

That day, a group of people, escorted by the guards of the Marquis's residence, went to the Old Lord Temple in the suburbs of the capital. In fact, those guards were not needed at all. Old Lord Ling Xu was in the team, who could attack? But since he was a Marquis, he had to have the bearing of a Marquis.

After resting for a night, the next morning, the group went straight to the shooting range under the leadership of the Grand Master. This area had been cleared several times by the people of the Old Lord Temple, and there were no idlers around.

Because the arrows had no fletching, they adopted the same design as bullets, so a magazine was made in the same shape as the M200 magazine, which could hold five arrows. Unfortunately, there was no automatic loading function. It was necessary to first use the stringing device to string the bow, and then pull a handle similar to a rifle bolt to push an arrow from below into the barrel, and then fit it to a moving buckle in front of the bowstring. This moving buckle was also made to stably propel the arrow.

For each type of arrow, hundreds of pieces with the same weight, shape, and center of gravity were made of ordinary steel for calibration and power testing. According to the targets at different distances, they were tested one by one.

What followed was tedious testing. Each time he shot, Wang Sheng had to adjust the scope and record the most suitable parameters. It was not until this time that everyone slowly began to see the power of this composite heavy sniper crossbow.

A range of three or four hundred meters was not surprising to everyone, because ordinary archers could also reach this distance, but when the distance exceeded two miles and the accuracy and power of the shot did not weaken, everyone was stunned.

Even though these grandmasters had personally crafted many powerful weapons, they had never seen a bow and crossbow with a range of more than twenty miles. Even though they had personally worked together to create this heavy sniper crossbow, seeing these unbelievable scenes, everyone still had a kind of illusory, unbelievable feeling.

As Wang Sheng expected, beyond a range of twenty miles, there was basically no accuracy to speak of. Wang Sheng shot at this shooting range for five full days. Considering both power and accuracy, he finally decided on the final shape of the arrow.

The weight of the arrow was 500 grams, about 20 times the weight of a sniper rifle bullet. The initial velocity was more than twice that of the M200, about 2,000 meters per second, the maximum range exceeded six kilometers, but the most powerful effective range was still within four kilometers.

The rifling manually pulled out by the grandmaster was definitely eye-catching. Within the effective range, after Wang Sheng carefully calibrated the scope, at a distance of four kilometers, the arrow's point of impact could be controlled within the size of a basketball. This was an accuracy that even those precision industrial products on Earth had failed to achieve, but it was created manually by this group of grandmasters in this world.

Just this point alone made Wang Sheng admire them to the point of prostration.

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The only drawbacks were that it was heavy and the recoil was much greater. But the heavy sniper crossbow itself was much heavier, which offset a lot of it. For Wang Sheng, this recoil was not a problem at all.

Another thing was the rate of fire. Because he had to manually string the bow each time, and each time he had to use Wang Sheng's own full strength to cooperate with the stringing device to complete it, the rate of fire was much slower than the M200. But thinking about the range and accuracy of four kilometers, it didn't matter if it was slower.

Most importantly, the power that Wang Sheng requested was maximized. Because of the materials treated with spiritual energy by Old Ancestor Ling Xu, it exceeded the previous expectations. After offsetting some aerodynamic imprecision, the power was increased by more than 120 times.

If it was replaced with arrows made of the armor-piercing material that Wang Sheng requested, at a distance of four kilometers, Wang Sheng could shoot through a master at least at the eighth level peak with one arrow. Compared with the original M200, it was really a transformation from a shotgun to a cannon.