Chapter 66 Artillery (5)
The inspection Liu Xingli mentioned was not to immediately drag the newly released cannon out for test firing. Instead, the Military and Police Department, as the designer, checked the shape and size of the product against the design drawings to see if it met the design standards.
Yan Chujie took out a tape measure and started to check every size of the two guns against the design drawings, including length, caliber, barrel wall thickness, and barrel depth. During the measurement process, he also checked the smoothness and smoothness of the surface of the gun body, and also marked the The flashlight scanned the inside of the barrel. Five minutes later, Yan Chujie said that the dimensional accuracy of the two cannons had fully met the design requirements, and there were no obvious flaws in their appearance.
However, the strict inspection procedures do not end here. The Ministry of Industry also brought a portable ultrasonic flaw detector to check whether there are cracks, pores and other internal defects in the two guns. This is not a fuss made by the Ministry of Industry, but Liu Xingli's initiative. Casting a cannon was a first for everyone, and Liu Xingli was not completely sure about it. If there were any mistakes, the consequences could become very serious. Of course, if the quality of these two cannons meets the standard, then today's cannon casting process will be carried out as a standardized procedure, and there will no longer be such troublesome detailed inspections when casting cannons in the future.
While people from the Ministry of Industry were inspecting it, Yan Chujie asked Liu Xingli: "I just touched the barrel with my hand. It feels flat, but it's not smooth yet. Should I use a boring machine to process the barrel again?"
Liu Xingli shook his head and said: "The smoothbore cannon's bore does not need to be processed so carefully. After finalization, we will use the central cooling casting method. The smoothness of the cannon bore will be better than it is now. It will not be too late to finish the bore after installing the breech-loading rifled cannon. Having said that, there is nothing we can do about it now. Our horizontal boring machine is still on board the New World, and we don’t know when it will be put to use.”
Yan Chujie nodded when he heard this, turned to Bai Kesi and said: "Mr. Bai, your machine tools have been installed on the ship but have not been unloaded. When will they be ready for use?"
There was a small metal processing factory before Baix crossed over, so almost all the processing equipment of the Executive Committee was organized by him. When Bai Kesi heard Yan Chujie's question, his expression was also very helpless: "The ship can be unloaded at any time, but the question is where to put it? Before installing machine tools, the floor of the factory building must be hardened. Now almost all the people in the Ministry of Construction Everyone is busy with the hydropower station, and the cement production capacity is not enough. No one can help me build the factory! Besides, even if the machine tools are installed, there is not enough power and electricity available now. I think the fastest I will have to wait for the hydropower station to be put into operation. Only later.”
Several technical backbones from the Ministry of Construction did not come here today. Among those present, only Tao Donglai still had a temporary job in the Ministry of Construction, so the job of explaining for the Ministry of Construction fell on him: "This hydropower station project There is no way to hurry up. Although the labor force is sufficient now, the cement and concrete have to wait for them to dry out. There is no point in rushing.”
Yan Chujie let out a long sigh and said: "It was so lively last night and we decided to mount a breech-loading cannon. I went back after the meeting and was so excited that I couldn't sleep. In the end, I had to use this clumsy old-fashioned artillery."
Tao Donglai patted him on the shoulder and comforted him: "Okay, these old-fashioned cannons were not made in vain. They will be used to train artillerymen in the future and practice basic techniques and tactics. It is good to use them. When the artillery is replaced, they can be sold to the Ming Dynasty Military Department." .”
The two cannons themselves were not large in size. People from the Ministry of Industry quickly completed the flaw detection and found nothing unusual. At this point, the on-site acceptance stage of the artillery has come to an end, and the next step is to take it to the field for test firing.
In order to avoid causing unnecessary disturbances, the preset shooting range of the Military and Police Department was not near Tiandu's No. 2 Base, but was placed on the large sandbank at the mouth of the Tiandu River to the east of Victory Port. After the last pirate attack, Yan Chujie led a team to that place to hunt down the escaped pirates. He found that the terrain was flat and uninhabited. The east side was full of mountains, which was very suitable for setting up a shooting range. So at his suggestion, the Military and Police Department used this place as a recent artillery and gun test firing range.
The two guns were finally put on the scale before leaving the factory. They were both around 220 kilograms, with a weight difference of less than 200 grams. Compared with the weight of cannons of the same caliber in this era, which often differed by several kilograms or even dozens of kilograms, the metallurgical workshop These newbies can already be called masters.
A few local workers in the metallurgical workshop carried two cannons and more than 30 shells to the dock on trolleys and loaded them onto the ship. The irrelevant people dispersed. Basically, the only people left to go to the shooting range next were the military police. Department and several people from chemical engineering groups. The reason why there were people from the chemical engineering team was because they had to go to the site to see how effective the gunpowder was. The chemical engineering team was slightly luckier than the people in the metallurgical workshop. They had been notified by the Military and Police Department a few days ago to trial-produce artillery to fire gunpowder. Fifty kilograms of granular black powder were handed over as scheduled before the shooting, and for ease of use, they were packed into 250-gram packages.
Judging from the technological level of this era, silk is undoubtedly the most suitable material for artillery propellant packs. However, at present, Chuanchuangzhong does not have a large number of channels for importing silk. It is impossible to use this expensive commodity to make powder packs, so it can only Use rough paper instead for now. But even this is already at the internationally advanced level. You must know that the most powerful gunners in the Ming Dynasty only rely on personal experience to roughly judge how many kilograms or taels of powder are needed before launching, but do not have the concept of quantitatively setting the gunpowder and making standardized powder bags.
Of course, the power of the products produced by the chemical engineering team are still calculation data on paper for the time being, and the real effects can only be reflected in actual launches. But at least in the two directions of gunpowder granulation and customization, the chemical engineering team is already far ahead of its peers in this era.
In addition to saving gunpowder, saving time and increasing the firing speed of artillery on the battlefield, the use of standardized fixed gunpowder also has two very important functions.
The first is to determine the optimal charge for the gun. The so-called ideal charge is when all the gunpowder in the barrel is burned, just enough to push the shell out of the muzzle. If there is too much charge and the gunpowder has not been fully burned and the shell has left the chamber, part of the gunpowder is actually wasted. If the charge is too small and the shell is still in the bore when the gunpowder is burned out, the friction between the shell and the bore will reduce the muzzle velocity.
Considering that the gravitational influence exerted on the artillery shell by different firing angles of the artillery will change, this ideal charge amount is not static, so it is even more necessary to customize the powder package to simplify the operation process of artillery firing.
The second function is that with the ideal charge, a highly practical firing table can be developed, that is, the relationship between shooting angle, charge and range. In actual combat, gunners can effectively hit targets at a certain distance by directly referring to the artillery firing table and adjusting the shooting angle and charge amount. Custom-loaded gunpowder can be said to be born for this artillery tactic. With this tactic, gunners no longer need to rely on experience to try their luck when firing. All they have to do is determine the range of fire, and then bombard the target according to the firing table. The real lethality of the artillery on the battlefield will also be greatly enhanced.
This method of calculating the range and maximizing the performance of artillery by adjusting the amount of gunpowder has actually appeared in Europe as early as the 16th century. European gunsmiths would even attach a gun to the cannons shipped from the factory specifically to measure the amount of gunpowder. scale. In the late Ming Dynasty, when the Portuguese sold artillery to China, they also exported their artillery tactics and sent some artillery instructors to the Ming Dynasty army to teach this relatively advanced combat concept. However, the gunners who mastered this technology immediately regarded it as a unique secret skill to save their jobs. As a result, this "advanced technology" failed to spread widely among the artillery troops.
Along with the artillery arrived at the shooting range, there was also a gun mount sent from the wood workshop. Because the size of the artillery was determined at midnight last night, the woodworking shop, which has been busy with production recently, only came out with one gun mount. However, the military and police department was very satisfied with the sturdiness of this gun mount. Its weight alone reached nearly two hundred kilograms, and four solid wood wheels were installed underneath for easy movement. Cai Hongzhan was even more confident that if the gun mount fell apart during the test firing, he would immediately resign from his current position as carpentry foreman. Of course, everyone didn't take his vow to heart. He was just an old carpenter in the Chuan Dynasty. How could he be fired and find someone else to take charge of the carpentry workshop?
In order to measure the range and accuracy of the artillery, people from the Military and Police Department came here early in the morning to set up homemade targets at different distances. From 300 meters to 1,000 meters away, there is a half-meter-high and three-meter-long mound every 100 meters as a target and distance mark. The mound is marked with white lime, which can be clearly seen from a distance. Behind the artillery installation position, a small reverse slope was specially piled with soil so that the gun mount could reset itself after the artillery was fired.
A semi-encircled U-shaped trench was dug behind and to the side of the artillery erection position. This was for safety reasons, allowing observers to enter the trench during artillery test firings and effectively shield their bodies.
Seeing that everything was almost ready, Tao Donglai signaled to Yan Chujie to start the artillery test firing. The gunners responsible for test-firing the artillery today, in addition to Yan Chujie who personally went into battle, were Wang Tom, Qiao Zhiya and Morgan who had experience in firing front-loaded artillery.
(End of chapter)