In the late Qing Dynasty, a 120mm semi-rapid-fire cannon produced by the Jiangnan Arsenal cost around 11,000 taels of silver.
At the same time, the price of the 120mm semi-rapid-fire gun produced by the German Krupp factory was only 9,000 taels.
If we only consider the cost, the actual cost may not exceed 1,000 taels.
After all, the selling price of 9,000 taels not only includes the manufacturing cost, but also the shipping cost and the profit earned by the German manufacturer.
It is normal for the price to increase seven or eight times when sold from Germany to the Qing Dynasty thousands of miles away.
Then why is it that the actual cost of a cannon that may not exceed 1,000 taels is more than 10 times the cost when produced in our country?
The reasons are too complicated.
The three most important points are: lack of technology, lack of industrial system, and rampant corruption.
The so-called Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau was plagued by serious corruption, and was proficient in all kinds of bribery. When it came to making guns and cannons, they lacked technology, raw materials, and even fewer talented people.
Even imitation requires hiring foreign technicians, and all the raw materials required, such as steel, steel bullets, steel pipes, etc., have to be imported.
In this case, it is no wonder that Li Hongzhang lamented that it is better to buy than to make.
After all, the same guns and cannons, the German Krupp cannons and American Remington rifles imitated by the Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau, are not only more expensive than imported ones, but also of far inferior quality.
At present, the artillery technology of the Song Dynasty has made great progress.
At the beginning, copper cannons were mainly manufactured. Copper cannons were safe but expensive. The cost of a copper cannon was more than two or three times that of an iron cannon.
Iron cannons are cheap, costing only about a hundred or less than two hundred strings of coins, but their safety is greatly reduced.
This situation did not change significantly until the establishment of Wuan Iron and Steel Plant, which completed the technological transformation from wrought iron to steel through new steel technology.
After that, all cannons produced in the Song Dynasty became steel cannons.
At the beginning, steel cannons were even more expensive than copper cannons, so the army had to use desulfurized wrought iron cannons as a temporary solution.
After all, steel production was too low at the time and it was impossible to supply too much.
After the Qingli Year, the production capacity of Wuan Iron and Steel Plant was increased, and the number of steel cannons increased rapidly. They played a brilliant role in the subsequent wars to defeat Liao and destroy Western Xia.
Basically, steel guns and artillery are enough to cover the entire army.
In recent years, the steel technology of the Song Dynasty has been continuously improving, the performance and quality of steel have been getting better and better, and even some alloy steels have appeared.
Anyway, the School of Chemistry has always had sufficient funding, so they dare to add all kinds of alloying elements into the molten steel.
Thanks to the national exhaustive method, high-strength steels such as chromium steel and nickel steel also appeared in the past two years and were mass-produced at the Wuan Iron and Steel Plant. They have long been used in armaments.
Also appearing at the same time was nitrocellulose.
Nitrocellulose is produced by pouring a mixture of sulfuric acid and nitric acid solutions onto cotton. The process is not complicated and only requires the ability to purify sulfuric acid and nitric acid.
Not to mention that sulfuric acid and nitric acid had been discovered in ancient times. When Zhao Zhen found the answer in , he asked the School of Chemistry to conduct research in this direction.
The School of Chemistry naturally couldn't have lived off the fat of the land these years, as they had long ago easily completed the production of sulfuric acid and nitric acid through dry distillation of gallstones and saltpeter.
This operation was achieved by the alchemist Gu Gangzi in the Tang Dynasty. The School of Chemistry does not even need to do its own research. The answer can be found by flipping through Gu Gangzi's "The Yellow Emperor's Nine Cauldrons Magic Pill Sutra".
It just so happened that the Song Dynasty now had cotton, so the Song Dynasty had smokeless gunpowder from then on.
The only problem is that this thing is too dangerous. It will spontaneously combust and explode when the temperature exceeds 40 degrees. If it replaces black gunpowder, although it can take the Song Dynasty's guns and artillery to the next level, it will kill one thousand enemies but lose eight hundred of its own.
If you put this thing in a bullet, the bullet will turn into a small grenade, which will explode when it encounters high temperatures or is exposed to the sun.
So in recent years, we have been studying how to make it stable.
Two years ago, a doctor from the School of Chemistry mixed it with purified alcohol, stirred it with gelatin to turn it into a jelly, dried it and sliced it. Since then, smokeless gunpowder has officially entered the historical stage.
Therefore, the artillery of the Song Dynasty has been updated again, and the technology is probably at the level of the late 19th century, which is the most advanced artillery technology at that time.
This brings up another historical problem.
That is, from the first year of Bao to the tenth year of Qingli, the Song Dynasty produced a lot of black powder grenades, flintlock rifles, cannons, field guns and other firearms.
And there are quite a few of them.
Taking cannons as an example, the Song Dynasty initially formed a firearms army of 80,000 people, with each army having 5,000 people, for a total of 16 armies. Each army had 30 wheel-drawn cannons, and the 16th army had 480 cannons.
Later, the entire army carried out firearms reform, and the number of cannons increased rapidly. The number of thousand-jin-class cannons in the hands of the 600,000 regular troops of the Song Dynasty alone exceeded 3,600.
Including the artillery pieces defending cities in various places, the total number is about 5,000, far exceeding the level of less than 2,000 cannons during the Napoleonic era.
The remaining small field artillery exceeded 10,000 pieces, grenades numbered millions, and firearms numbered nearly one million. After the technological upgrade, the Song Dynasty once again faced a serious problem of overspending on military equipment.
This is mainly due to Zhao Zhen’s fear of insufficient firepower.
Zhao Jun did not expect that the technology would upgrade so quickly. In just ten years, the Song Dynasty was about to get rid of black gunpowder and start moving towards the technological level of chemical gunpowder.
And better steel has also emerged.
So the problem of eliminating cold weapons and switching to hot weapons occurred again.
At that time, Zhao Jun's solution was to sell the cold weapons in stock to neighboring countries, making a huge fortune from the war.
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