With a general plan in place, the next step is to develop a power system to trigger the arrows.
I'm pretty sure there should be bamboo branches here too, I just haven't found them yet.
These small, short arrows essentially have two power options: one is to store energy through elastic potential energy by the elastic deformation of the material.
The advantages of elastic potential energy include simple and reliable structure, low maintenance difficulty, and wide availability of materials.
However, there are some drawbacks. Because they are affected by elasticity, in order to achieve reliable performance, the weapons made will inevitably occupy a larger area, which will reduce their portability.
Let's take the crossbow and the blowgun as examples. Regardless of power, the blowgun is much more portable than the crossbow.
Another option is the pneumatic compression potential energy, which is the most popular method in modern times and works exactly the same way as a blowgun.
This solution has many advantages. Because it is a pneumatic compression structure, the internal components can be compressed and simplified to a very small area.
This means that the resulting weapons will have high portability and mobility; let's take the crossbow as an example again.
The simplest example is the pistol, which can be worn on the waist, and smaller models can even be put in a pocket, something that crossbows can only dream of.
However, every advantage has its disadvantages. Although the aerodynamic compression potential energy scheme is good, it has high requirements for materials, structure, and airtightness.
It is much more troublesome to maintain than conventional weapons, but it has one major advantage that neither cold weapons nor firearms have, and in fact, it has all the advantages of both.
The first advantage of aerodynamic potential energy is its strong concealment. Like weapons such as bows and crossbows, they make very little noise when fired, so they are not likely to startle other animals. Therefore, guns designed with this structure are mostly used for hunting.
Secondly, its near-absence of recoil gives it greater accuracy than weapons like firearms and crossbows.
Finally, the power of this structure can vary greatly, depending on how many atmospheres of aerodynamic pressure it can reach. The greater the pressure, the greater the power.
Some large-caliber air-operated firearms from abroad can even blast concrete blocks and hunt large animals such as wild boars and elk.
Based on the data from the above categories, I decided to choose the second aerodynamic potential energy scheme. This may take more time, but it is worthwhile.
After all, I put a lot of effort into making shotguns, and there's a reason why they became my life-saving tool.
Another advantage is that the manufacturing cost of bullets with a pneumatic structure is lower than that of bullets with a firearm structure.
Its manufacturing process is similar to that of a blowgun, and the material requirements are not as stringent as those for shotgun shells.
My current challenge is to solve the problem of manufacturing materials, which involves some issues related to gas connectivity. It is obviously difficult to meet the process requirements using ordinary materials such as wood.
What I'm thinking of is finding the hills to the east, and looking for the kaolin soil found along the roadside.
The texture of that kind of kaolin is relatively fine, and after being glazed and fired, the surface is even more smooth and new.
The amount of kaolin clay is not too large. That day, I carried a basket back to where I found the kaolin clay and brought back half a basket of the material.
This time, because I intend to make it as small and portable as possible, I can't make the caliber the same as that of a blowgun.
My plan is to make three parallel tee ceramic pipes with an inner diameter of 5 mm, an outer diameter of 10 mm, and a length of about 30 cm.
Now, to make these kaolins into suitable tubular structures, one thing is still missing: a solid cylindrical inner mold to maintain the verticality of the pipes.
There are many ways to make it vertical. The suspended wire method I used to make the blowgun used gravity verticality.
That method produces the most precise finished product, but it's also the most complicated. My current mid-to-close-range weapon doesn't require such high precision, so I plan to use a simpler method.
The ceramic dining tabletop I made before, out of my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I made sure all four corners were flat before steaming them to dry and shape them.
After I finished making it, I used a thin hemp rope to test the flatness of the diagonal surface. I found that no matter which corner I measured from, the taut hemp rope was always flat against the tabletop, with no gaps in the middle.
The nearly perfect plan I created back then is now proving useful.
To make a cylinder, we first need to review what the closest geometric shape to a cylinder is, that is, what is the easiest to make in daily life.
The answer is naturally a cuboid. Before making a cuboid, I still need to knead a lump of kaolin clay.
Then place it on a flat ceramic tabletop and shape it into a long strip of clay, one centimeter thick and thirty centimeters long.
Before final shaping, a thickness shaping mold needs to be made. It is best to make this mold from a relatively long tree branch, with a length of at least 68 centimeters.
First, I flattened the branches into the shape of bamboo strips. Since I didn't find any bamboo here, this was the only way I could do it for now.
The thickness of the slices should be appropriate, but the height of the wood slices must be at least one centimeter.
Then fold it at the 30-centimeter mark, and then fold it again at the 4-centimeter mark.
Repeating the process once yields a quadrilateral wooden frame mold with a length of 30 centimeters and a width of 4 centimeters. This method of determining thickness was invented by bricklayers who fired tiles.
As for measuring the thickness, you can use a small piece of toothpick-sized thin stick to make a one-centimeter mark, and then take two vertical points on the clay blank and wrap thin hemp rope around the two one-centimeter marks.
If it is a flat surface, the taut thread will be close to the surface of the clay blank, indicating that the thickness is uniform.
To ensure data accuracy, two additional measurements are usually taken at a width of four centimeters, since the flatness of the clay blank directly affects the quality of the cylinder that is made later.
Once the clay blank is flattened, the wooden frame can be removed. When removing it, open it one side at a time along the folded corners to avoid affecting the integrity of the clay blank.
After completing this step, the next step is to use a thin string to divide the 1-centimeter width into three equal parts, leaving the excess part aside for the time being.
The next step is to transform the cuboid into a cylinder.
The cross-section of the cuboid at this point is an equilateral square. Use the diagonal intersection method to find the center of the circle.
Then, using two thin wooden sticks as compasses, draw a circle at each end of the square's edge.
Now you can use a taut thin line to vertically pull off the extra corners of the square, and you will get a regular hexagonal prism, which is one step closer to a cylinder.
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