Hearing this, I already had a few ideas in mind. Perhaps the stone houses under this sinkhole have some ancient connection with the stone wall in the forbidden western land.
These are products that are beyond what we can imagine in this era, perhaps like the relationship between primitive people and the lost civilization of Atlantis.
These indigenous peoples, including the Haru, are only a part of the primitive people. The information left on the stone tablets and the Asaida stone walls are relics left by a more ancient and mysterious civilization.
I have a vague feeling that the Haru species must be hiding some secret, and that these secrets might be related to the ancient civilization's heritage.
Perhaps this is the real reason why those Haru are so ruthless and want to oppose all living beings.
However, we have very little information at hand right now, and everything is just my own wild speculation.
I sighed. It seemed like these hectic days were going to go on forever, and our situation was now extremely precarious.
I led Dante and the others to burn down someone's long-established business, and now I find it hard to imagine whether Haru will retaliate against us.
If it's retaliation, that's fine; at worst, we'll just have to fight them.
In a direct confrontation, our manpower is far inferior to theirs. However, if they dare to bring a large force to provoke us, I am confident that I can show them the power of 21st-century firearms.
Things like Claymore landmines, RPG rockets, and steel ball grenades. As long as the right raw materials are available, I can find ways to overcome and solve any other technological problems.
Equipped with a whole suite of modern firearms, even if you're physically strong, what good is nitroglycerin?
Eating mushrooms can make you go berserk? Well then I'll just give you a whole array of RPG rockets and see who's crazier!
What I'm most worried about now is that those guys are secretly launching some kind of conspiracy that we don't know about. This kind of crisis, which is subtle and insidious, is the most deadly.
Now, if I want to get more information, I can only make a trip to the Western Forbidden Lands to learn more about Haru from the Asada tribe.
However, I am now very worried about the tribe. Those Haru are now like wild beasts on the edge of a cliff. No one can predict what they will do next.
There are still many problems to be solved, and our discussions on these issues continued until very late.
The next day, I went to the armory to check, and the production of repeating crossbows was still not progressing well, with only about ten finished products produced.
But there's nothing I can do about it; I can't exactly build a dedicated crossbow manufacturing line for the tribe.
The cost of doing so is too high; it would be more practical to just develop some more powerful firearms.
The repeating crossbow is relatively sophisticated, and achieving this level of production is already quite good.
Next, I went to check out the iron smelting site. The steel production there was quite good; they could produce about one or two hundred kilograms of wrought iron a day.
What I'm most concerned about is dilute sulfuric acid, a byproduct of iron smelting. This is an essential chemical raw material for manufacturing nitroglycerin, smokeless powder, and other thermal weapons.
However, under the leadership of their chief, the tribe carried out my requests meticulously. Several large vats were placed near the iron smelting furnace.
This container contains sulfurous acid collected according to my requirements. After thorough aeration, it has been converted into dilute sulfuric acid of fairly good purity.
The concentration of this dilute sulfuric acid is higher than that of the dilute sulfuric acid I previously extracted from sulfur springs. With a little refining and concentration, a considerable amount of concentrated sulfuric acid can be obtained.
In the days to come, I plan to manufacture some more powerful, wide-area-of-effect weapons.
I don't plan to manufacture things like Claymore mines for now. The main reason is that these things are too dangerous, and if they are made and placed around the camp, they might accidentally injure our own people.
After all, these natives aren't regular soldiers and lack strict discipline. If someone were to accidentally step on a landmine they themselves laid, they'd be in deep trouble.
Therefore, I still intend to focus on proactive offensive thermal weapons, and the cost of manufacturing these thermal weapons also needs to be considered.
All the raw materials need to be made by our own hands, and this process is not easy.
Therefore, I think we should save every bit of these chemical raw materials and use them as much as possible for their main applications, such as explosives.
I have quite a bit of raw iron on hand now. I plan to produce a batch of hand grenades first. These things don't require much iron; cast iron can be used, since they're all disposable materials anyway.
The raw iron doesn't need to be refined; it just needs to be fused together and then poured into a pre-prepared mold to create the prototype of the cartridge case.
All that's left is to load it with high explosives made from nitroglycerin absorbed by clay. As for the detonator, it can be made by mixing guncotton with some dry starch to create the initiating charge.
Like sugars, starch is a high-carbon compound that produces a lot of energy during combustion, and can cause an explosion if it occurs in a confined space.
If the detonator successfully explodes, it will 100% detonate nitroglycerin, which is not very stable.
As for the detonator's casing, I plan to use thin cast iron sheets. The shockwave from the detonator's explosion will be stronger, making it safer to detonate high explosives like nitroglycerin.
I still have some nitroglycerin and guncotton on hand; all I have left are the time-delay fuses for grenades.
Delay fuses are generally made with fine black powder, which burns at a uniform and stable rate, not too fast.
I can also make gunpowder, but a lot of things would have to be redone, which would be a bit of a hassle.
So I tried to change the nitrogen content and concentration of nitric acid. After several attempts, I finally got the burning speed of the black powder I wanted.
Designing this mold really took me a lot of effort, because this thing needs to be made into a hollow can shape, and it's definitely impossible to mold such a delicate thing using ordinary casting methods.
The only thing I can think of is to use the method of casting bronze vessels to cast a mold and pour out the outer shell of the grenade.
The casting techniques for bronze ware mainly include two methods: mold casting and lost-wax casting.
The second lost-wax casting method is more suitable for casting some precision bronze vessels, but this method requires a large amount of paraffin or beeswax to be used.
We don't have any of these things on hand right now. Anyway, the precision requirements for grenades are not as high as those for shooting firearms, so I plan to settle for using the mold casting method to cast the grenade casings.
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