Chapter 690: Or let's make artillery (please vote and subscribe)
Commander Xin and his two most trusted elders planned to catch Niuwei. Niuwei himself didn't know about this. He was even thinking about when Commander Xin would accept Luo Chong's invitation to go to the Han tribe. This guy has been overwhelmed by the idea of quick success and instant benefits. He wants to prove his worth in front of Luo Chong.
On the Han tribe side, Luo Chong also encountered some problems. It was not very serious, but not small, because suddenly someone sent a message that the iron in the Han tribe was not enough.
How could there be so much iron that it could not be used up? This matter was simply too ridiculous. Luo Chong could only feel how weak the Han tribe was. After all, in the era of such development in the previous life, the world's first in annual steel production never said that it would not be used up.
The reason was not because the iron smelting industry in the Han tribe was so developed, but because the population was too small. There were a total of more than 100,000 people. Even if everyone wore iron armor, how much iron could be used?
So the fact that the iron could not be used up could only prove that the Han tribe had few people, not how powerful the Han tribe was.
So should we continue to produce now? If not, what will the people of Xingang County do? Dongxin County's coal can continue to be mined, and it doesn't matter if the coal mines can store more. Moreover, even if Xingang County no longer makes steel, Kaiyuan County on the grassland will still be a large coal user.
The grassland is white in winter. There are few trees to begin with, and they can't provide enough fuel. The herders pick up cow dung and dry it as fuel because it contains grass clippings.
But now it's different. After the Han tribe built a city on the grassland, they naturally had to consider the issue of fuel. Kaiyuan County is located on the lakeside, and it is most convenient to transport coal by large ships. Now is also the season with the most coal stored.
In addition, Dongxin County is also located on the shore of the Liuyang River. Even if they all stop mining coal, they can still go to farm.
But Xingang County is different. Xingang County is full of mines, the ground is full of heavy metals, and there is a salt lake. The surrounding area is also grassland and hilly landforms. There is not even a forest, and fresh water is far away. They really can't grow food there. If they don't mine and smelt iron, the people of the whole county will have nothing to do.
So iron smelting can't stop. Since it can't be used up now, we should find a way to find more things to do. Except for the necessary reserve resources, everything else can be used as much as possible.
Things that use more steel. Luo Chong walked around the study and found that there is really nothing that can be done now. Laying a railway will definitely use a lot of iron, but without a rolling mill, it is impossible to make such a long railroad. It is a fantasy to rely on manual hammering.
Steel bars are also a good thing, a powerful tool for infrastructure, and can be used in building houses, paving roads, and repairing bridges, but mass production of that thing also requires a rolling mill. As for the one that was placed on the lighthouse as a lightning rod last time, it was really hammered by hand.
Seamless steel pipes also have a great role. Not to mention making guns and cannons, they are also needed to make bicycles and tricycles. After all, most of those things are welded with steel pipes, but steel pipes must be mass-produced with rolling mills.
In this way, the situation is very embarrassing. There are many things needed, but there is no rolling mill to make them. Isn't this nonsense?
Rolling mills are actually not difficult. They are just some large steel machines, but they must have power to use, otherwise they are just a piece of iron that can only rust.
In other words, the current situation is that the Han tribe needs an artificial power machine to solve the problem of excess steel production capacity. This problem is very simple. With the current conditions of the Han tribe, there are coal and iron, and it is enough to make a steam engine directly, but that thing is not so easy to make.
The core technology of the steam engine is the four important components of the cylinder, piston, bearing, and valve, almost every one of which is impossible for the Han tribe to do now.
Take the cylinder for example. That thing needs to fit tightly with the piston, be strong, and not leak. The reason why the West made this thing was because their technology in this area was relatively mature.
At that time, the West was at the end of the Age of Discovery. The cannon casting technology and boring machine technology had reached the peak of mankind at that time. The cannon and the cylinder of the steam engine have the same purpose. They all require strong, durable, and no leakage. The cylinder (barrel) must be tightly combined with the piston (cannonball).
So, some people used the method of making cannons to make the most primitive Newcomen steam engine. If the Han tribe wanted to make a steam engine, did they have to develop cannons first?
This seems to be a good idea, because no matter whether the steam engine can be made or not, at least these cannons alone can consume a lot of iron. After all, cannons not only need a gun body, but also a lot of iron balls and projectiles. A cannon weighs thousands of pounds. If you make more, won’t the iron be used up?
Having made up his mind, Luo Chong immediately began to design and make cannons. This thing is actually quite useful. It can not only be used in field battles, but also placed on city walls to defend the city, or placed on ships as naval guns. Let's not talk about whether it can be fired accurately or not. As long as it can explode loudly, it can scare the enemy away in this era. Of course
, it would be even better if it can be fired. Firing a cannon is an art, and casting a cannon is a technology. If you want to cast a high-quality and easy-to-use cannon, the technology is even more difficult. The first thing is to select the material.
Take the muzzle-loading smoothbore cannon as an example. The steel cannon is the first, followed by the bronze cannon, and the third cannon is the iron cannon. The steel cannon is first of all strong enough, and the weight is relatively light, and the durability is the best; the bronze cannon is actually not bad, and the most famous one may be the Napoleon cannon. The biggest advantage of the bronze cannon is that it is resistant to high temperatures, so it is very durable, ductile, and not easy to explode, but the disadvantages are also obvious, because bronze is much heavier than steel of the same volume, and the price of bronze is too expensive.
As for the remaining iron, there is no need to consider it. Not only is it easy to explode, but it is also very heavy. If you have the ability to make steel, iron is not worth considering.
Besides, the main purpose of casting the cannon this time is not because the Han tribe lacks military firepower, but because there is too much iron and nowhere to use it, so the primary purpose is to consume steel. In this case, bronze is even more useless. Wouldn't it be better to use it to make money?
After selecting the material, the next step is the use. The cannons of the Han tribe are mainly used for defense. It is still too early to make field cannons for the time being, and there are no field battles for the Han tribe to fight, so Luo Chong decided to design a dual-purpose cannon for ships and cities, which also saves the trouble of too many styles and difficulties in supply.
To put it bluntly
, it is a unified caliber. The naval guns on the ship are actually not very useful, because the Han tribe does not even have an enemy with a large ship now, so the naval guns may only be used when attacking land, so a cannon with a long range and great power has become the first choice of the Han tribe.
Following the theory that the longer the barrel, the longer the range, Luo Chong simply set the gun length to two meters to save trouble. The caliber was made according to the standard 12-pound gun, which was neither too big nor too small, just enough.
The caliber of a 12-pound cannon is 121 mm, which is not very small. With a two-meter-long barrel, if the charge is doubled, the firing angle is five degrees, and the effective range can reach 1,800 meters. If the charge is 1.5 times, the firing angle is ten degrees, and the range can reach more than two thousand meters. This is already the limit of the muzzle-loading smoothbore cannon. The Napoleon cannon in the previous life was not so large.
Because the materials of the Han tribe are relatively developed, Luo Chong can directly use cast steel to build cannons. Coupled with his advanced understanding of weapons, he can basically do it in one step.
First draw the design on paper. The thin front and thick back shape is very consistent with the characteristics of gunpowder combustion, because the breech of the cannon always bears the greatest pressure. The more fully it burns, the smaller the chamber pressure in the rear of the shell movement, so the thickness of the barrel at the muzzle is relatively thin.
There are two symmetrical cylindrical gun ears in the middle of the gun body, which are convenient for combining with the gun carriage and adjusting the elevation angle. There is a fire door above the breech of the gun, on which a flintlock ignition device can be installed, which can greatly reduce the time error between aiming and firing, and the hit rate will be higher.
There is also a spherical gun ball at the end of the gun, which is first convenient for carrying and second for adjusting the angle of the gun body, which is also indispensable.
After drawing the drawings, Luo Chong asked someone to send the drawings to the wood processing factory in Hanyang City and asked them to make a proportional model with wood first, which would also be convenient for Xingang County to make molds.
The way to cast the gun is of course the iron mold casting method, because this can be said to be the most advanced method of casting guns before there were large-scale rolling mills and mechanical forging hammers. There is no other method. The iron mold casting method is also the iron mold casting method, which has many advantages. First of all, it has high production efficiency, and then the quality is better. It can directly surpass the two methods of casting guns by eighteen streets.
At first, clay molds (molds made of clay) were used to cast cannons. However, clay molds can only be used once and need to be destroyed and remade. The material is not expensive, but it wastes time. The molds must be plasticized with wet clay first, and then dried in the shade for more than three months before they can be used. It is very inefficient.
If it is used before it is completely dry, when casting the cannon, the high-temperature molten iron will cause the water in the clay mold to evaporate quickly, and then form water vapor that mixes with the molten iron, and finally form a large number of dense bubbles in the gun body. This is the so-called honeycomb gun body, which will explode after a few shots.
Iron molds do not have these disadvantages. The mold can be cast directly with pig iron, so there is no need to worry about the problem of bubbles. Then the iron mold is made into sections, and each section is fixed with a clip, which can be easily disassembled and quickly reused.
However, this is still not the ultimate in cannon casting technology. The best cannon casting technology, using iron molds can only be considered half of the success, and the other half of the finishing touch is called "core cooling".
There are a series of very important processes in using steel to make tools, which are called quenching and tempering, and casting cannons is no exception.
How should cast steel cannons be quenched? Throw it directly into water or oil? That's impossible. The
quenching method of cannons should be carried out from the inside out, cooling down layer by layer from the barrel to the outer wall, which is the so-called core cooling technology.
Combined with iron mold casting, the process is roughly like this. First, make a hollow core mold with a tube, and then put a layer of body mold on the outside. After the molten steel is cast, wait for it to cool naturally to a red-hot state, and then start to pour cold water into the tube of the core mold to cool down the barrel first.
As we all know, most objects have the characteristics of thermal expansion and contraction, and steel is no exception. Therefore, after the inner bore of the cannon is cooled first, the barrel will quickly cool down and shrink from the inside to the outside, tightening.
Therefore, cannons cast with this core cooling process will naturally produce an inward tightening stress, and the entire barrel is tightly compressed and held tightly inside the barrel, which is more effective than adding a number of iron hoops directly to the outside.
Moreover, because the inner wall of the cannon is cooled first, the hardness of the barrel will increase after quenching, and the strength of the gun body will gradually increase from the outside to the inside. In this way, the durability of the hardened barrel can also increase linearly.
Of course, this is not the end. The necessary grinding process is still necessary, but the grinding of cast steel cannons is also a relatively difficult process without machine tools and grinding wheels.
According to Luo Chong's understanding of this aspect, the external grinding method of cast cannons is generally to brush it with a brush when it is just cast, while the cannon is still in a red-hot state and the hardness is not so high. As for the barrel, it can only be polished with a boring machine, otherwise there is no way.
However, this is not very difficult for the Han tribe. Now without a steam engine, hydraulic or pneumatic boring machines can be used to do this grinding work. It is said that the cylinder of the world's first Newcomen steam engine was drilled out with this hydraulic boring machine specially used for grinding the barrel.
So the development of artillery is for the steam engine.
We must first make technical preparations. When everything is ready, the steam engine will naturally come out.
After making these plans, Luo Chong is also looking forward to the news from Takeshima. He doesn't know whether Niuwei's idea will work. There is also the plan of the Han tribe to promote currency in Takeshima. Has it started now and is it going smoothly?
Looking at the two children playing with building blocks in the living room, Luo Chong's thoughts began to diverge, thinking about all sorts of things. Where will the Han tribe go in the future? His efforts still have to rely on these two little guys to pass on. The Han tribe cannot fall, and she must go on tenaciously.
However, Luo Chong is not very worried that the Han tribe will end up splitting in the future. As long as he is still alive, no one will rebel under his pressure. Then, as long as he can make a transportation artifact like a train in his lifetime, he will not have to worry about the Han tribe splitting.
In fact, whether a country is stable depends to a large extent on its transportation capacity. If the central government of the Han tribe has the ability to mobilize hundreds of thousands of troops to reach any corner of the country within 24 hours, then talking about rebellion is just a joke.
Once a few military trains are out, who dares to rebel.
(End of this chapter)
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