Zhao Hao walked into the manufacturing and research workshop and saw the floor was wiped clean and shiny. Large steel machines were neatly arranged, various tools were hung on the wall according to their categories, and countless small parts were classified and boxed and stored in cabinets. There were labels on the boxes, and if you didn't know, you would think you had entered a herbal medicine shop.

It was obvious that it had been cleaned up in advance.

"It's been a few years since my uncle came here. Everyone was so excited that they couldn't sleep and kept cleaning all night." Zhao Shizhen also felt that the people below were too much, so he smiled and said, "But we are usually not much worse than this."

"I'm not here to check the hygiene." Zhao Hao's eyes fell on the steel machines and he identified them one by one:

"Lathe, planer, drilling machine, grinder, milling machine... Oh my goodness, add a milling machine and a boring machine, and you will have a complete machine tool."

"We didn't make this." Zhao Shizhen said without taking credit: "It's the result of the research and development of the 03 Institute over the years."

03 Mechanical Research Institute, the director is Zhang Jian, the director of the research center...

Zhang Jian pushed up his black-framed glasses and said, "I am ashamed. I didn't do the primary task given by my master well. I am ashamed to do more basic work."

"Hey, Jingyang is wrong." Zhao Hao shook his head decisively and said, "Why did the development of the prime mover encounter so many difficulties? It's because our foundation is too poor. If we do these basic work well and improve the manufacturing level, it will be a natural thing to conquer the prime mover."

What Zhang Jian called his primary mission was named by the then young Zhao Hao as the "Human Instrumentality Project".

As for this name that is incomprehensible to ordinary people, Zhao Hao explained that the mission of this project is to improve the Zhang Jian steam engine into a prime mover that can provide power for all walks of life!

Once this universal prime mover is developed, it will revolutionize the human race by making their weak and powerless hands become extremely powerful, liberate the human brain to handle all problems, and bring human civilization to a new height that was unimaginable to our predecessors!

Zhang Jian and his researchers were deeply attracted by the steam age described by Zhao Hao. They vowed to devote their entire lives to completing this "Human Instrumentality Project"!

At that time, the 03 Institute was actually quite confident because the Zhang Jian steam engine had been officially put into use more than ten years ago. At first, it was only installed in various mines to pump water, so it was also called the Zhang Jian pump.

Because the water pumped by a Zhang Jian pump is equivalent to the work done by fifty horses, and it can work day and night, the cost is only one-sixth of that of using horses to pump water and one-third of that of using people to pump water. Therefore, it not only quickly became the standard equipment of major mines, but was also installed on the canal to supply water to reservoirs and sluices. In cities, it is also used to pump water for water towers to supply drinking water to residents.

At present, the number of steam engines produced, installed and maintained by Jiangnan Power Company has exceeded 500, which are spread all over Jiangnan, South China and overseas administrative regions. To some extent, it has even become a symbol of Jiangnan Group.

But Zhao Hao was far from satisfied with this first generation steam engine, as its main drawback was its low thermal efficiency, as the steam condensed on the cylinder wall, which had just been cooled by water, when it entered the cylinder, thus losing a lot of heat.

In addition, this first-generation machine only utilized the vacuum formed by the cylinder of the low-pressure boiler during condensation, but did not utilize the tension of the steam, resulting in a large energy loss. Therefore, it had to be extremely large and consume a large amount of coal to provide acceptable power.

Although this way, there is no need to worry about the danger of boiler explosion due to excessive steam pressure, it also makes Zhang Jian's steam engine unable to perform the work of a prime mover.

The current compromise is to build a water tower and a pool, use Unit-01 to pump water and store water, and drive a waterwheel to provide stable power. The coal and steel complex in Tangshan uses this method to drive the hydraulic rolling mill. But this stupid and crude method is obviously not universal, so we still have to find a way to improve Unit-01, making it smaller and more efficient, until it can be widely used.

What made them even more confident was that the North Star in the dark night, Mr. Zhao, had pointed out the direction - he told them that what they had to do was to make a sealed pressure cooker to boil water, and then use a pipe to pass steam into a piston cylinder to push the piston down. After the piston came back, open the valve and discharge the steam into the condenser. This was the principle of the new generation of steam engines.

It doesn't sound difficult at all. However, Zhang Jian and his colleagues never expected that this "Human Instrumentality Project" would be so difficult at every step, with so many problems to be solved.

For example, it took Zhang Jian's team nearly a year to figure out the valve between the steam cylinder and the condenser cylinder. However, this brought a new problem: the condenser would be filled with condensate and air, and what should we do if we couldn't discharge them? The team spent another half a year designing a vacuum pump to solve this problem.

In addition, the cylinder problem has not been solved yet. First, if the strength is not enough, long-term high temperature and high pressure work will cause explosion, leading to major accidents. Second, the machining accuracy of the cylinder is also a big problem. If the inner wall of the cylinder is not smooth or round enough, the airtight fit with the piston will be greatly affected, and serious air leakage will occur.

In order to solve these two problems, it is necessary to use higher strength steel to cast the cylinder blank, and then use a boring machine to bore out the cylinder.

The problem is that the group doesn’t have a boring machine yet. So we have to stop developing a boring machine again…

In addition, a set of precision gears connected in series and a valve system driven by connecting rods are needed to cooperate with the work of the steam engine. This requires repeated design and high-precision processing... Most of the lathes, drilling machines, grinders, and planers were born for this reason.

In short, there are countless problems, which is much more difficult than Watt improving the steam engine in another time and space.

This is normal, because at the end of the 18th century when Watt lived, Britain had already established a fairly complete scientific and industrial system, and metallurgy and machinery manufacturing industries had become quite systematic, sufficient to support Watt in turning his fantastic ideas into reality.

Although Zhao Hao has made rapid progress for more than ten years, it is still not enough to make up for the gap of two hundred years and help Zhang Jian and others pick this industrial flower.

So Zhang Jian and his colleagues could only rely on themselves to improve the manufacturing level bit by bit.

Fortunately, this research and development process itself will drive all-round progress in its own technological level, bringing great benefits to the entire research center and even the group.

For example, these machine tools at the Ordnance Research Institute...

~~

In the workshop, researchers from Institute 00 demonstrated to Zhao Hao the significant progress in gun barrel manufacturing technology.

Originally, both in the East and the West, gun barrels were made by wrapping red-hot iron sheets around steel bars and forging and rolling them into tubes. Two or three sections of iron sheets were forged and welded into a complete gun barrel.

But at that time, the gun barrel was just a rough blank, and the original hole was very small, so it was necessary to use a steel drill on a drilling machine to drill a smooth and straight gun barrel. At that time, the drill bit used a steel drill, which was not very hard, so it could only drill an inch a day, and it took a month to drill a gun.

Therefore, 99% of the time spent on making a bird gun is wasted on the barrel. Moreover, the quality is very worrying and it will explode sooner or later.

Even for the best quality Longqing rifle, the probability of barrel explosion will increase sharply after firing a thousand times.

For the safety of the soldiers, Zhao Hao had to stipulate that each rifle must be retired and replaced with a new one after one year of service or when it had been fired 800 times.

Fortunately, the retired rifles can be sold to Indian kings and Arab tribes at ten times the price. Because even this retired marine police rifle is safer than the Turkish muskets they used before, and it can shoot farther and has greater power, and is very popular with overseas customers.

Now the manufacturing process of gun barrels has been greatly simplified, eliminating the time-consuming and labor-intensive forging process. The barrel blank cast by 01 is directly ground on a grinder into a one-meter solid steel pipe, and then drilled directly with a deep hole drilling machine.

The cast iron drilling machine and the high carbon steel drill bit greatly improved the efficiency of drilling holes in gun barrels. Zhao Shizhen told Zhao Hao that if manpower was used as the power source, a gun barrel could be drilled in six hours.

If a water wheel is used to drive the drilling machine, the drilling time can be further shortened to four hours per hole!

"Wow!" Zhao Hao exclaimed, "Wow, how many times has the efficiency been improved?"

"The biggest advantage of this barrel is that it has no gaps and is made of steel." Zhao Shizhen handed one to Zhao Hao and said, "After testing, it has been found that there is absolutely no risk of the barrel exploding after firing 20,000 rounds. The reason why we say 20,000 rounds is because we only tested 20,000 rounds..."

"Seamless steel pipe..." Zhao Hao muttered as he looked at the hole in the steel pipe.

"Seamless steel pipe? Uncle is always able to name things accurately!" Zhao Shizhen exclaimed, "This seamless steel pipe is truly the king among gun barrels. We have also tested using 'Thor Gunpowder' as propellant, and it can also withstand the test!"

The so-called Thor gunpowder is a small amount of 04 nitrified starch mixed into black powder, which can greatly increase the explosive power. This is of course also a top-secret test product for testing only.

"Good, very good." Zhao Hao nodded with satisfaction. He was happy not only for the gun barrel, but also for the fact that various research institutes had already built up the industrial system of the Ming Dynasty.

Then the researcher inserted the drilled barrel into the manual wire drawing machine, and pulled it back and forth dozens of times at one position, cutting a pair of rifling grooves on the inner wall of the barrel, and then adjusting the position to cut another pair. After about a hundred reciprocating times, the rifling of a gun was drawn.

Rifling is not a new thing. Europeans added rifling to gun barrels decades ago. The machine used by Zhao Shizhen to rifle was first seized from the Portuguese in Macau.

Because rifling can greatly increase the range and hit rate. But loading a muzzle-loading rifle is very laborious, and the musketeer needs to use a hammer to hit the bullet feed rod to load the lead bullet into the barrel. As a result, for every shot fired by a rifled gun, a smoothbore gun can fire three shots, which is obviously unbearable.

Therefore, rifled guns were rarely seen on the battlefield.

However, under the suggestion of Zhao Hao, Zhao Shizhen developed a new type of bullet that solved this problem while retaining the advantages of the rifle.

Yes, it is the Minié bullet.

This conical lead bullet with a hollow tail has a diameter slightly smaller than the diameter of the barrel, so loading is very smooth.

A small wooden plug is used to plug the hole at the bottom of the bullet. When firing, the gas presses the wooden plug into the hole, forcing the bottom of the bullet to expand and stick to the rifling, sealing the gap between the bullet and the barrel, preventing the gas from leaking out. It can also make the bullet rotate at high speed under the pressure of the rifling and accurately hit the target thousands of meters away!

This Minié rifle, named Wanli rifle by Zhao Hao, will, if nothing unexpected happens, be the ultimate musket he has ever launched in his life!

The more powerful version will be left to future generations...

P.S. Do you believe me when I say I have been researching for days? Just to avoid making up nonsense... I will not be here tonight.