Qiming 1158

Chapter 924 Formation of the Firearms Unit

After returning to the palace, Su Yonglin ordered the relocation of the coking workshop and the iron smelting workshop to the outside of the city, while ordering the selection of highly educated and able-bodied soldiers from the army.

He didn't want to wait any longer, he wanted to immediately start preparing to form the first officially organized firearms unit of the Ming Army.

In the past, the Ming army also used firearms, such as the Thor cannons fired by catapults, and large rockets fired by bed crossbows, but they were not regarded as organized firearms units.

Like the bowman, the artillery is an obvious technical branch.

They need to master a series of professional skills such as firing guns, cleaning gun bodies, and maintaining guns. They are both combat soldiers and logistics personnel, and they need strong professional and technical capabilities.

It obviously takes a long time to build a technical army from scratch, so from this time on, Su Yonglin started to build an artillery unit.

The more than [-] people selected first were high-quality soldiers of the Ming Dynasty from the Yanyun Corps.

They were taken to the Firearms Bureau to watch the appearance of the new artillery, observe the firing, understand the lethality of the artillery, and at the same time study the specific performance and parameters of the artillery with the craftsmen of the Firearms Bureau.

They need to record these important parameters in order to evolve into the professional standard of artillery in the future.

Su Yonglin also participated in this process many times, discussing these issues with the soldiers and craftsmen, and basically participated in the whole process of artillery formation.

He even served as the commander of the first artillery unit himself, giving them orders to complete the whole process of transportation, placement, loading and firing.

The sound of the guns rumbled, shaking the sky.

At the beginning, the experimental city wall had been smashed. Su Yonglin mobilized soldiers from the Yanyun Corps and Zhongdu craftsmen to rebuild some city walls in the north of Zhongdu City as a special experimental wall for artillery experiments.

Among them are the most common rammed-earth city walls, and the less common brick-clad city walls. Su Yonglin also specially instructed them to use different engineering strengths to make these city walls.

Relatively inferior, hurried, ordinary and impure loess walls.

There are also very well-built and sturdy city walls. The main material even uses the three-in-one clay type that dominated Wancheng. It is so strong that it even makes the craftsmen of the Ministry of Industry feel that it is too wasteful to do so. It is better to equip some cities with such The city walls would be better.

But in the military, Su Yonglin never hesitated to invest.

Military spending cannot be saved.

If military expenditures are deducted in order to save money, the saved military expenditures will double as expenditures on the battlefield, bringing unexpected disasters to the country and making it difficult to make up for it.

There is always some money that cannot be saved no matter what.

Let the artillery shoot at different city walls, from different angles and distances, and then observe the damage to the city wall, so as to judge what angle and distance the artillery should shoot from to achieve the best effect.

In order to achieve such a goal, Su Yonglin spent about ten walls and recorded countless data, forcing Lin Jingchun to come to the site to supervise the work in person to avoid waste.

Lin Jingchun can't do anything about it. This is military expenditure and cannot be saved. He still understands the truth. Besides, after several wars, the Ming Dynasty has a lot of financial revenue. Now the savings of the Ministry of Finance and the treasury are quite large, so it is a ten-sided experiment. It's just a wall, no big deal.

Yes, no big deal.

Lin Jingchun hypnotized himself like this, forcibly pretending not to care, but his appearance really didn't look like he didn't care at all.

It felt that the iron bullets fired by the artillery didn't hit the wall, but hit his heart.

A large number of practical exercises have greatly enhanced the professionalism of the artillery, and a large amount of data has increased the scientific nature of shooting. With a rigorous scientific attitude and the level of spending money like a big dog, Su Yonglin has pulled the Ming Army artillery unit up.

Not only was the artillery unit pulled up by Su Yonglin, but until March of the fourth year of Hongwu, Su Yonglin also used the [-] finished arquebuses produced by the Firearms Bureau to form the first musket team in Daming.

The selected high-quality soldiers of the Ming Dynasty were pulled by Su Yonglin to the military academy outside the Central Capital City for training. They were equipped with enough arquebus, gunpowder and iron, and practiced firing for a long time all day long, until the waist and knees became sore and weak.

Through the training of these 200 people, Su Yonglin also summed up some key points of formation and operation of the musketeer unit.

For example, the problem of firing rate and the problem of firing safety can be solved by fixing the ammunition.

The problem of early muskets is the same as that of artillery. There is less gunpowder loaded, and the power of the shot is not enough. If there is too much gunpowder loaded, it will explode.

Therefore, according to continuous calculations and experiments, it is concluded that how much gunpowder can achieve the best shooting effect, and then determined by the way of fixed-loading ammunition. Carrying fixed-loading ammunition for soldiers is indeed a good solution to the problem.

In this sense, the bullet of modern firearms is also a fixed-load ammunition.

Su Yonglin instructed the Firearms Bureau to use two different types of bamboo tubes to load gunpowder. The large bamboo tube was filled with gunpowder in the barrel, and the small bamboo tube was filled with gunpowder. In addition, he carried a projectile tube with him, and he carried a roll of match rope on his back.

When firing, the gunpowder in the big bamboo tube is poured into the gun barrel, the gunpowder in the small bamboo tube is poured into the fire door, and then the projectile is stuffed to prepare for firing, which can save the time of gunpowder filling and improve the firing efficiency.

In addition, although the Mingjun granular gunpowder burns more fully than powder gunpowder and has less residue, after multiple firings, there will inevitably be gunpowder residue in the barrel, which will affect the firing efficiency and even cause the chamber to explode.

Therefore, after many tests, the firearms team also determined how many times the firearms need to be cleaned up after firing to ensure that the firearms will not explode due to the blockage of gunpowder residues.

In addition, Su Yonglin also ordered the musket team to start training for the segmented shooting.

In order to form continuous firepower, it is necessary for this unit to maintain continuous shooting in the form of segmented fire to enhance the deterrent to the enemy.

How to segment, how to take over the shooting, and how to ensure that the soldiers can complete the ammunition loading and prepare for shooting within the specified time all require a lot of training.

But the good thing is that this kind of training is easy to understand and easy to use. Generally speaking, the basic training of musketeers can be completed in two or three months.

Compared with the normal training time of two or three years for bows and crossbows, and three or five years for cavalry, the training cost of musketeers is really low.

And when Su Yonglin realized the advantage of the musketeer's extremely low training cost compared to the bowman, he realized even more why the musketeer would become an inseparable service in the world when the muskete was immature, and finally laughed Proud battlefield.

The training cost is really cheap compared to other traditional arms.

(End of this chapter)