I'm the Dauphin in France

Chapter 1043: The Decisive Hero

When more than 1300 Cossack cavalrymen appeared on the flank and rear of the Persian Crusade Knights with a sharp roar, the outcome of the battle was already determined.

The Persian heavy cavalry, which had just experienced two rounds of all-out charges, was now exhausted and suddenly attacked. They were divided into several pieces without any resistance and then fled in different ways.

By the afternoon of the next day, the Persian army, which was blocked on the north side of the Kertchanis Hill, finally began to surrender after losing its command and being heavily surrounded.

Agha Mohammed ordered the main force to retreat in the early morning.

That night, the whole city of Tbilisi was celebrating that they and the Tsar's army had defeated the brutal Persians.

They should have celebrated. Historically, at this time, Tbilisi had already been conquered, and all adult males were massacred by Agha Mehmed, their eyeballs dug out and arranged in a pyramid outside the city.

And right now, they are the winners.

At the dinner party at the Georgian Royal Palace, Gudwich shouted "Long Live the Tsar" in front of all the nobles and officers, and then suddenly shouted: "Thanks to our eternal friend - France!"

At the same time, in the temporary camp of the Persian army that had retreated south to Ganja, two officers held bloody plates and bowed to Agha Mohammed, saying, "Great Shah, the execution is complete."

The latter glanced at the two eyeballs on the plate and waved them away.

The dish contained the eyes of Bozorg. Although he was one of the bravest generals under Agha Mohammed, he failed to break through the Russian defenses and returned alive.

Then you must accept military law.

Agha Mohammed looked at the Turkish cavalry commander beside him and asked: "Have you figured out the situation of the Russians?"

"Not yet, Your Majesty..." The officer wiped the sweat off his forehead and added, "But what we can confirm is that they have at least 20,000 people and are carrying a large number of artillery. It's obvious that they didn't just arrive."

Agha Mohammed's face became darker and darker. He swept all the flags on the sand table to the ground and said in a deep voice: "Order the entire army to withdraw to Tabriz immediately tomorrow morning."

He had fought in battles all his life and never admitted defeat, but this time, in just two days, his army lost more than 1 men, and his most elite Crusade Knights were almost wiped out.

Although he still has about 2 men under his command, the strong combat effectiveness demonstrated by the Russian army today forced him to be cautious.

As a hero, he is not lacking in decisiveness.

Tabriz is 400 kilometers south of Tbilisi. His order just now not only gave up the fight for the Transcaucasus, but also gave up Armenia.

But Tabriz had strong fortresses where he could hold off the Russian army and then gather strength for a counterattack.

In the following month, Valerian Zubov led his army to advance rapidly, occupying more than 100,000 square kilometers of land along the way, until finally stopping in front of the Tabriz Fortress.

Subsequently, all the Transcaucasian states, including Georgia, as well as Armenia and Karabakh, sent envoys to St. Petersburg to express their willingness to become Russian protectorates.

……

The French province of Liège in the Southern Netherlands.

In the workshop of the Royal Ironworks of Namur, Joseph flipped through the technical data compiled during this period, and patiently reminded the chief technician here, Wandel: "So, don't worry about waste. The amount of manganese and nickel added must be adjusted and tested continuously by 0.01%."

"Yes, Your Highness." Wandel nodded seriously.

He originally thought that His Royal Highness the Crown Prince was only here to inspect the research and development progress of converter steelmaking, but he did not expect that His Royal Highness was more concerned about the technicians' mastery of steelmaking knowledge.

Fortunately, they had repeatedly studied His Highness's manuscript of "Principles of Steelmaking" before, and were familiar with "desulfurization and desiliconization", "furnace lining corrosion", "preventing phosphorus regeneration" and so on.

Of course, the most essential part of this manuscript is the explanation of "lattice structure".

His Highness pioneered the idea that during the steelmaking process, carbon and iron elements would form a special spatial structure, which would greatly affect the performance of steel.

These technicians knew that the carbon content would make steel hard or brittle, and that steel products needed to be quenched and annealed, but they finally understood the underlying principles after seeing the manuscript.

This allowed them to change their previous model of relying solely on experience when designing steel processes and begin to have scientific theoretical guidance.

Of course, Joseph only told them the general principle - he himself didn't know the more detailed ones - but for the top technicians, this was the most difficult step in the research and development process.

As long as someone points them in the right direction, all that's left is to perfect the technology through a lot of experiments.

It was after receiving His Highness's manuscript of "Principles of Steelmaking" that the quality of steel at the Namur Royal Ironworks was significantly improved.

This time, His Royal Highness the Crown Prince brought them a new steelmaking technology - the alloy steel principle.

Yes, this technology is so important that Joseph did not write it into "Principles of Steelmaking", but personally orally told it to core technical personnel.

The Royal Ironworks of Namur is also 100% owned by the French government, and all important positions are staffed by royal guards and intelligence agency personnel.

In fact, it was only last year that Joseph learned from Leroy, the president of the French Academy of Sciences, that as early as 40 years ago, the Swede Kronstedt used carbon reduction to separate metallic nickel from red arsenic nickel ore.

Twenty years ago, the Swedes also used the carbon reduction method to obtain metallic manganese from pyrolusite.

Although these laboratory preparation methods can only produce very small amounts of nickel and manganese, fortunately not much needs to be added during steelmaking, which gave him the idea of ​​starting to refine alloy steel.

You know, manganese steel, nickel steel and ordinary steel are almost two different substances!
Of course, he also knew that it would take a lot of experiments to draw conclusions on how much manganese and nickel to add, when to add them, and how the steelmaking process needed to be adjusted.

So he took the opportunity of inspecting the steel plant to let Wandel start refining alloy steel.

In fact, Joseph originally did not want this matter to distract Wandel's attention - the latter is currently responsible for the research and development of converter steelmaking technology.

However, after he confirmed that converter technology was still a long way from being realized, he decided it would be better to walk on two legs.

It was true that the research and development at the United Steam Engine Company had hit a bottleneck - the 100-horsepower steam engine had experienced pipe rupture problems several times in a row.

On the one hand, this requires improving the control of boiler pressure, and on the other hand, it can also be solved by increasing the strength of steel.

(End of this chapter)