Guangzong Yaoming

Chapter 272: Research on the subject, success astonishes the world
"And there is this bolt shrapnel." Zhao Shizhen pointed at the inside of the trigger. "When I made the Rumi gun, I used a piece of soft and tough fine steel that was more than an inch long. The bolt would fall if you pinched it. Now, according to your majesty's opinion, it has been changed to a trigger. Of course, it will not be accidentally pinched, but the gun bed needs to be more delicate, and it is not easy to install it. I have a way to solve this difficulty."

He was referring to the current names.

The buttstock structure is called the gun bed. The Rumi gun is still a matchlock gun. When it is ignited, there will be an explosion and thick smoke near the firing port. In order to aim and hold, the buttstock is relatively long. The trigger of the Rumi gun is not pulled back, but a copper piece that is squeezed into the gun handle, like a button.

If you squeeze the copper sheet, it will press down a piece of steel in the buttstock. This piece of steel is very elastic and drives the trigger to ignite and shoot.

The new gun now has no fuse, but the bird-beak-like dragon head that strikes the primer pool is still there.

Because the new gun is a flintlock, even though there is no matchlock, once the primer is ready, it is easy to accidentally squeeze the trigger of the original design and fire directly when holding the butt. This is not appropriate, and if you accidentally injure your teammates, it will be a loss.

Changing the trigger design also puts higher demands on the elastic structure in the trigger device.

There are actually a lot of elastic structures. The principle of the bow is elasticity. Nowadays, some high-end carriages also have shock-absorbing leaf springs.

When shooting, the trigger was pulled to trigger and reset. When Zhu Changluo heard him say that there was a steel sheet inside, he naturally thought of a spring.

But the key issue is not this, but the problem of smelting technology.

To increase the range, the gap between the bullet and the barrel must be as small as possible. Since neither the barrel casting nor the bullet processing can be standardized and precisely produced, some clever methods must be used.

Zhu Changluo looked at the gun in his hand again and again.

He certainly contributed some ideas, such as what they now call the mortise and tenon structure.

Because we want to figure out how to load the bullet, what we have now is a bullet wrapped in oil paper, with the bullet in the front and gunpowder in the back.

Loading depends on this bolt structure. In today's muskets, the firing device is still built on one side, with a special powder groove as a fire gate. Then the main part of the barrel can be used.

The mortise and tenon structure that has been developed does not use springs and relies purely on pulling and pushing.

The design is quite ingenious. After completing a shot, turn the lever to release it from the locked state, pull it back to reveal the loading slot, and push it forward again to push the bullet into the barrel.

The ingenious design lies in the fact that the front end of the push rod is a thick steel plate slightly larger than the inner diameter of the barrel, and there is a short steel needle left in front of the thick steel plate along the inner edge of the barrel.

The advantage of this is that when the bolt is reset and rotated to lock again, the small steel needle can rotate with it. When the bullet is pushed forward into the chamber, it has already pierced the thick oil paper at the bottom of the bullet. With another rotation, it can just cut the oil paper behind the bullet, allowing the gunpowder in the bullet to fully contact with the primer poured into the firing port.

Now looking at this small steel needle, Zhu Changluo naturally thought of the more advanced generation of firing pin bullets.

Although the more advanced and sophisticated the technology is, the more high-precision technology is required, it does not necessarily mean there is no solution.

"Nowadays, the barrel of the gun can only be made by a master craftsman himself?" Zhu Changluo asked, "You said that not even one out of ten barrels is suitable. What are the reasons for it being unsuitable?"

Zhao Shizhen said: "The distance of the shot. The size of the barrel of each gun is slightly different, and the size of the bullet is also slightly different. Some cannot be loaded, and some are too small to be loaded, and can only go as far as the Rumi gun."

Li Chengliang's eyes brightened up again: "That's fine too!"

Even if the range is the same, the rate of fire is faster! As for mistakes made in the chaos of the battlefield, it would be better to prepare more and train more thoroughly.

Zhu Changluo knew that precision manufacturing could not be accomplished in a hurry, and he suddenly remembered the famous story.

The problem of manufacturing accuracy is not unique to the Ming Dynasty, it also exists in the West. Zhao Shizhen and his team's solution to Zhu Changluo's bullets was to use slippery oil paper, and the West also seemed to have done something like smearing lard and butter on bullets.

Although it was just for lubrication, it ended up being a religious blasphemous joke.

Zhu Changluo looked at the round bullet again. This shape was naturally far from the bullet shape he was familiar with.

After thinking about it, he decided that he should still give it a try.

So he ordered, "Bring pen and ink."

Zhao Shizhen thought that he wanted to write a handwritten order to arrange resources to solve the problems he mentioned, but he didn't expect that the emperor would pick up the pen and start drawing.

Zhu Changluo first drew a bullet.

There was no concept of aerodynamics, but the conical bullet and the sharp arrow were naturally similar. He also changed the bottom of the bullet into a concave hemispherical shape, leaving a thin edge.

The gunpowder is at the back, and the whole structure is narrow at the front and wide at the back.

As for the bullet shell and bottom, he wrote: copper and iron shell.

Then a small dot was drawn in the middle of the bottom of the bullet, standard: flint.

Zhao Shizhen looked at the pattern in confusion, then looked at the emperor and said, "Your Majesty, if you wrap it with oil paper, the gunpowder can be almost burned out when firing, and then pour out the gunpowder ash foam in the barrel. If it is a copper or iron shell... and put this flint in the bullet..."

"not busy."

Zhu Changluo changed another piece of paper and drew another structure.

Even though he was not an expert on firearms, he had been thinking about this for several years. He had in-depth discussions with Zhao Shizhen and others, and had also studied natural sciences for many years at Baijiayuan.

Zhu Changluo drew a simple map, and Zhao Shizhen and others would have subsequent considerations.

Now all we have to do is solve two problems: the stability of the barrel and bullet caliber, and the material problem of flint ignition.

Fixed-load bullets are definitely the direction. If the caliber accuracy problem is difficult to solve now, then it can be solved by improving the efficiency of the energy utilization of gunpowder explosion. Now that the concept of flintlock is in place, using a firing pin to detonate gunpowder inside a bullet is nothing more than finding a more suitable trigger.

Zhu Changluo drew something first, then looked at Zhao Shizhen and asked, "Do you know what this is?"

Zhao Shizhen looked at the emperor in confusion: "This armlet..."

"Over there at the smelting and foundry, we are trying to make this tough steel bracelet. Let's call it a spring."

The so-called armlet is an ornament worn by women, which is no different from a spring, except that it is made of gold or silver.

The springs in guns are more useful, so Zhu Changluo decided to let them tackle this problem.

Zhu Changluo drew another iron sheet on it, and on top of it were several bullets stacked up, saying, "If the cartridge case is made of copper or iron, when it is pressed down, the bolt will move back and it will bounce up. Then think about how to not have all of them bounce out at once, but just catch the bullets one by one so that they can be pushed into the barrel."

After that, he drew a gun barrel, which was thick at the back and thin at the front. "There is a copper and iron shell outside the powder bag, and it is blocked by the gun barrel and the bolt. If the powder bag can be ignited, the bullet will be rushed out of the gun barrel. The bullet is pointed at the front and round at the back. The reason why the bottom of the bullet is shaped like a small round pit is that it expands when heated. In this way, the projectile does not have to be made the same size as the inner diameter of the gun barrel, it can be slightly smaller. Grease the bullet head."

As he was drawing, he made some changes to the bolt. The original inner rod used to push the bullet forward was now simply modified by him: "Behind the bolt is a small tough steel armband, let's call it a spring. You can think about how to connect the trigger to it. If it can be made, there will be no need for primer. Pulling the bolt can eject the old shell and load a new one. It can kill many enemies in an instant, which should be much better than this new gun."

Li Chengliang looked at him in amazement, although he was not sure if he could make such a thing.

Zhu Changluo also knew where the main difficulty lay.

Forget it if the bullet and the barrel don't fit well enough or there are no rifling. Don't dwell on these things. As long as the gunpowder in the chamber doesn't release firepower out through the remaining vent and the energy is fully used to push out the bullet, it's fine.

"There are three difficulties. I will ask people to deal with them one by one. First, the thing hidden in the bullet will explode when it is loaded. I will ask people to find or refine it. There will be some results. Second, for the spring, you can ask the master craftsman at the ironworks to make a trial with fine steel or refine new steel. Its rebound force should be both suitable and easy to pull and press down. Third, if the above two problems can be overcome, how much bullet and ammunition should be equipped in the future, so that the shell will not collapse and the bullet can be pushed far. I will have people test it in large quantities and calculate it carefully."

Putting down the pen, Zhu Changluo held up the flintlock rifle he already had and said, "If you can make this gun, I believe that the new gun I envisioned can also be made. Instead of dwelling on the most difficult problem of casting the gun barrel and bullet to the same size, why not think of some other way."

He only had to hint at the general structure he knew, and the rest was just a few technical difficulties.

I learned a lot from the red studies back then about how the martyrs made their own firearms under extremely simple conditions, and that little bit of shallow accumulation came in handy.

The current smelting and casting level of the military industrial park is actually acceptable, evolving from millimeter-level to micron-level precision. Zhu Changluo doesn't want to think about such unrealistic problems. Instead of thinking about these, it is better to let them improve the process flow and try to improve the standard level.

But he knew about famous things like fulminate of mercury and detonators, and he simply asked those Taoist alchemists and some people from Baijiayuan to conduct research in this direction.

As for springs, since there are materials to make plate-shaped things now, it means there is spring steel. Even if the quality is not as good as that of later generations, the emperor gave a clear idea. Who says that the top craftsmen of the Ming Dynasty can't make springs?

The final bullet caliber design and charge amount are just a process of a large number of experiments and data analysis of the experimental results to determine the final standard.

Zhu Changluo laughed at Li Chengliang's expression: "We have the Rumi gun and the bird gun, which are enough for now. Add to that the tiger squat cannon, the falconet cannon and this improved Mingwei cannon, and who will be the Ming Dynasty's weaponry inferior to? In this case, if we have another invention, we might as well let it come out and shock the enemies of the world!"

(End of this chapter)