Wind Rises in North America 1625

Chapter 187 Armament
"boom!"

A crisp gunshot rang out, and a bullet instantly flew out of the barrel, hitting a huge wooden board eighty meters away, penetrating through it, and landing on the grass behind it.

"Can this rifle shoot farther?" Luo Zhenhui nodded slightly, but still looked at Zhang Ruosong beside him with hope.

"Sure." Zhang Ruosong hesitated for a moment, then replied affirmatively, "But if it's farther away, it might not be so accurate."

"Even if it's inaccurate, it doesn't matter," Luo Zhenhui said with a smile. "As long as this gun can fire far and has considerable lethality, that's enough. Then, we can unleash intensive firepower and eliminate the enemy beyond the range of their weapons."

The smoothbore rifles of this period were generally more than 18 meters long, with barrels over 20 meters long and calibers between 50 and mm, but their effective range was often less than meters, not even as far as modern pistols of later generations, making them very weak.

Furthermore, spherical bullets have a particularly large cross-section facing the wind, which creates significant drag during flight. Once the flight distance exceeds 40-45 meters, the projectile's trajectory degrades, making it impossible to effectively inflict damage on the target.

In this situation, soldiers can only fire at the enemy in dense formations to increase the density of firepower output and thus improve the hit rate.

In the past few years, the time travelers have converted hundreds of matchlock rifles purchased from Macau and seized from the Spaniards into flintlock rifles. This has saved many steps in the operation process and increased the shooting frequency accordingly. In addition, the gunpowder has been optimized and improved, slightly increasing the range of the rifle.

However, these modified muskets did not completely transcend the technological level of the era and did not form an absolute generation gap.

When facing the massive invasion of the Spanish, the time travelers can only adopt the traditional line-up shooting tactics and engage in line-fire shooting with them.

But the problem is that there are only more than 200 Marines in the newly formed army. How can they withstand such consumption? They may be wiped out by the enemy after two or three rounds of volleys.

Of course, during wartime, armed militias can be recruited in large numbers to serve as line-filling infantry, thereby enhancing the ability to sustain combat.

But even so, the time travelers were not very willing to engage in this cruel rotation of shooting tactics with Spain.

Every immigrant was transported from the Ming Dynasty with great difficulty and huge financial and material resources. It would be heartbreaking if they were killed in an instant by a small lead bullet.

We can't afford to compete with the Spaniards in a war of attrition!
Therefore, it is necessary to upgrade weapons and equipment, at least to be half a generation ahead, in order to suppress the Spaniards with firepower.

So, since smoothbore guns do not have much advantage in performance and range, can we develop a rifled gun to gain a slight technological advantage?

For a long time, people firmly believed that the effective killing limit of a musket was about fifty meters, and the only improvement was to increase its rate of fire.

However, in 1616, a blacksmith named Gott in Nuremberg, Germany, while studying how to increase the loading speed of muskets, engraved two symmetrical straight rifling grooves on the barrel of the musket (in fact, as early as the 16th century, the earliest version of the rifled gun had already existed in Italy).

Although this accidental creation did not achieve the goal of increasing the rate of fire, it unexpectedly discovered that the effective range of the musket with straight rifling exceeded 80 yards (73 meters).

Gort, delighted, immediately carved four symmetrical straight grooves into the barrel. As a result, the effective range of the musket in the test firing reached an astonishing 100 yards (about 91.4 meters).

The Kingdom of Denmark was the first to purchase this type of rifled musket to equip its own army. This was considered the world's first standard rifle with rifled muskets.

However, this "Goth" musket with its ultra-long range and high accuracy did not have a good reputation in the Danish army.

Because the manufacturing cost of this type of musket is too high and the production process is too complicated, it is not convenient for mass production and equipping troops.

Soon, this rifled gun was abandoned by people and turned back to traditional smoothbore guns.

The reason for this is not complicated. During this period, the manufacture of guns and cannons was mainly done by hand, and processes such as rifling were too complicated for pure handicrafts.

Moreover, the measurement accuracy people had at that time was only up to 0.1 inches (about 0.25 centimeters), and the concept of millimeter had not yet been proposed.

So before the 18th century, the world was not ready for the era of rifled guns.

Although, given the current industrial development situation of the time travelers, it is quite difficult to manufacture rifled guns.

The key point lies in the rifling engraving process inside the barrel.

Before the Spanish exploration fleet arrived, the time travelers had not felt any real threat and believed that they could continue to develop peacefully on Qiming Island for several years. After casting more than 20 coastal defense guns, they did not invest too much energy in rifled guns. Instead, they concentrated their research and most of their industrial production capacity on civilian use, trying to produce enough goods in exchange for much-needed materials and gold and silver.

Casting a cannon, or producing and modifying a rifled musket, requires much more manpower and material resources than making an axe!
However, more than half a month ago, the Spaniards somehow found their way to Qiming Island and captured several fishermen who were learning whaling in the waters near Dayu Port. This immediately shocked the entire group of time travelers.

The Spanish threat was imminent. Once the fleeing Spanish ships returned to Mexico and reported the situation to the colonial authorities, they would inevitably invite a Spanish expedition.

In five months at the fastest and ten months at the slowest, the Spanish army will arrive in full force.

Even if the Spanish fleet was blocked outside the port by relying on coastal artillery, the enemy would still find an undefended shoal and launch a forced landing. With some casualties, they might be able to attack the shore.

It would be easy to deal with the Spaniards attacking in winter. At most, we could evacuate all the residents to the fortress, defend it, inflict heavy casualties or continuously consume the enemy in the defensive battle, and finally force them to withdraw.

But if Spain attacks in spring, summer or autumn, we cannot choose to avoid fighting and rely on defending the city to outlast the enemy.

Because the Spaniards can prevent you from carrying out agricultural production, and they will burn and destroy farmland outside the city, and even harvest the mature crops to replenish their own resources and support the war.

So, in this situation, the time travelers could only pull out their troops and fight the Spaniards head-on.

In order to reduce the loss of officers and soldiers and to gain an advantage on the battlefield, it became an urgent task to develop a batch of more advanced muskets before the Spaniards came.

After pooling the wisdom and experience of dozens of skilled craftsmen, the Shixingbao Weapons Workshop successfully produced a wooden rifling lathe four days ago to process rifling inside gun barrels.

This simplified version of the broaching machine is somewhat similar to the earthen lathes built by our army in the base area during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. It requires three people to operate: one person to shake the turning rod, one person to observe and correct the position of the broach, and the last person to control the fixed barrel. The core of its work is to achieve the synchronous rotation of the broach during the pulling process to process spiral rifling.

As for the hard broach head, it was modified and processed from the alloy parts dismantled and preserved from the "Breaking Waves". In the process of turning the draw rod, spiral rifling can be slowly cut on the inner wall of the barrel.

However, the accuracy and durability of this wooden rifling machine are relatively low. If you are not careful, deviations will occur, causing the barrel to be scrapped.

In addition, each processing process can only produce one rifling groove. If a gun requires multiple rifling grooves, it must be engraved repeatedly, which is time-consuming and laborious, and no mistakes can be made.

After three days, only two qualified gun barrels were processed.

Afterwards, the weapons workshop assembled two rifled guns using these two rifled barrels, which was considered a preliminary breakthrough in the iteration of weapons technology.

After learning the news, Luo Zhenhui led a group of military personnel and hurried over to verify the power of this rifle.

After several rounds of shooting tests, the distance increased from 60 meters to 170 meters, and it was able to effectively penetrate the wooden boards, far exceeding the range of the straight-rifled "Goth" musket.

"If we are given sufficient manpower and material resources, how many of these muskets can be produced every month?" Luo Zhenhui polished the musket in his hand, a look of great satisfaction on his face.

One hundred and seventy meters was enough time for our army to fire three or four volleys before the Spaniards came within range of their muskets.

In this situation of "I can hit you, but you can't reach me at all", only the opponent is a very well-trained and extremely disciplined army that can withstand several rounds of attacks without collapsing, but continue to rush forward silently and start a musket fire with us.

However, given the state of those third-rate troops in the Spanish American colonies, they would surely be defeated after suffering massive casualties.

"If we don't care about the cost, we should be able to produce twenty to thirty pieces per month." Zhang Ruosong calculated secretly and gave a more conservative output.

"Too few!" Luo Zhenhui shook his head and said, "We must equip at least 300 of these rifled muskets before the Spanish army arrives. Only then can we give them a big surprise. You know, these muskets are consumables. During the battle, many will inevitably be damaged and scrapped. If we can't replenish and replace them in time, we will be in a very disadvantageous position."

"I'll... do my best," Zhang Ruosong said with a wry smile. "However, this will probably take up a lot of resources and manpower, and will somewhat delay production and operations in other workshops."

"That's fine. We'll just have to make do in a pinch. Right now, our survival is at stake, so military matters come first." Luo Zhenhui said, "Once the immigrant fleet returns, we should have a bit more manpower. Come winter, aside from necessary military training, we can put other work on hold and focus on war preparations."

"I don't know how many people this immigration fleet will bring back from Ming Dynasty."

"If the Portuguese covet our gold, they will send four or five ships to help us transport people, just like they did last year. That way, we can add more than 2,000 new recruits."

"Yes, every immigrant we add is a strength for us."

"By now, the immigrant fleet is almost ready to return."

"Well, now that the Wavebreaker is back, we'll have more ways to deal with it."

(End of this chapter)