The Thunder Gun Car was settled like this, but no one had seen the drawings of another type of artillery.

In fact, this cannon is the famous Napoleon cannon in history. It is an absolutely classic weapon. It is known for its strong mobility, fierce firepower, extremely simple and effective manufacturing and use. At the earliest high level of front-mounted artillery, it was widely used by both sides during the American Civil War, so it was famous. Of course, this name was not the Napoleon that people in later generations are well-known, but was named after his nephew Napoleon III. However, it was named after the m1857 12-pound field cannon by the US Federal Army at that time.

The Napoleon cannon is all made of bronze rather than iron, so it is extremely strong and can withstand the explosive power of heavy or double charge without rupture. The maximum range can reach about 2,000 meters. At the same time, although the Napoleon cannon is a smooth-bore cannon, it also has a very high shooting accuracy. The Napoleon cannon, like most artillery guns of the same period, cannon cannons, blasting shells, shotguns and shrapnel cannons. It is popular and successful mainly because of the size, firepower, mobility and relatively light weight of the cannon.

A standard twelve-pound Napoleon cannon and the gun mount, the wheels are all made of bronze. The barrel is about 1.7 meters long and the caliber is 117 mm. The diameter of the left and right wheels is 1.45 meters. The total weight (combined with the gun body, the gun mount plus the wheel) is 1,109 kilograms. However, the gun itself weighs only 557 kilograms. If converted into the weight of the Ming Dynasty, it is less than 1,000 kilograms, and the range is slightly better than the 2,000 kilograms of Red-Black Artillery.

It is not technically difficult to manufacture Napoleon guns, but it is very troublesome to make materials, because the materials used to make guns and cannons are actually steel, followed by copper or bronze, and iron is the second most. Iron is used as the material and cooked iron is the best, and cast iron is the worst. However, at present, a large number of steel-making cast guns are unrealistic, so we can only find ways to find copper and iron.

Bronze is actually a copper alloy, mainly an alloy with copper and tin as raw materials. China's tin ore is very rich, ranking second in the world, and it was also mined very early. Although China's copper ore is not small in quantity and ranked third in the world, the ore of China's copper ore is poor in quality, low utilization rate, and it is difficult to mine. In addition, copper is also China's circulating currency. The cost of using bronze cast cannons is much greater than that of iron casting. Therefore, in the Ming and Qing dynasties, they were originally made iron cannons, and there were very few copper cannons.

However, although the cost of a bronze cannon is much greater than that of an iron cannon, its performance and service life are much better than that of an iron cannon. If a red cannon is cast iron, it is generally used for about 500 times, and the number of times of a cooked iron can reach about 600 to 800 times, while using copper or bronze cannons can reach 1,000 to 1,500 times. At the same time, copper cannons are much lighter than iron cannons. Therefore, from the perspective of cost-effectiveness, the difference between copper cannons and iron cannons is not very huge. Therefore, Shang Yi also believes that it is completely necessary to assemble copper cannons of an appropriate proportion in the merchant army.

Now Shang Yi has purchased more than 30,000 kilograms of copper mine, and at least he can start to build a few Napoleon guns to see. However, Shang Yi planned to use bronze on the gun body, and the gun mount and wheels were mixed with wood and iron, striving to control the total gun weight to within 1,200 kilograms, and at the same time, it can also reduce the use of bronze.

This work was left to Sun Heding because he was good at casting cannons and selected three people from Spanish craftsmen to assist Sun Heding in completing it, and the bounty was also 1,000 taels of silver.

The rifled gun, the organ gun, and the Napoleon cannon are the three major technical research points that need to be completed in the arsenal. At the same time, Shang Yi has also proposed some minor improvements and upgrades for other weapons.

First of all, Shang Yi asked the arsenal to build flowering bullets. The artillery shells currently used by the merchant army are solid bullets and shotguns. The former has a long range but a small lethality, while the latter has a large lethality, but a too close range. The flowering bullets can combine the advantages of both.

Flowering bullets are also called explosion bombs. The principle is very simple. They are a hollow ball filled with gunpowder and some iron sheets. After firing, they use time fuses to detonate the shells. They rely on the explosion of gunpowder, splashing iron sheets and loose sheets after the shell shell explodes to kill the enemy. This not only increases the lethality power of the shells, but also does not reduce the range. It can be said that it kills two birds with one stone.

In fact, the flowering bullet appeared in the Ming Dynasty. According to some later scholars, during the Ningyuan War, Yuan Chonghuan injured Nurhechi, causing his injury to die without hesitation, and used flowering bullets. However, the flowering bullets in the Ming Dynasty were made very rough, and they were basically fired in curves with limited range. To put it bluntly, it was no different from throwing with a catapult. Therefore, it was not popular. In the Qing Dynasty, because it did not pay attention to the development of firearms, it did not make further improvements, but was lost. When Zuo Zongtang was stationed in the northwest, he excavated a large number of flowering bullets left by the Ming army in an abandoned fort, which also made Zuo Zongtang sigh: China had this weapon three hundred years ago, but it could only be miserable for future generations to be lost. "

However, the flowering bullet that Shang Yi needed was not the flowering bullet fired by the mortar, but the flowering bullet fired by the cannon (i.e., the direct-fired cannon). Only this flowering bullet can combine the advantages of solid bullets and shotguns.

Although the flowering shells fired by cannons and flowering shells fired by mortars are the same in principle, they are much more technically difficult. First of all, the thickness of the shell shells of the flowering shells. If the shell wall is too thick, the gunpowder cannot blow up the shell walls after explosion, which will not appear lethal, and it will become an actual solid shell. If the shell wall is too thin and cannot withstand the pressure generated when the cannon is fired, the shells will be broken in the cannon chamber, which will cause the chamber to explode. At the same time, the caliber and pipe length of the cannon are different, and the pressure applied to the shells is also different, and the thickness requirements for the shells are naturally different. Moreover, there are no accurate mathematical formulas to calculate the power generated by cannon launches of various calibers, so the most suitable size can only be found through one experiment after another.

Another technical difficulty is the time fuse. The material used to make time fuses must not only be flame-resistant, but also keep burning under strong impacts, which is not easy to extinguish. It also has to burn evenly, neither too fast nor too slow, so as to ensure that an explosion occurs when the shell hits a certain distance.

Therefore, the principle of flowering shells is easy to say, but it is difficult to do. At the same time, Shang Yi also asked to use this opportunity to unify the caliber of the artillery, and stipulate seven to ten caliber calibers. Each caliber must have a limit on the length of each caliber. All artillery manufactured in the future must be standardized according to the prescribed size and cannot follow the feeling. Similarly, the production of shells will also be uniformly produced according to this standard. At the same time, the caliber sizes will be stamped on the artillery and shells in the future, so as not to be diverse in the future, and the shells will be diverse, making it difficult for the gunners to distinguish.

The second improved technology is to change the ignition method of artillery or grenades to a rope-pull type, also called a string-pull type. The advantage of using a rope-pull type is that it can be used directly without lighting an open fire when firing a cannon or throwing a grenade. This not only improves efficiency, but also is safer.

Because when firing, in order to improve efficiency, the ignition torches are generally kept inexhaustible, but because in a war environment, people's minds are highly tense, it is easy to cause torch errors and ignite gunpowder. After the grenade is changed to a string-pull style, when throwing the grenade, two people no longer need to cooperate with each other, and one person can complete all the movement techniques. At the same time, the shape of the grenade can also be changed to the most traditional wooden handle type.

The third improved technology is to add a tail wing and a launcher to the Pili Rocket. At the same time, we should also try to increase the size and flight distance of the Pili Rocket, and strive to increase the Pili Rocket's flight distance from the current 300 to 400 steps to 500 to 600 steps, which is more. At the same time, the oil hidden in the Pili Rocket must also be improved. In the past, animal oil was mainly used, and the combustion rate was not large, so it was best to be replaced with oil, so that the power of the Pili Rocket can be expanded several times.

Because in this war against the Spanish army, Shang Yi discovered that the Pili Rockets are not only powerful weapons in land warfare, but also very useful in naval warfare. Only in naval warfare requires more attention to the accuracy and range of the Pili Rockets, so these improvement measures are made to increase the range of the Pili Rockets, and at the same time ensure the stability and accuracy after launch, and can become the original missile used by the navy.

The improvements of these three technologies are not big, but once the transformation is successful, the performance of these weapons can also be greatly improved. Without the inability to update the weapons, fully discovering the potential of each existing weapon to improve their performance is also a good way to maintain a leading technological advantage.
Chapter completed!