章 14: 14 qian is a catalyst
After watching Tang Mo's continuous shooting performance, Mathews's aloof demeanor had completely dissolved.
He was like a curious baby, wanting to touch but hesitant to reach out, craning his neck with curiosity as he examined the left-wheel handgun in Tang Mo's hand.
While looking, he kept muttering incessantly, "It looks like a very complex rotating structure... You use it for continuous shooting?"
"Yes," Tang Mo said as he fired six shots in a row, only beginning to clean the gun's chamber after the bullets were all spent.
The process was actually quite annoying, but it had to be done—Tang Mo felt more and more that developing smokeless powder was necessary.
He really missed that feeling of continuous firing, then easily ejecting the magazine, coolly reloading, and fiercely strafing the enemy once more.
Standing there, trying to get a better look at the left-wheel handgun in the spotlight in Tang Mo's hand, Dwarf Mathews kept whispering in admiration, "What a genius idea! You are simply a genius!"
It seemed he couldn't properly express his reverence for this exquisite design without speaking out, yet he feared being too loud and disturbing Tang Mo, making him annoyed, so he could only murmur quietly.
Finally, he couldn't resist any longer; he carefully pointed to the left-wheel handgun in Tang Mo's hand and asked, "Could you tell me what this is?"
"I call it a revolver," Tang Mo replied, picking up the handgun and responding to Mathews.
Mathews looked like a child who had seen a beloved toy but didn't have the money to buy it. He just stared at the gun, continuing to mutter to himself, "My God! Incredible! Gods above... it's unbelievable."
"You see? This thing represents the future!" Tang Mo said to Mathews with a smile.
"You're right, we are destined to win... no, we are destined to win!" Mathews corrected himself subconsciously, "Clever linkage... how did you think of this?"
Tang Mo laughed, with an unrestrained grin. He handed the handgun to Mathews, "Take a closer look."
In fact, as long as one takes a good look at the structure and disassembles it, replicating it is almost effortless.
The only technical difficulty was with the fulminate. Without the percussion cap, the thing was almost worthless.
But with the percussion cap, it became the most advanced king of close combat of the era, and without a doubt, even Wes described it as the bane of the Rangers!
"Stay and work for me, and you will see a different world," Tang Mo offered as he watched Mathews handling the handgun.
"I will go make the parts you need right now! I can finish them before dark! As long as you don't send me away, I'll stay here until I die," Mathews said to Tang Mo earnestly, looking up.
As he spoke, his eyes shone with sincerity; Tang Mo knew that this old dwarf truly saw this place as his lifetime workplace.
"We have a lot to improve, but the first thing to do is to automate production as much as possible!" Tang Mo snapped his fingers and said to Mathews.
"Automate?" Mathews didn't quite understand the word.
"It means making the machines work on their own!" Tang Mo explained.
"Are you the god of craftsmen?" Mathews stopped in his tracks, incredulously looking at Tang Mo.
"No, I'm just a businessman..." Tang Mo motioned for him to keep up, "Come on! We have a lot to do."
The early development of bullets was actually full of imagination. In the space-time familiar to Tang Mo, someone even linked bullet production with sausage making.
A well-known weapons manufacturer once filled animal intestines with gunpowder like sausages, using this method to produce ready-to-use ammunition.
Interestingly, this merchant also cleverly thought of coating the intestines with a type of glue, making them thin and fragile. In this way, the intestines from the animals would shatter and dissipate upon firing, along with the explosion of gunpowder.
The human intellect truly sparkled with brilliance at that moment—using sausage-making methods to produce ammunition, and even solved some of the issues with ejecting spent rounds!
Although this type of skin-based round was eventually phased out as humanity progressed and evolved, the cold numbers recorded on paper could prove its popularity at the time.
Yes, during the American Civil War, there were orders for more than 60 million of these rounds! Heaven knows how many animal intestines were used up in the war that broke out in the 'beautiful country', leaving the face of the American Animal Protection Association thoroughly slapped...
Tang Mo, familiar with all of this, naturally would not take such detours, so in the process of bullet production, he still directly chose the most correct path.
However, the most correct path isn't necessarily the one that can be taken right away. Due to the lack of smokeless powder and the current industrial foundation not allowing for the direct production of metal-cased cartridges, everything had to be done honestly according to the existing technical conditions.
He did not have a witch with magic at her disposal, nor did he have a goddamn tree in his head that could solve everything, so he could only honestly take things step by step.
Paper cartridge ammunition was a realistic type of ammo he could handle at the moment. And to give himself an insurance policy, he dug himself a big hole.
In fact, paper cartridge ammunition, combined with the new invention of the percussion cap, could still offer a variety of innovations.
For example, when choosing the type of cap assembly, Tang Mo had two mature options to use—one was the long-needle gun paired with bullets that had caps installed in the middle and the other was the short-needle gun with bullets that had caps installed at the bottom.
History had actually already provided an answer to which method was superior. In fact, in the world Tang Mo was familiar with, the French light weapons of this era's technical level were truly the pioneers at the forefront of the world.
At that time, Prussia used long-needle guns while France used short-needle guns, and eventually, metal-cased cartridges were invented. Primers became the most mature, most convenient, and commonly adopted method for metal-cased cartridges, and long-needle guns were instantly thrown into the dustbin of history.
So why did Tang Mo still bring out the long-needle gun? Actually, there were many reasons for this. One was that Tang Mo wanted to buy some time for his own development, and another was that his resources were extremely limited.
In this era, there was no such thing as patent protection, so Tang Mo could only protect his own technology from being stolen by others.
Everyone knew that the Shireck conglomerate, which had infiltrated the Leite Kingdom, was a monstrous super arms dealer. Once they got their hands on a sample of Tang Mo's new weapon, it would be very easy for them to mass-produce replicas.
And since Tang Mo had been showcasing his weapons around, no one could guarantee that the information wouldn't reach the ears of those at Shireck.
Tang Mo first brought out the needle gun actually as a way of deliberately setting a trap for Shireck, this potential adversary. Once the opponent fell into the big pit of the needle gun, it meant they were led astray and would naturally waste a large amount of resources.
By the time Shireck realized what was happening, Tang Mo would have had a brief respite and could calmly respond and bring out better weapons for yet another leap forward.
What if Shireck played fair and did not copy Tang Mo's needle gun design? Wasn't the needle gun still more advanced than Shireck's flintlock? The superiority was obvious at a glance, and Tang Mo wouldn't suffer, would he?
Besides this insurance, there was another very direct reason—Tang Mo was just the owner of a handicraft workshop, and he really could not mass-produce paper cartridges with caps at the bottom in any proper sense at the moment.
Although this item was not too sophisticated, it still demanded higher requirements than the cap that was simply wrapped in the middle of paper cartridge powder, so Tang Mo could not ensure quality control.
If he had the support of Count Fisheo, Tang Mo could expand his production line and hire more workers. Then he probably could mass-produce paper cartridges with primers at the bottom, but he did not currently have the capability.
Therefore, the more rudimentary, and the easier to manually produce ammunition for the long-needle gun, became Tang Mo's temporary choice.
He really had no other choice, as his small workshop of about a hundred people truly had limited productivity, which couldn't keep up with Tang Mo's demands.
Among these hundred people, there were seventeen or eighteen traditional blacksmith and smelting workers who operated the furnaces and processed metals into usable materials.
There were also less than twenty parts manufacturing workers, who were true craftsmen. They operated simple equipment and relied almost entirely on handicraft to create some parts, drilling out expensive gun barrels!
Do you know how many days a proper worker in this era, using a semi-automatic method, needs to drill a qualified gun barrel? About three days!
How many guns could Tang Mo's small workshop produce each day? Roughly one-third of a gun! It took him about three days to make a rifle, and equipping an infantry company with weapons would keep him busy for a year!
Therefore, his trip to the Northern Ridge to meet with Lord Earl was actually not just for a weapons production order but also for a full support from Lord Earl and a series of plans to expand the workshop's capacity!
He intended to consume almost all of the steel output of Northern Ridge in the future and then begin by making two coal-fired steam engines in his own workshop. With these modern machines, he would manufacture perfect gun barrels.
In short, everything needed time, effort, technology, and talent to accumulate...
And before all of this, before anything was ready, Tang Mo needed to prepare another catalyst for these "chemical reactions"—money!
Yes, he needed a lot of money! Everything needed money for support, without money everything was just a dream.
Now he had money, so everything could start to be deployed and implemented—and that was indeed what he was doing. At present, the parts for the steam engines were still under manufacture, but soon Tang Mo would have two boring machines that could work day and night!
With this equipment, his production speed could be multiplied, and Lord Earl's order would no longer be an unattainable goal.
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