Chapter 722 Technological Progress

The Guanghan line bid can only be considered a part. The benefits of grain trade are so great, and the influence is needless to say. If Fujian and Guangdong want to let go of this industry, it is not just the Guanghan line.

Chen Ming thinks that this "interest exchange" will involve a lot of things.

Fujian and Guangdong are not important grain-producing areas. The land there is all planted with cash crops. Especially after the invention of canned food, there are too many large and small fruit canning factories in these warm-climate Lingnan areas.

The powerful officials and wealthy people from Fujian and Guangdong do not grow grain. Once foreign grain begins to levy customs duties, it is conceivable how huge the stimulus will be to Lingnan, the region with the lowest grain prices in the country.

And the Lingnan interest group that has paid such a sacrifice will definitely not seek small things.

Although Chen Ming did not get specific information for a while, after finalizing the proposition of "interest exchange", he had seen everything he wanted to "see".

Chen Ming saw the national power gathered behind the issue of "increasing grain tariffs".

This power comes not only from the traditional agricultural areas of the two lakes and Huanghuai, but also from the prosperous commercial economies of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong. The entire chain of interests is closely linked, and officials, businessmen and civilians are involved, and it is likely that the whole of China is involved.

This power is so huge that Chen Ming will not openly go against their wishes.

This matter gave Chen Ming a little shock. The driving force of interests is too great and too heavy. It turned out that the interest groups in the north, south, east and west were self-adjusting traffic. Chen Ming had thought about the arrival of this day, but he did not expect it to be so soon.

Perhaps these transactions are just unremarkable reports in the newspapers, but in Chen Ming's eyes, they represent a different meaning.

When facing powerful obstacles and "enemies" that are very difficult to conquer, the interest communities of Lingnan, the two lakes, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, Huanghuai, etc. did not think about how to tear them apart and deal with them, or take the benefits for themselves, but turned to mutual communication, mutual exchange, and seeking common ground while reserving differences. Chen Ming thinks this is a manifestation of "maturity".

And this "maturity" is the maturity he desires. Different interest groups have cooperated instead of fighting each other.

Even though there will be a lot of back and forth between them behind the scenes, Chen Ming longs for being able to put on a cooperative look in front of the stage and push forward the operation of society under the impetus of a common interest.

Because in his mind, China's future path must follow the bourgeois route, and these economic communities are the hotbed of political parties. Although Chen Ming is willing to have one party in the country, and then there can be factions within the party, and there can be mountaintops within the factions, these are all allowed. But he dare not guarantee that his wishful thinking can really be implemented smoothly. When China really gives birth to bourgeois parties in a few decades, he is not sure that China can really have a one-party dictatorship.

And no matter whether it is one party or multiple parties, as a politician, learning to "seek common ground while reserving differences" and learning to "compromise" is a very basic internal factor for politicians in the later capitalist era. But it is also a very rare and lacking element in Chinese traditional culture.

If the domestic interest communities can understand this point as soon as possible, Chen Ming will be very happy.

The transformation from the agricultural age to the industrial age, the world is changing, and politics must also change accordingly;

In the eyes of Chinese politicians in the past, the whole world is just this small piece of land in East Asia. Yunnan and Guizhou were not completely conquered until the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and the chieftains of Hubei did not collapse until the Yongzheng period. For thousands of years before Kang Mazi took Taiwan into his pocket, only the Han regime of Zhengming firmly held its sovereignty.

Perhaps it is the limitation of the times. In the traditional agricultural society, the empire's territory can never be expanded indefinitely. And China's traditional culture makes the vigorous central empire not allow the existence of semi-independent forces of the same nature as the vassal states on its borders, which makes China in history seem very unenterprising for a long time, and the unchanging social environment cannot promote political change.

Perhaps the traditional Chinese emperor would worry that the power in his hands would be threatened, but Chen Ming knew that if he continued like this, his imperial power would be divided, but he still strode forward unswervingly. This is the biggest difference between a time traveler and an indigenous person.

At the end of November, the administrative order to increase the tariff on grain imports was officially issued, with a tax rate of 15%, a rate that was neither high nor low, and a figure that was negotiated and compromised for a long time.

Commercial interests affect national politics. No matter how many people give this matter a lofty name, it is still a real economic interest.

Because it is winter, winter is when China's grain prices are high. Once this news was released nationwide, grain prices all over the country immediately rose.

Although the cancellation of the preferential policy for grain imports and the imposition of a 15% tariff on it will not be implemented until the eighth year of Chengtian next year. But the huge influence has already stimulated all provinces in the country.

Chen Ming watched all this quietly. These changes were all what he liked to see, and at the same time, one of his ears was closely following the progress of new guns and cannons, and the new development of Chinese science and technology.

Once again, Chen Ming's guns and cannons were alarmed, but they were not Nimi rifles or muzzle-loading rifled cannons, but real breech-loading guns and cannons.

With fulminate of mercury, there is a primer. Needle-percussion breech-loading rifles can certainly be made, and breech-loading rifles can be made, so will breech-loading cannons be far away? At least five rifled muzzle-loading cannons were manufactured by Chinese military factories two years ago, but after long-term test firing, the effect was not ideal.

The new features of muzzle-loading rifled cannons - multiple rifling, lead-coated bullets and breech-loading designs are quite complex and inefficient. Although very powerful, they are expensive and not suitable for mass production and equipment of troops.

And there is another problem that the range of rifled cannons is indeed very long, and the accuracy of artillery firing is also great, but the targets aimed at by the latter are within the line of sight of naked eye observation. In real battles, the range of artillery is not the longer the better. Because the artillery of this era does not have a pair of "eagle eyes" that match it.

The range of modern artillery is getting longer and longer, which is based on modern implementation, aiming and fire control systems. Chen Han now relies on people, human eyes and human brains to calculate the shooting parameters. If the range of a cannon is too long, it is useless. Because it can't be shot accurately!

No matter how powerful it is, it is useless if it can't hit the target.

For today's cannons, an effective range of two kilometers is enough to deal with everything. When such a cannon is installed on a warship, due to stability, even if the effective range is reduced by half, a range of one thousand meters is unimaginable for many naval guns today.

When European ironclad ships came out, they still played close combat of one or two hundred meters. The British Royal Navy's shooting manual in the 18th and 19th centuries clearly stipulated that the maximum shooting distance of a 24-pound cannon was 400 yards. In this way, in actual combat in this era, the distance between the warships of both sides was often within 100 meters.

Chen Ming does not need a cannon that can hit too far, but a cannon with a perfect size, range, accuracy and rate of fire. It can ensure that the Chinese naval forces can still fire outside the range of the rocket and hit the enemy after the rocket is leaked.

In fact, the effective range of 2,000 meters is an ideal distance, and Chen Ming thinks this distance is very appropriate.

When Chen Han's military industry system conquered this "goal", it did have results, that is, rifled cannons.

The rifled cannon is like the difference between a smoothbore gun and a rifled gun. Not only does the range increase dramatically, but the accuracy is also greatly increased. However, the manufacturing process is really complicated, and the cost price of each cannon is much higher than that of a smoothbore cannon.

The most important thing is that it also has various problems and shortcomings such as bursting, jamming, and slow shooting.

"Since the range requirement is not high, we can shorten the barrel of the artillery to save its weight and manufacturing cost."

"The use of breech-loading rifled cannons has a great advantage for our army now, that is, the shells used by rifled cannons are pointed shells instead of traditional round shells. Pointed shells are not only more stable in the air than round shells, but also because of their shape - they are long, the body of the shell can be developed backwards, and the weight can be adjusted under the same caliber. For pointed shells and round shells of the same weight, the caliber of the former is only about 70% of the latter. That is to say, for the same caliber, even if no other external factors are considered, the power of rifled cannons is far greater than that of smoothbore cannons. Considering the pointed cone The low resistance of the projectile in the air, the penetration power of the pointed bullet can reach five times that of the round bullet for the same weight of the shell. "

"That is to say, our army's rifled five-jin cannon can be comparable to the smoothbore eight-jin cannon in the past, and the power is at least the level of the smoothbore ten-jin cannon."

"In actual combat, the small warships of our navy are enough to match the firepower of the European medium-sized warships, and the medium-sized warships can challenge the large European warships." In addition to the advantages in effective range and rate of fire - the small shells will of course have advantages - the result is that the large sailing battleships of Europe will not only be helpless against the smaller Chinese navy warships, but may also be raped instead of raped.

This is a voice in the military industry system that supports rifled guns.

However, the locking design structure of the rifled breech-loading guns they manufactured is very complex, with low stability and high failure rate. Unfortunately, the only opinion Chen Ming can put forward is a threaded breech block, which is a breech block mode used on many artillery in later generations. When the bolt is closed, the threads on the bolt body engage with the corresponding threads on the inner surface of the breech block. The bolt body thread surface is divided into a number of even-numbered sections, and the threads are cut off every other section. The threads on the inner surface of the breech block are treated in the same way, except that the sections where the threads are cut off are staggered with the sections where the threads are cut off on the bolt body. When the bolt is closed by the bolt handle, the bolt body rotates in an arc until the threads on the bolt body and the breech block are fully engaged. This type of thread is called a "broken" thread or "slotted" thread, and is the most common thread on modern screw-type breech blocks. The pitch of this thread must ensure that sufficient friction is generated to prevent the bolt body from rotating or opening during the firing of the gun. In order for the screw-type bolt body to be disengaged and opened by pressing the bolt handle, the breech block must also be equipped with some form of transmission device.

Then it is to express my moral support for a group of researchers who study breech-loading rifled guns.

Their words are indeed very inspiring, but they can't do it.

The most important thing about a cannon is not range and accuracy, but reliability and ease of large-scale equipment. This is exactly what the current breech-loading rifled cannons cannot meet.

And there is another point. When the five breech-loading rifled cannons were fired, due to the poor adhesion between the hot-dip lead and the iron, the torn lead fragments would spread in a short distance in front of the muzzle and cause harm to the soldiers on the side.

Why do the tip bullets of rifled guns need to be lead-plated? That is to embed the projectile body into the rifling. If cast iron or steel is too hard, it will seriously wear the rifling. So even modern artillery shells are made of steel bodies (the diameter is smaller than the inner diameter of the rifling) and copper belts (the diameter is slightly larger and can be embedded in the rifling).

The pointed projectile produced by Chen Han is made of cast iron, coated with lead on the outside, and uses a simple impact fuse. The projectile is filled with black explosive and uses a black powder bag as the propellant. In the original plane of time and space, until the second half of the 19th century, the artillery shells of the Western powers were also at this level.

But Chen Han's current steel smelting level is definitely not as strong as that of the Western powers at that time.

Naturally, the overall performance of the cannons produced cannot be compared to that time, or it cannot be compared at all. Chen Ming still compares horizontally with the development of European firearms in this era to find confidence.

Chen Ming decided not to take the initiative to interfere with the military industry system. Now Chen Han already has the capital to make trouble in firearms manufacturing. Sometimes, stumble is also a valuable experience.

At the end of the year, what really surprised Chen Ming was the steel industry. The latter had always been attached to the Ministry of Mines. These old and honest people continued to expand China's steel production and established coal and iron bases one after another in the country. .

But now, the surprise he brought to Chen Ming was a leap.

When Chen Han's situation stabilized, Chen Ming was no longer satisfied with making iron or crucible steel. He hoped to directly make steel and produce steel on a larger scale.

But Chen Ming really can't make much contribution to steelmaking, except for regenerative furnaces and gas.

Any iron-making furnace that uses coal or coke will produce a large amount of gas, and this gas has always been directly discharged from the top of the furnace to waste. The blazing flames when the gas is burning are very spectacular at night, but from the 21st century From a certain perspective, this is a serious waste of energy and environmental pollution.

In the original plane of time and space, this phenomenon continued until the 1930s. An ironmaking plant in Germany first piped gas to a regenerative furnace for heating. Various techniques could increase the hot air to 500 degrees Celsius. above.

When the air supply is raised to more than 300 degrees Celsius and then sent into the iron-making furnace, the iron output increases three times compared with cold blast for the same amount of fuel.

After this phenomenon was proven useful, it immediately aroused strong interest from the Ministry of Mines, because they felt that this technology could not only be used in iron and steelmaking, but also in refining other metals.

After several experiments, they found a method. A cast iron tube hot blast furnace is used.

The cold air flows from the upper branch pipe of the blast pipe main pipe to each heating furnace, and passes through the arched cast iron pipe located above the fire into the pipe on the other side of the heat exchange chamber, and then enters the tuyere of the iron furnace. When the wind is directly heated, the temperature can rise to 300 degrees Celsius, enough to melt lead. But this still does not satisfy the Ministry of Mines. Subsequent improvement experiments are still in progress. However, high-temperature hot air will cause damage to the air supply port of the iron melting furnace and must be protected.

Although this surprise has its shortcomings, its importance to steel production is obvious. Before the subsequent improvements were completed, Chen Ming took the lead and awarded gold medals to the research team. This is really a great progress for Chinese metallurgy!