Chapter 430 “Steel Star”

After Lucia came of age, Border Town also entered the last month of winter.

For the Demonic Moon, the end of winter does not mean the end. The heavy snow in the sky will often continue until the next spring. As for when it will subside, it is completely left to fate.

According to past experience, the evil month ends in the first half of the first month of spring, which is a very difficult time; when it ends in the second half of the first month, it is a very difficult time; if it continues into the second Months have become difficult to survive.

But this is just what happened to small town residents.

The situation has been greatly improved this year. Even if the evil month lasts until the end of the second month of spring, the wheat stored in the granary is enough to fill everyone's stomach.

Naturally, Roland would not be satisfied with just passing the test as long as everyone did not starve to death or freeze to death. These days, he had been lying in front of his desk with high spirits, drawing drawings one after another, conceiving his next stage of large-scale production plan. The entire plan is divided into two aspects: military and civilian. The former includes plans to build new weapons factories, bicycle factories, docks, and shallow-water heavy artillery ships. The latter is mainly about water, heating, and electricity tees in residential areas, and iron. The promotion and popularization of agricultural tools.

It was Lucia White who filled him with motivation. After testing her new abilities in detail, Roland clearly realized that the last limitation of mass production had also been solved, and the productivity of the town would increase as the population grew. Ushering in a new peak.

The limitation is material supply.

Modern smelting is a very complex subject, and steel production is also one of the most important parameters for measuring an industrial country. Roland didn't know much about this, so the town's iron-making capabilities were still very backward. Not to mention that the technology had not advanced beyond this era, and the scale was not comparable to the private smelting plants of some mining businessmen. When the iron ore is smelted into pig iron in the brick blast furnace, the good quality is sent to make steam engines, while the poor quality is given to Anna for further smelting into steel. This process is completely uncontrollable, and the carbon content is high and low. The available materials can only fill two or three carriages for a whole day, which greatly limits the production capacity of the steam engine manufacturing plant.

Although Anna's special furnace can convert low-quality pig iron into quality-controllable steel, the output is only enough for the military factory. In the fall, it can basically meet the needs of the town. But after winter, the army has expanded twice, and with the development of new firearms and artillery, this amount of steel has become somewhat stretched.

Lucia's evolution can be described as a shot in the arm. The targeted separation ability can easily eliminate undesirable components in the material. It can also control the proportion of each element during the smelting stage to maintain the same performance in each furnace of molten steel.

It can be said that with Anna and Lucia, the smelting level of Border Town can be improved by several levels in an instant.

For this reason, Roland has asked Anna to put down other tasks at hand and concentrate on building a new generation of extra-large furnaces.

Compared with the previous special furnace designed for her, the new furnace is more than ten times larger in volume, extending to fifty meters in length, ten meters in width, and nearly four meters in height. At first glance, it looks like an elongated swimming pool. It is essentially the same as the previous generation special furnace. It is still an iron box with no heating equipment and relies entirely on Anna's black fire for smelting. However, it was buried in the ground and relied on the soil to support the pressure of the molten iron on the four walls. There was a walkway in the center, which allowed Anna to heat the iron ingots on both sides at the same time.

It has only one advantage, that is, it is large enough. If it is smelted according to the previous method, the amount of limestone used to remove impurities will be large, and it will take a lot of effort to clean up the generated impurities. Adding materials and stirring are also a big problem. It’s troublesome, so it must not be too big. But now, these worries are gone. All you have to do is put in the pig iron and dissolve it, and then let Lucia remove harmful ingredients such as phosphorus and sulfur.

Roland plans to build a new batch of furnaces. Together with the old blast furnaces and old shaft furnaces, they will only be responsible for initial smelting. They don't care about the quality of the finished products, as long as they can melt the ore and turn it into square iron ingots. Then all these iron ingots are put into the new furnace for secondary refining. The formed molten steel flows through the gate into the lower-lying formwork, directly forming materials that can be processed. After that, the steam engine factory will also switch to steel production, which is inevitable. It can bring a stronger source of power to the town.

Roland calls the new furnace the "Steel Star."

Once Anna is completed and Steel Star is put into formal production, the town's steel production will increase more than tenfold.

It can be said that the new large-scale production plan is based on this foundation.

In addition, the development work of new light weapons has also come to a conclusion.

Roland found that his original idea was not appropriate. He designed several prototype weapons by referring to the principles of later gas-guided automatic rifles. Simply put, automatic weapons use part of the high-pressure gas when bullets are fired to complete ejection. , loading action, thereby realizing the reloading process.

This work lasted for about half a month. It cannot be said to be difficult. It just required repeated testing of whether each component could function properly. He didn't need to memorize the specific structure of a certain rifle. As long as he knew how it worked, he could piece together a usable weapon after a few tries.

The problem lies here.

The prototype weapon was just silly, big and black. It had nearly a hundred parts, each of which was processed by Anna herself, especially small gadgets such as springs, firing pins, and gas pistons. The level of machine tools is still difficult to mass produce. If you want to replace all the revolver rifles in the hands of soldiers with automatic weapons, not only will it be a huge burden on Anna, but the firearms processing equipment that has been put into production will also cause waste.

In addition, if all soldiers are equipped with automatic weapons, their ammunition consumption will undoubtedly be astronomical. Roland didn't pay much attention to this at first, thinking it could be solved by increasing the number of people producing it, but he soon discovered that once the new weapon reached scale, it could easily swallow up the entire output of the acid plant.

As for the small problems such as jamming and failure to fire that often occur during test firing, they are not important.

After repeated weighing, he finally gave up the idea of ​​large-scale replacement of automatic weapons. However, improving the army's firepower output was an urgent need, and he set his sights on another repeating weapon.

That's the heavy machine gun.

Twenty to fifty people are assigned a heavy machine gun, which greatly reduces the number of weapons and solves the two most difficult problems. It can also use the gas guide method for automatic loading. Its structure is similar to that of the trial-produced prototype weapon. It can be put into principle testing after modification. In addition, it can be made larger, and the parts do not need to be designed to be closely connected. For me, it is equivalent to reducing the difficulty.

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