I am the prince of the Ming Dynasty, I don't give up

Chapter 215 Bird Gun
In addition, some tiger squat cannons were also manufactured. This was mainly because Zhu Houxuan had limited knowledge of cannons of this era, so he made them all to try out.

Anyway, Zhu Houxuan and the Portuguese cannon makers also figured out the European cannons of that era during this period.

The mainstream of this era was still the muzzle-loading cannon, which had great power, a long range and a slow rate of fire, and was most effective for sieges. The breech-loading cannon, represented by the falconet, had a fast rate of fire, a short range and low power, and was mostly used in field battles and naval battles.

The breech-loading cannon at that time was quite advanced in this era, but its fatal flaw was air leakage in the barrel.

Take the Portuguese cannon, for example. It was a bit like an old-fashioned breech-loading rifle, with an open belly and a huge groove.

The gunner can load iron bullets and gunpowder into the sub-gun in advance, and then directly install the sub-gun into the slotted belly of the gun when shooting, and then wedge in the breech block that fixes the sub-gun to fire.

This type of artillery has a fast rate of fire, fast heat dissipation, and fast ammunition replacement. The first three shots can be fired in 20 seconds, and the next ones can be fired once in less than a minute.

It is also very safe, with the main gun and the secondary gun separated, so there is no need to worry about the barrel overheating and causing the gun to spontaneously ignite. The secondary gun bears most of the explosion pressure, so if it is broken, just replace the secondary gun, and the main gun has a very long service life.

However, its air tightness is extremely poor, and it may explode in serious cases. In addition, its range is short and its power is small, making it very unsuitable for use as heavy artillery.

Zhu Houxuan also wanted to solve the airtightness problem of the Portuguese artillery, but it was too difficult given the technical conditions of the era.
This design of the breech and belly of the gun cannot improve the airtightness at all. If you want to prevent air leakage, you must redesign the belly of the gun, which is equivalent to designing a completely new gun.

However, this is a powerful weapon for land field battles. Where else could you find a cannon that could fire one round every few seconds?
And this kind of artillery is necessary to deal with the highly mobile Mongols.

However, the research on muzzle-loading cannons should also be put on the agenda, because muzzle-loading cannons will be the mainstream for the next 200 years.

Moreover, Zhu Houxuan suddenly realized that if the Portuguese, who dominated the ocean at that time, generally used this kind of Portuguese artillery, then it can be inferred that the artillery at that time was still in a supporting position in naval warfare, and its power was too small to sink the enemy, and the final victory would have to rely on boarding battles.

In order to gain a technological advantage in future naval battles, it was necessary to use muzzle-loading cannons with good airtightness, long range, high accuracy, great power, and long barrels. Of course, this type of artillery was also heavy. The most representative one was the famous Red Cannon in later generations, which weighed several thousand pounds at a time and was suitable for sieges, defenses, and naval battles.

Although Zhu Houxuan's eyes were still mainly on the Mongols, he had already begun to consider the future struggle for maritime hegemony. He wanted to use his foresight to give the Ming Dynasty's navy a technical advantage in ships and artillery to make up for the Ming Dynasty's lack of navigation experience.
After clarifying the direction of artillery manufacturing, the scale advantage of the Ming Royal Group soon became apparent. In less than a month, it produced more than 20 Portuguese steel cannons, as well as a dozen small cannons and tiger squat cannons weighing about 100 pounds.

This is just a trial production and has not yet been completely finalized and put into mass production, because Zhu Houxuan still needs to use it in the new army for a while to see how it works.

The new army of 50,000 people was expected to be equipped with hundreds of cannons.

In fact, the cost of these cannons was not high for the Royal Group. It was mainly labor. Although a lot of steel was used, steel was not expensive for the Royal Group of the Ming Dynasty. Moreover, after the cannons were scrapped, they could be recovered as scrap steel. In addition, during the cannon casting period, Zhu Houxuan was also promoting the improvement of fire guns.
At this time, the Ming Dynasty's muskets were still of the style of the early Ming Dynasty. When firing this type of musket, the shooter needed to hold the gun with one hand and light the wick coming out of the firing port with the other hand to ignite the gunpowder in the chamber and shoot the bullet out.

After this method of firing the open flame gun was introduced to Europe, it was adopted by European firearms developers as the firing method of the earliest European musket - the matchlock gun.
This method of firing was slow and laborious, so Europeans developed the matchlock gun.

To put it simply, this thing is to light the fuse that originally needed to be lit by hand in advance, and then fix it with an iron hook. Fix the iron hook next to the chamber where the gunpowder is placed. Every time you want to fire, press the iron hook to press the burning fuse into the chamber to ignite the gunpowder. This is the most primitive matchlock gun.

Its basic structure and appearance are close to modern rifles. It is the prototype of modern rifles and a landmark product of the transition of human warfare from the era of cold weapons to the era of hot weapons.

This ignition method allows the user to continuously ignite and fire projectiles as long as he pulls the trigger, thereby increasing the firing speed and enhancing the lethality.

The manufacturing process of the matchlock gun was not complicated, and it mainly involved the improvement of the ignition method. Craftsmen quickly imitated it.

However, Zhu Houxuan was not satisfied with this primitive matchlock gun. He turned his attention to the ultimate evolution of the matchlock gun - the bird gun.

The barrel of the bird gun is longer and the caliber is smaller. It fires round lead bullets of the same caliber, with a longer range and stronger attack power.

The gun barrel is relatively slender, which allows the gunpowder to burn fully in the gun barrel, generating greater thrust, making the projectile's initial velocity faster, achieving a low and straight trajectory, and hitting targets at a longer distance.

The range of the bird gun is 100 steps when fired horizontally, and about 200 steps when fired with the gun raised. In the Ming Dynasty, one step was 1.5 meters, which means the maximum range was about 300 meters.

The ammunition for the bird gun is generally a three-qian (11g) bullet. Bullets of this weight are difficult to penetrate heavy armor at medium and long distances, but they are enough to deal with Mongols who do not have much heavy armor.

If the enemy Zhu Houxuan was facing at this moment was the Jiannu heavy armored infantry, he would definitely quickly build a heavy matchlock gun and increase the weight of the projectile to more than 30g, so that the power could almost ignore the heavy armor.

The difficulty in making a bird gun lies in the manufacture of the barrel. Zhu Houxuan had no good solution for this because the barrel could not be cast with molten steel like a cannon, because there would be some pores in the molten steel during the casting process. These pores were not a big problem on the cannon, after all, the wall of the tube was thick, but they were not a problem on the gun barrel. The presence of a pore would greatly reduce the performance of the barrel.

Therefore, the steel used to make gun barrels is repeatedly forged to remove bubbles and impurities. In addition, the inner diameter of the gun barrel is still too small. If it is sand cast, the gun barrel will be relatively rough and prone to sand holes, so it is still necessary to use the forging method to roll out a gun barrel.

A good gun barrel is made of wrought iron. It is wrapped with two layers of iron pipes, leaving a small opening in the middle. Then a steel drill is used to drill the opening into the gun barrel. Only about one inch can be drilled a day, and the barrel can be drilled smooth and straight in about a month.

The Royal Group has relevant technical reserves for this step, because the steel plant has already tested many alloy steel formulas.
(End of this chapter)