Sword of Light: Humanoid Self-Propelled Artillery

Chapter 41: Energy Convergence Effect Changes the Pattern of War
It was only when Wang Gensheng returned to his battalion headquarters that he discovered that his Third Battalion had a lot more people, making it fully staffed.

After asking around, I found out that this was Liujia Village. Many people in Liujia Town came here to join the army and fight the Japanese when they heard that the Eighth Route Army was recruiting soldiers.

So in just four or five days, Kong Jie's new second regiment was fully recruited.

The new Second Regiment now has more than a thousand people, and each battalion has more than three hundred people.

Now, outside Wangjia Village, the new recruits are training in full swing. However, this is the limit of the New Second Regiment. There is no other way because even if they want to expand, there are no guns to provide to the new recruits.

After the battle of Liujia Town, only about 500 guns were seized. Even if the Japanese squadron that was completely wiped out last time was included, the total number of rifles was less than 700. So it was already very good to be able to fully staff the New Second Regiment.

If they wanted to expand the New Second Regiment, for example, to expand it into a New Second Regiment with eight battalions like the later Independent Regiment, they would have to take the initiative to find a war.

And it is better to fight that kind of annihilation war, only in this way can we obtain more guns. You must know that the Eighth Route Army increased from more than 40,000 people in the early days of the War of Resistance to more than one million later, and most of the guns here were captured.

The Huangyadong Arsenal produced only more than 9,000 Type 81 cavalry rifles during the entire War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.

Therefore, the remaining 900,000 rifles were naturally captured from the Japanese or the second Japanese invaders. Therefore, before Wang Gensheng traveled through time, he did not believe the nonsense on the Internet that the Eighth Route Army did not fight against the Japanese during the War of Resistance.

Where did the more than 900,000 rifles in the hands of the Eighth Route Army, who did not fight the Japanese, come from? Were they given by the Japanese?
However, Wang Gensheng did not care about the training of the new recruits of the Third Battalion. After all, the training of the soldiers of the Third Battalion was already in the charge of the veterans, and the veterans of the original platoon of the Third Battalion were enough for the training of the Third Battalion.

So Wang Gensheng took a quick look at it and then took out the grenade and started thinking about how to turn it into an anti-tank grenade.

In fact, the most important part of an anti-tank grenade is the energy-gathering shield. You only need to install a conical brass energy-gathering shield inside the grenade.

This will allow the grenade to produce a focused energy effect when it explodes, thereby obtaining a high-temperature, high-speed metal jet that can penetrate the tank's metal armor.

To be honest, if there was no energy-gathering effect, the era after World War II would still be an era of steel torrents.

It is conceivable that if there is no shaped charge armor-piercing effect, those anti-tank missiles will become decorations, such as the Panzerfaust and the Bazooka, which will be waste.

To destroy a heavily armored tank, it may require a direct hit from a heavy missile such as a Prisoner of War missile that contains dozens or even hundreds of kilograms of TNT.

Therefore, the only way to deal with heavy tanks is to use heavy tanks to fire armor-piercing discarding sabot shells.

The powerful recoil generated by firing high-speed armor-piercing discarding sabot rounds is simply not something a fighter can withstand.

Therefore, if there is no concentrated energy armor-piercing effect, the war situation will be a torrent of steel against a torrent of steel with no other choice.

You have to know that before the invention of bazooka and Panzerfaust, the only means for ordinary infantry to fight tanks was anti-tank rifles.

However, as the tank armor of both sides became thicker in the later stages of World War II, anti-tank rifles became useless.

It’s not that we can’t produce anti-tank rifles with larger caliber and greater power, but that the more powerful anti-tank rifles have exceeded the upper limit of what ordinary soldiers can carry.

Greater power means a larger caliber, which in turn leads to heavier weight and greater recoil.

Therefore, the anti-tank rifle was destined to take a different path. The most powerful anti-tank rifle during World War II was Su Zheng's PTRD-41 anti-tank rifle.

This anti-tank rifle, combined with tungsten alloy armor-piercing bullets, can penetrate 40mm thick armor within 100 meters. However, such a powerful anti-tank rifle was not able to withstand the Tiger tank.

Because the front armor of the Tiger tank is as thick as 150 mm, and even the sides and rear are 80 mm thick. Only the top and bottom armor are slightly thinner, but that is still 40 mm thick.

So when faced with such armor, even the most powerful anti-tank rifle is not enough.

However, the RPG-2, which was later improved based on the Panzerfaust anti-tank rocket launcher, can penetrate armor to a depth of 180 mm, and its power has increased by more than four times.

Such armor-piercing capability is enough to deal with Tiger tanks.

Regardless of whether it is RPG-2, Panzerfaust, or Bazooka, the armor-piercing principle is the principle of concentrated energy.

Therefore, if the principle of shaped charge armor-piercing had not been applied, there might really have been a scene in the late World War II where soldiers carried explosive packs to pierce tanks.

As for this energy-gathering effect, also known as the Roman effect, it was discovered by the American chemist Charles Edward Roman in an experiment in 1888.

He discovered that if the bottom of a round column of explosives was hollowed out, it could penetrate multiple layers of steel plates when it exploded, while solid explosives could only leave a shallow mark.

The principle is that the explosion products fly along the normal direction of the explosive surface, and the design of the grooves or cavities makes the energy converge toward the axis, forming a high-speed, high-pressure flow of explosion products, thereby concentrating the release of chemical energy.

Therefore, this concentration effect is also called energy concentration effect.

The reason why Wang Gensheng knew it so clearly was because Wang Gensheng in his previous life had specifically looked it up. Of course, Wang Gensheng had also looked up the manufacturing method of TNT, but he only found out that the original name of TNT was trinitrotoluene, but he did not know clearly how to prepare it.

All I know is that toluene needs to be mixed with sulfuric acid and nitric acid, but it doesn't tell me what this toluene is and where to get it.

After all, Wang Gensheng is just a person who became famous on the Internet by playing with flying knives. He is not a chemistry major. How would he know how to make this thing!

Apart from anything else, in modern society, at least seven out of ten people don’t know how to make TNT. It was impossible to make TNT in ancient times.

It was also because of this that Wang Gensheng had no choice but to follow Kong Jie to fight the Japanese. If Wang Gensheng had a solid knowledge of chemistry and knew how to make smokeless gunpowder and TNT, Wang Gensheng would definitely report directly to the Huangyadong Arsenal.

However, although Wang Gensheng didn't know how to make TNT, he still knew how to dismantle the Type 97 grenade.

The Type 97 grenade is not pineapple-shaped, but cylindrical, like a small water cup.

There is a threaded lid on top. When you unscrew the lid, you can see the TNT explosives inside.

On the lid is a collision delay fuse made of brass. Wang Gensheng's method of modifying the Type 97 grenade is also very simple, that is, to remove the delay of the delay fuse and then the fuse of the grenade will directly become a collision fuse that explodes upon collision.

Then a brass cone-shaped charge cap for concentrated energy penetration is installed inside the grenade. In this way, the ordinary Type 97 grenade will be transformed into an armor-piercing grenade that can deal with tank armor.

Of course, it is easier said than done, just as everyone knows that nuclear bombs are made from uranium enrichment.

(End of this chapter)