Necromancer, summoning 055? What the heck?

Chapter 134 Hanhai Naval Factory, Cold and Hot Weapons

Over the next few months, the lord devoted almost all his attention to the steel industry chain.

At first, the lord's seemingly haphazard plans left the artisans and engineers of the territory completely bewildered.

Today a machine with a cold, gleaming light comes in here, tomorrow another piece of equipment covered in gauges is added there. The dwarf team has just finished racking their brains to learn about metal surface treatment, and the human engineers are now receiving training on nitrocellulose with furrowed brows.

The convoluted chemical symbols and rigorous operating procedures left everyone bewildered, leaving them with no choice but to memorize them by rote.

However, no matter how puzzled they were, no one would question it.

In the Vast Ocean Territory, you should simply listen to the lord's words.

Of course, the lord was open-minded and did not support such behavior. He repeatedly pointed out at the territory's council meetings that everyone should be realistic and offer more opinions!

Then, Chen Mo received a bunch of similar opinions.

"My lord, you are too busy with affairs of state and neglect your health. You should take a rest!"

"Yes, yes, my lord, you haven't been eating properly lately, always eating cold rice diluted with water. This is really bad for your health. We should ask the canteen to prepare special meals for you, after all, the rise and fall of the Vast Sea depends on you!"

"My lord, you don't even have a maidservant. I have several girls of suitable age at home, all gentle and kind..."

Unable to listen any longer, Chen Mo waved his hands repeatedly: "Stop talking nonsense, get out of here, get to work!"

In September, with the arrival of a new batch of equipment and the completion of initial installation led by engineering robots, some astute members of the Territory Council finally discerned the Lord's overall plan.

The governor of Helan was amazed and repeatedly emphasized in the council meeting: "When we do things, we always proceed from one to two, from two to three. At most, we can make some foreseeable preparations for the next step when we take the first step."

"The lord's planning is simply unpredictable. It's like putting a five here and a ten there. At first glance, it seems to have no pattern, but in the end, every position is just right, and the timing and steps are perfectly matched!"

"Perfectly integrated, as if divinely inspired!"

"I originally wanted to encourage everyone to learn from this, but after thinking it over, I realized that this is beyond your reach. Everyone should focus on their work, be conscientious and dutiful, and not let down the lord's cultivation and promotion."

So, what kind of industrial system did Lord Chen Mo plan, or rather, what kind of industrial system did the planning department of the Eastern Xia Central Government plan for the Han Hai Territory?

In short, this is a dual-track steel industry with both high-end and low-end components.

The lower-end route is called the ordinary short-process steelmaking production line, or simply the ordinary steel line.

The planning department of Dongxia raised a key issue: although the Hanhai Territory appears to be militarily strong, it has a significant weakness compared to traditional major powers—a scarcity of weapons and a serious lack of armor.

Fully equipping the troops with Dongxia-style firearms? That's unrealistic and too dangerous.

In the short term, the most ideal combination for the Han Hai Ling is a mix of common cold weapons and elite firearms.

The population of the Han Hai is mostly slaves purchased from the harsh northern lands. The age structure is quite healthy, mainly consisting of young men and women, plus a small number of teenagers and infants.

Slaves who were not physically strong simply could not survive.

To some extent, all the slaves in the north were selected and eliminated through round after round of cruel natural laws.

In addition to their daily work, these people in the desert also have to participate in simple militia military training, including morning exercises once a day and drills twice a week, rain or shine, without interruption.

If needed, a full mobilization based on the current size of the territory could mobilize up to four thousand militia members, including teenagers.

A true nation in arms.

However, the militia was severely under-equipped.

You can carry a wooden stick during training, but what if you really encounter a war?

The ordinary steel production line was prepared by Dongxia to temporarily arm these grassroots militia members.

Pig iron containing impurities from the reduction workshop of the First Steel Plant, also known as the "Iron Nest," will enter this ordinary steel production line and, after two simple processes, be transformed into the basic weaponry of the territory.

The first step is the steelmaking furnace melting. Under the technical guidance of Dongxia, it makes the most of the local raw materials of the Starry Continent and is built with a small amount of technological equipment. The melting temperature is about 1,600 degrees Celsius, which is just enough to melt the hard pig iron into red-hot molten iron.

The soul of this production line is a core piece of equipment specially made by Dongxia, called a toner precision dispensing machine.

This machine automatically senses the production process and adds carbon powder to the molten iron at the appropriate time. The inspectors' job is to maintain manual supervision, check the machine regularly, and replenish the carbon powder...

The low-carbon steel with added carbon powder can achieve a tensile strength of 250-300 MPa. Although it is still somewhat inferior to the locally refined equipment materials, it is more than enough to arm the militia.

The second step is sand casting.

The molten iron, heated to a high temperature and carbonized, was guided and poured into the neatly arranged sand molds in the foundry.

Steam rises, the metallic scent fills the air, and the molten iron cools and solidifies rapidly in the mold, forming a mold in one go!
The weapon design was also based on Dongxia's suggestion; the basic weapon of the Hanhai militia was the long spear.

Dongxia is one of the few modern armies on Earth that still uses cold weapons in combat, but it has indeed not studied large-scale cold weapon warfare for a long time.

A group of military experts had to dig up old tactical manuals and arrange multiple rounds of live-fire simulations before finally determining the recommended direction.

Regarding the proposal, the expert panel offered the following comments:

Swords and bladed weapons not only consume a lot of materials, but are also difficult to operate, requiring a long learning curve and having a high barrier to entry. They are more suitable for professional standing troops who can undergo long-term, high-intensity training.

As a typical long weapon, the rifle provides a significantly stronger sense of security to its wielder than short-weapon users, assuming soldiers of similar skill levels, thus helping to maintain basic morale within the unit.

For militia members, once basic formations are mastered, the power and stability of a gun formation far outweigh those of hand-to-hand combat.

With guns chosen as the primary weapon, the foundry will also be equipped with some shields, breastplates for ordinary militiamen, half-body armor for militia captains, full-body armor for rank-up warriors, and javelins as mid-range long-range weapons.

It wasn't until he truly began organizing and training melee weapon troops that Chen Mo truly understood why the orcs chose javelins as ranged weapons.

The making of a bow is extremely complicated.

Both the bow and the bowstring require special materials, involve complicated processing techniques, and take a long time to make. Moreover, they are difficult to train with.

An arrow that can't hit its mark is less threatening than a stone.

The javelin is much simpler. Like a spear, it's just a metal head and a wooden shaft. After a simple training session on how to throw a javelin, the rest is just a matter of whether you can throw accurately or not.

Whether it's accurate or not doesn't really matter; as long as it scares people, it's already effective.

Moreover, based on the principle of combining cold and hot weapons, a gun formation combined with a shield formation is clearly a more suitable way to protect against firepower from thermal weapons. The lord's second planned route is called the high-purity steel production line.

The raw materials were still pig iron, plus recycled scrap steel from discarded cold weapons.

This route utilizes almost all of the recent altar's transportation capacity, employing a plasma furnace for initial melting, followed by vacuum consumable electrode remelting, and then supplemented with alloy additives to ultimately produce high-quality steel billets and coils.

The materials were destined for a remote, heavily guarded military zone deep within the industrial park, behind a specially designed recessed area of ​​the reduction workshop.

The security here is so tight it's outrageous. The open space in front of the factory is covered with barbed wire and riddled with traps for horses of all sizes. The only two heavy machine guns in the entire territory are mounted on the permanent fortifications at the factory gate.

Meanwhile, there are also visible and concealed firing positions, with sniper rifles and grenade launchers taking turns to block them off. A group of loyal core members of the youth group, selected from the first phase of the Torch Program, carrying various types of cold and hot weapons, guard this factory area around the clock.

In other words, to attack this area, one must either break through the steel mill restoration workshop controlled by the seventh-tier Voidbreaker, or charge head-on into this dead zone controlled by firearms.

This is also the place where Lord Chen Mo usually comes most often.

After completing his training tasks for the day, Chen Mo once again led his personal guards and hurriedly arrived at the factory.

Before the car had even come to a complete stop, a burly figure was already standing and waiting outside the first cordon—it was none other than Old Niu, the captain of the personal guard, whose injuries were still healing and whose left arm was still in a sling.

Liu Zaiyue pounded his chest with his right fist, raised it, and gave a standard military salute.

"Is your injury almost healed? Are you feeling any discomfort anywhere?"

Old Liu scratched his head slightly: "No... it's just that, just thinking about that dark guy behind me makes me feel a little chilly."

"Haha, it's okay, as long as you don't run into the restoration workshop, he won't see you!"

After chatting for a few minutes, the two passed through three checkpoints and arrived at the factory gate. As the gate slowly opened, Tong Xu, the head of the processing department, jogged over to greet them.

Although Bronzebeard did not have dwarven blood, he had learned smelting and processing from his father for many years. He was so skilled that he was able to stand out among the technicians and become the factory's technical backbone and production manager.

The entire factory is divided into five areas.

The first area Chen Mo inspected was called the cartridge stamping workshop.

The machine set up here is a multi-station high-speed cold heading machine. This machine itself does not have a high level of technology, but in order to control the weight, ensure the reliability of the equipment in the desert environment, ensure the durability of key components, and make the replacement and maintenance of some vulnerable parts convenient, the engineers of Dongxia have gone to great lengths.

After repeated trials by the six major heavy industry groups, they finally produced this behemoth that weighs less than 400 kilograms and can process up to 2000 rounds per minute.

When Chen Mo arrived, the cold heading machine was operating at only one station, steadily and efficiently pressing the previously pickled and drawn steel strips into standard cup-shaped cartridge cases with a "crackling" sound.

Wearing gloves, Copperbeard carefully lifted a few still-warm shell casings and presented them to the lord.

"Sir, the machine is very stable. We have completed the testing of the yield rate of each workstation, and all of them have been debugged and qualified. We can start mass production at any time."

"Awaiting the lord's command!"

Area 2 is the primer assembly workshop.

Here, a row of automated robotic arms are embedded in the production line. Workers place the jigs filled with cartridge cases onto the production line, while on the other side, they place the materials to be filled in the hopper. The robotic arm group instantly completes the primer loading of a whole set of bullets by adding gunpowder and shaking the jigs.

"The main problem now is still the stability of the raw materials."

Copperbeard's voice was somewhat helpless: "If we use the materials that you, the great lord, obtained from the Mechanical Emperor and the Eastern Xia God, then there is no problem at all!"

"However, the quality of locally sourced materials varies considerably, making it difficult to control precisely at present. We may need... we may need some more time to study this."

Chen Mo deeply understands this point.

Dongxia's advantage lies in its standardization, whether in equipment or raw materials.

Whether it's mercury fulminate or a detonating agent, the next batch will be exactly the same as the previous one.

However, the locally produced nitrocellulose analogues and the gunpowder particles ground by the dwarf workshops are not only different from batch to batch, but also vary in quality even within the same batch.

Chen Mo now understands why, although the masters among the dwarves had created primitive firearms like the dwarven musket and heavy explosives like the Thunder Jar many years ago, the countries on the continent still use a war model of swords and magic, showing little interest in firearms.

The appearance of the workshop, a dwarf master and a level of skill, is not bad.

Even with the same master, there are differences between sunny and rainy days, and between having wine and not having wine. Even if you had a fight with your wife today and were in a bad mood, the things you make will be different.

Each piece is a limited edition.

Chen Mo had heard from the mercenary group's marksman that the firing time of the previous gun might have been three seconds, but the firing time of the new gun might have been two seconds.

That's barely acceptable, but what's truly terrifying is that the explosion time of the explosive canisters varies greatly, some lasting a long time and others a short time.

Not to mention that it can occasionally explode directly.

Therefore, the Thunder Jar, a "powerful weapon," was not even as common on the continent as the Dwarven Firearm.

Chen Mo commissioned the Seven Luminaries Garland Trading Company to purchase some gunpowder produced by the Dwarf Workshop. So far, they haven't fully figured out the best way to use it, and can only wait for the analysis results from Dongxia to see if there are any better testing and adjustment equipment.

The third area is called the bullet casting workshop, and the fourth area is the final assembly and testing workshop. The lord completed his inspection for the day and finally, in the warehouse area, saw baskets of finished bullets.

"This is the latest final inspection report."

"When the fully automated production module is used for processing, about 95 out of every 100 bullets produced are up to standard."

"Of the bullets made by the factory's manual processing modules, 73 to 75 out of 100 are of good quality."

"We are also urging workers in each shift to strengthen their skills training in order to further improve the yield rate!"

Actually, it's not bad; it's comparable to a certain major Eastern power on Earth.

No matter how difficult the process or how bumpy the construction was, Hanhailing finally acquired its own bullet manufacturing capability.

According to the revised version of the ninth point of the Hanhai Industrial Development Plan, once the bullet workshop of the Hanhai Naval Factory is completed, it can produce 500,000 to 600,000 bullets and more than 3,000 artillery shells per month, and has reserved space for further expansion of production capacity at any time, which is enough to provide the territory with a continuous supply of firepower support.

Chen Mo slowly tightened his grip on the bullet in his hand.

At this very moment, in the far north, a new storm is about to sweep across the continent, dragging the southern nations, still licking their wounds and not yet recovered from the shadow of the last war, into a new abyss once again.

(End of this chapter)