After returning to the palace, Su Yonglin ordered the relocation of the coking factory and iron smelting factory outside the city, and ordered the selection of soldiers with high educational levels and strong bodies from the army.
He didn't want to wait any longer. He wanted to immediately start preparing to form the Ming Army's first formally organized firearms unit.
The Ming army also used firearms before, such as the thunder cannon fired by trebuchets, and large rockets fired by bed crossbows, but they were not considered an organized firearms unit.
Like the crossbowmen, the artillery is an obvious technical branch.
They need to master a series of professional skills such as firing the gun, cleaning the gun body, maintaining the artillery, etc. They are both combat soldiers and logistics personnel, so they need strong professional and technical capabilities.
It obviously takes a long time to build a technical army from scratch, so from this time on, Su Yonglin started to build an artillery unit.
The more than a thousand people selected first were high-quality Ming soldiers from the Yanyun Corps.
They were taken to the Firearms Bureau to see the appearance of the new artillery, observe the firing, and understand the lethality of the artillery. At the same time, they studied the specific performance and specific parameters of the artillery with the craftsmen of the Firearms Bureau.
They need to record these important parameters so that they can evolve into professional standards for the artillery branch in the future.
Su Yonglin also participated in this process many times, discussing these issues with the soldiers and craftsmen, and basically participated in the entire process of artillery formation.
He even personally served as the commander of the first artillery unit, giving them orders to complete the entire process of transportation, placement, loading, and firing.
The sound of cannons rumbled, shaking the sky and the earth.
The initial experimental city wall had been smashed. Su Yonglin mobilized soldiers from the Yanyun Corps and craftsmen from Zhongdu to rebuild some walls in the north of Zhongdu City as special experimental walls for artillery experiments.
Among them are the most common rammed earth city walls, and the rarer brick-clad city walls. Su Yonglin also specifically asked them to use different engineering strengths to make these walls.
The city walls are relatively inferior, rushed, and made of ordinary and impure loess.
There are also very carefully constructed and extremely strong city walls. The main material even uses the Sanhe soil type that ruled Wancheng in the past. It is so strong that even the craftsmen from the Ministry of Industry feel that this is too wasteful. It is better to equip some cities with such The city wall would be better.
But in the military, Su Yonglin never hesitated to invest.
Military expenses cannot be saved.
If military expenditures are withheld in order to save money, the saved military expenditures will double as expenditures on the battlefield, bringing unexpected disasters to the country that will be difficult to make up for.
There is always some money that cannot be saved no matter what.
Let the artillery shoot at different city walls, shoot from different angles and different distances, and then observe the degree of damage to the city wall to determine from which angle and distance the artillery should fire to achieve the best effect.
In order to achieve such a goal, Su Yonglin spent about ten walls and recorded countless data, forcing Lin Jingchun to come to the site to supervise the work in person to avoid waste.
Lin Jingchun had no choice. This was military expenditure and could not be saved. He still understood this truth. Besides, after several wars, the Ming Dynasty's fiscal revenue was quite abundant. Now the Ministry of Finance and the national treasury had considerable savings, so the Ten-Sided Experiment It's just a city wall, no big deal.
Yeah, no big deal.
Lin Jingchun hypnotized himself like this, forcing himself to pretend not to care, but he really didn't look like he didn't care at all.
It felt like the iron bullets fired from the artillery were not hitting the wall, but hitting his heart.
A large amount of practical operations greatly enhanced the professionalism of the artillery, and a large amount of data increased the scientific nature of shooting. Su Yonglin used a rigorous scientific attitude and the level of spending money like a big dog to raise the Ming Army's artillery force.
Not only was the artillery unit mobilized by Su Yonglin, until March of the fourth year of Hongwu, Su Yonglin also used the 200 finished matchlocks produced by the Firearms Bureau to form the first musketry team of the Ming Dynasty.
The selected high-quality soldiers of the Ming Dynasty were dragged by Su Yonglin to the military academy outside Zhongdu for intensive training. They were equipped with enough matchlocks, gunpowder and iron, and practiced firing for a long time around the clock until their waists and knees were sore and weak.
Through the training of these 200 people, Su Yonglin also summarized some key points of formation and operation of the Musketeers.
For example, problems with firing rate and firing safety can be solved by customizing ammunition.
The problem of early muskets was the same as that of artillery. If there was less gunpowder, it would not be powerful enough. If there was too much gunpowder, the chamber would explode.
Therefore, based on continuous calculations and experiments, we can summarize how much gunpowder can achieve the best shooting effect, and then determine it through fixed-loading ammunition. It is indeed a good way to solve the problem for soldiers to carry fixed-loading ammunition.
In this sense, the bullets of modern firearms are also fixed ammunition.
Su Yonglin instructed the Firearms Bureau to use two different bamboo tubes to load gunpowder. The large bamboo tube was used to load the gunpowder in the barrel, and the small bamboo tube was used to load the propellant gunpowder. In addition, he carried a projectile tube with him, and carried rolls of match rope on his back.
When firing, the gunpowder in the large bamboo tube is poured into the barrel, and the gunpowder in the small bamboo tube is poured into the fire door chamber, and then the projectiles are stuffed into the gun to prepare for firing. This can save the time of loading gunpowder and improve the firing efficiency.
In addition, although Ming army granular gunpowder burns more fully than powder gunpowder and leaves less residue, after multiple firings, there will inevitably be gunpowder residue in the barrel, which will affect the firing efficiency and even cause the barrel to explode.
Therefore, after many tests, the musketry team also determined the regulations for how many times the firearm needs to be cleaned after firing to ensure that the firearm will not explode due to clogging of gunpowder residue.
In addition, regarding the staged shooting, Su Yonglin also ordered the musketeer team to start training.
In order to form a continuous firepower, this unit needs to maintain continuous firing in a segmented firing method to enhance the deterrence of the enemy.
How to segment, how to take over firing, and how to ensure that soldiers can complete loading ammunition and prepare to fire within the specified time, all require a lot of training to complete.
But the good thing is that this kind of training is easy to understand and easy to get started. Generally speaking, basic training of a musketeer can be completed within two or three months of intensive training.
Compared with the normal training time of two to three years for crossbows and three to five years for cavalry, the training cost of musketeers is really low.
And when Su Yonglin realized the advantages of musketeers' extremely low training cost compared to crossbowmen, he realized even more why musketeers had become an indispensable force in the world in an era when muskets were immature, and finally laughed. Proud of the battlefield.
Compared with other traditional arms, the training cost is really cheap.
