Hantian Machinery Factory did not dare to decide on the Qin family's purchase of new spinning machines and new looms, but quickly reported it to the Ministry of Industry.
After all, Hantian Machinery Factory is still a relatively special factory. The mission of this factory from the beginning is to develop and produce various types of mechanical equipment for Hantian Arsenal and many other factories affiliated to the Ministry of Industry. Although it also has various civilian products For external sales, they are all ordinary civilian products and do not include various types of mechanical equipment.
All kinds of mechanical equipment are also very important to the Da Chu Empire. To a certain extent, the reason why the Da Chu Empire can produce so many advanced guns and cannons is that even the output of traditional weapons such as armor is not that of ordinary handicraft workshops. can be compared.
And these all rely on these mechanical equipment!
A large number of mechanical equipment is the foundation of the national defense strength of the Da Chu Empire. It is precisely because of the large number of mechanical equipment that is ahead of the contemporary level that the Da Chu Empire can still do a lot of work even with a limited number of mid-to-high-end craftsmen. To large-scale production of various types of guns, cold weapons, armor and other weapons and equipment.
Because if mechanical production is used, many processes do not require manual operation by skilled craftsmen, but can be produced by skilled workers operating machinery.
This is very obvious in processes that are repetitive and have certain technical requirements.
For example, the armor produced in the Dachu Empire today is actually no different from the armor of the Ming Army and Dongluo. They are all very typical cloth armor.
To put it bluntly, this kind of cloth armor is a sandwich...the outer layer is ordinary cloth or cotton armor, the middle is an iron piece, and the inner one is cotton armor.
Well, you can also directly understand this cotton armor as thicker and tighter cotton.
To put it simply, it is two layers of cloth holding one layer of iron.
Here, whether it is cloth or cotton armor, there is no technical difficulty.
But the layer of iron in the middle is not so easy to handle.
Maybe you will say that this is just adding an iron piece, but it sounds simple, but in fact it is not easy to do, especially if you want to mass-produce it.
This also involves an issue that is easily overlooked by ordinary people, that is, how to fix these iron pieces.
Whether it does not fall off during daily exercise, or the iron piece does not fall off even after receiving an arrow or a knife from the enemy during combat.
This alone involves a process that was very difficult for ancient craftsmen: drilling!
Drilling a piece of iron that has been forged repeatedly and has a hardness close to the level of low carbon steel. The thickness is generally two to three millimeters thick, and some are even four to five millimeters thick. This is not an easy task, even if it is placed on the In later generations, if you don't have professional tools, it will not be easy to drill a hole in an iron piece.
Before drilling, you have to grind and remove burrs from the iron sheet, and then the most important thing is to shape the iron sheet!
After all, you have to process the iron sheet into a fixed size iron sheet before proceeding to the next step of processing.
Fixing the size is not difficult. What is difficult is that the processed iron sheet needs to have good properties. It cannot be too brittle or too soft. It is best to be one that can be made into low carbon steel.
At the same time, the Dachu Empire is currently unable to directly refine steel on a large scale and stably... If the furnace temperature cannot be reached, there is no way to directly refine steel.
The Da Chu Empire still relies on the traditional method of frying steel to produce steel. The cost is high, the quality is unstable, and the output is low... The limited amount of steel is used for internal production, especially the steel used to build various machinery. Those who make parts, not to mention armor, even guns and other items are reluctant to use these expensive steel materials, and the output is only a small amount.
So the iron pieces on the armor on the Chu Empire's side are just ordinary iron.
Of course, even the iron speed cannot be used directly. It has to be beaten into iron pieces.
What, you said pour it directly into an iron piece and form it in one go... With the current technology of the Chu Empire, if you dare to do this, this iron piece will not even be able to block the arrows of the half-stone bow, and it will explode for you in minutes. look.
This iron piece must first be forged into shape, and then the next step of cutting, grinding, drilling and other processes can be carried out.
This forging work is the most important work in the iron sheet forming process. It is extremely time-consuming to make it by hand, and it is difficult to ensure uniform quality.
But here in the Dachu Empire, water-powered forging machines are directly used for forging. A few hits with a large machine-driven hammer is enough.
The subsequent cutting, grinding, deburring and hole drilling also use mechanical equipment on a large scale. At first glance, it seems that this thing is not difficult:
A piece of red-hot iron turned into a piece of iron under the machine's big hammer in two or three strokes. It was then deburred and polished under the same mechanical grinder, and then sent to the drilling machine. The workers casually The hole is drilled in just two operations...
In this way, the iron sheet used in a piece of armor has completed the three most important processes. The subsequent step is to paint it to prevent rust, and then use rivets and the front and rear layers of cloth to fix the connection.
Because of the rivets, if this kind of armor does not add an extra layer of useless, purely decorative cloth to the outer layer, then you can see densely packed rivets if you look directly at it.
These bubble nails actually fix the inner iron sheets.
Of course, in later generations, Dongduo captured horses and released them to Nanshan. Coupled with the continuous development of firearms, armor became less and less useful. Dongduo gradually removed the iron pieces from the cloth armor and only retained a symbolic protective heart. Mirror, or even don’t even need a breast shield...
However, these bubble nails were retained and turned into purely decorative bubble nails...
The three processes of "forging the iron sheet, polishing and deburring the iron sheet, and drilling the iron sheet" in the production of iron sheets used in armor are the most time-consuming and the most demanding processes for craftsmen in the production of armor. At the same time, they are also the highest cost. of three processes.
It is because of the difficulty in producing these iron sheets that ancient armors such as fish scale armor, pierced armor or cloth armor, which are composed of many small iron sheets, are often very expensive.
An ordinary full set of cloth armor used by infantry often costs twenty or thirty taels of silver. This price is roughly the same as the price of an ordinary Mongolian horse.
And the price of a matchlock gun is only three or four taels of silver. This is the price of the Ming court's imitation of the Chu-made thieves-killing blunderbuss.
A good waist knife, well, that is, a steel blade with an iron body. The steel knife that people often talked about in ancient times cost about one tael of silver, and sometimes it was not used...
An artillery piece only costs tens or hundreds of taels of silver. The Ming Dynasty cast a small cannon weighing tens or hundreds of kilograms, such as the squatting tiger cannon, for only a few dozen taels of silver, and the cheaper ones cost only more than ten taels of silver. .
Long-barreled field cannons are more expensive, mainly because the yield rate is relatively low and many are scrapped. Even so, in the past two years, various workshops in the Ming Dynasty have cast two and a half kilograms of iron field cannons, and the price is only about two hundred taels to three hundred taels. About two. The five-pound iron cannon is more expensive, but it only costs between five hundred and one thousand taels.
The reason why prices fluctuate depends purely on the evil intentions of the officials in charge.
In other words, an ordinary set of infantry armor can buy four or five muskets or a horse.
A two-and-a-half-pound field gun is equivalent to four or five sets of infantry armor.
And this is also the reason why the number of heavily armored soldiers in the Ming court and even Dongdu is very small, and their proportion of the overall army is very low.
In the Ming army, only soldiers or officers were often equipped with this kind of full set of infantry armor, and there were similar elites in Dongluo, such as white-armored soldiers.
As for the others, there are a lot of ordinary soldiers in the Ming army, and there are a bunch of similar Eight Banners soldiers in Dongli. These soldiers are equipped with very rubbish armor, or simply cotton armor without iron plates.
Then there are still a bunch of young and strong conscripted guards in the Ming army who don't even have cotton armor.
There is also a group of miscellaneous auxiliary soldiers on the Dongdu side.
The configuration of arms of both warring parties is actually similar, and the reason that led them to make these common choices is also the same: armor is really expensive!
A set of dozens of taels, then a set of ten thousand is hundreds of thousands of taels, and a set of one hundred thousand is several million.
Even if it is simply expensive, it cannot be mass-produced in a short period of time, because traditional hand-made production is very fast and requires high craftsmanship.
There are only so many skilled craftsmen, so even if they have money, it will be difficult for them to obtain a large amount of new armor in a short period of time during war.
Unfortunately, this thing is not a one-time purchase that can be used all the time. It is also a consumable. After a war, quite a few pieces of armor need to be repaired or simply damaged beyond repair.
innocent
When the Chu army fought, there was no shortage of armor among the various materials transported from the rear.
These armors are used to replace frontline battle losses.
But those who can match the Chu army are not accepted. In fact, in most periods, no matter what country, the rulers rarely equip ordinary soldiers with these high-quality armors, and often just give them some iron pieces.
The simple breastplates and half-body armor worn by ordinary soldiers in Western Europe, and the large-area iron armor in East Asia may have different names in troubled times, but they are actually the same kind of junk, "large-area iron armor," which belongs to the company of bows and arrows. The kind that can't be stopped, it's just a psychological comfort on the battlefield.
Therefore, in the era of handicraft industry, armor was a direct reflection of a country's productivity.
The reason why the Dachu Empire is now able to equip ordinary soldiers with high-quality cloth armor is that, in addition to not being short of money, the more important reason is that the Dachu Empire uses machinery to mass-produce, breaking through the limit on the number of skilled craftsmen.
The large amount of machinery and equipment is the direct reason why the Great Chu Empire has such a huge production capacity of various types of ordnance.
Such important mechanical equipment naturally received great attention in the Da Chu Empire.
The Ministry of Industry of the Dachu Empire has successively established five large-scale machinery factories: Xiangyang Machinery Factory, Hantian Machinery Factory, Changsha Machinery Factory, Jiujiang Machinery Factory, and Dangtu Machinery Factory. In addition, it has also established a number of small and medium-sized machinery factories in some important cities. It is not a mechanical factory that is technically advanced in terms of scale.
These machinery factories carry out research, development and production of various types of machinery and equipment for dozens of important national defense companies and more than a hundred other types of factories in the Chu Empire.
But now, the Qin family from outside came to visit and said they wanted to purchase their machinery and equipment.
If an ordinary person comes looking for him, Hantian Machinery Factory will kick him out without the Ministry of Industry taking action.
However, the Qin family was so rich that they offered a price that Hantian Factory could not refuse and even the Ministry of Industry seemed hesitant.
When the Qin family saw that the person in charge of the Ministry of Industry hesitated and seemed to be willing to relent, they immediately increased the price.
We can also work with other textile families to jointly purchase your new machinery and equipment, not only looms and spinning machines, but also many other supporting machinery and equipment.
From cotton to finished cloth, a complete production line.
The total purchase amount is definitely more than three hundred thousand taels!
After three hundred thousand taels were spent, the matter was reported to the ears of Yuan Gaofeng, the Minister of Industry and Counselor. However, Yuan Gaofeng did not dare to make up his mind, and finally reported it to the Holy See.
When Luo Zhixue learned about this, he smiled and said, "Why not? People use money to buy machinery, but they don't get it for nothing."
"Besides, the gentry are willing to devote themselves to industry, provide jobs for the people, increase tax revenue for the national treasury, and increase income for cotton farmers. This will be a good thing for the country and the people. It is much better than letting them focus on the two acres of ruined land!"
After Luo Zhixue's speech, the matter was finally finalized.
The Qin family finally obtained the new equipment they had dreamed of. The complete production line from cotton to finished cloth was not one set, but a total of seven production lines divided into different processes and production capacities.
Once these production lines are fully put into operation, the production capacity will directly surpass Hantian Textile Company and become the largest machine-made fabric manufacturer in the Dachu Empire and the world!
