Chapter 84 Shooting Skills
The next day, Changning Guard took urgent action.
In addition to the one hundred guardsmen, the one hundred military men who were trained by Su Ze last time were also gathered in the name of group training.
The old man selected more than a hundred relatively strong young men and gathered them all on the school grounds.
Standing on the school grounds, Su Ze was wearing the cotton armor of his predecessor Baihu. He held a gun and said to everyone: "Everyone watch my movements. When I finish the demonstration, there will be a group of twenty people, and each person will shoot." Three shots at the target."
[Discover the location of the shooting range. You can learn the skill "shooting". Do you want to learn it? 】
"Learn!"
Su Ze was delighted. Although he had already figured out how to shoot a blunderbuss, the skills and movements would become more standard!
And shooting is a practical skill! There is one more skill that can be mastered!
Sure enough, the knowledge of shooting with blunderbuss entered Su Ze's mind, which was more correct than the set of rules he had thought about himself.
Su Ze first cleaned the ignition holes and the gunpowder pool. This step is actually crucial. Many bird guns will have gunpowder residue after being fired, or ashes will block the fuse holes. This is also the main reason why bird guns misfire. Effective cleaning can greatly Reduce the chance of duds.
Then Su Ze poured the primer ground into fine powder into the gunpowder pool and closed the lid of the gunpowder pool. Primer is an easily flammable gunpowder that ignites the propellant.
The next step is to pour the propellant from the gun chamber, then insert the lead beads in the mouth into the gun chamber, then remove the purge bar from the barrel, and compact the lead beads and propellant.
At this step, the standard action of loading is completed.
Su Ze wiped the sweat from his forehead. This gun was one meter and three meters long and heavy. Su Ze was sweating after operating it like this.
Finally, it was time to launch. Su Ze used a fire stick to light the musket's match. The match was specially treated to burn slowly.
Put the match rope on the match rope clamp, pull the trigger, and quickly open the gunpowder tank cover while the match rope falls. A thick smoke comes out of the gun, and then there is a burst of fire and a thunderous sound, and lead balls fly out from the barrel of the gun. , hitting the arm of a scarecrow-shaped target eighty paces away.
[Training bird gun hits, "Shooting" skill experience +1, Lv1, 1/100]
The accuracy is indeed not good. Su Ze aimed at the straw man's chest, but in the end the shot missed the arm.
Su Ze held the blunderbuss and looked back. Everyone in Changning Guard had different expressions.
The soldiers had also seen the gun, and were not afraid of the fire and smoke of the gun. However, they saw that Su Ze could hit a grass man eighty steps away with one shot, and they had an intuitive understanding of the power of the gun.
Eighty steps, which is less than fifty meters, is the shooting range that archers require accuracy.
Qi Jiguang's standard for military training is that if an archer can hit two out of three shots within eighty steps, he is considered a good shooter. The minimum requirement is to hit one out of three shots. If he misses all three shots, he will be punished.
You must know that the Qi Army is already one of the most elite troops in the Ming Dynasty. Even if you read some novels, it can always hit the enemy with a hundred steps. The accuracy of bows and arrows is just like this. The army's bow and arrow shooting training during the Ming Dynasty was seriously insufficient. It is already possible to have this hit rate. Pretty good.
Moreover, the power of the gunshot is actually not small. A large piece of straw will be taken away from the straw man who is shot. If it hits a human body, a large piece of meat will be lost.
Lin Mojun fell into deep thought. No wonder Su Ze insisted on buying a blunderbuss. This blunderbuss is indeed a magic weapon!
Moreover, Lin Mojun knew that Su Ze had never practiced shooting with a bird gun and hit a target eighty steps away. As expected, it was as Su Ze said. The training period of a bird gunner is shorter than that of an archer. As long as there are enough birds, With guns and ammunition, a team of gunners can be quickly trained.
The ordinary Changning Guardsman Yu was startled by the explosion, smoke and fire from the cannon. When he saw the big hole in the straw man's body, he looked at Su Ze with fearful eyes.
"I'll demonstrate again. There will be a group of twenty people later. Each person will shoot three rounds. The one who hits will get a prize!"
Hearing that there will be a reward for the one who hits the target, the atmosphere in the school grounds became a little more lively. Those fearful young military veterans Also open your eyes wide and watch Su Ze shoot carefully.
[Military training in the school field, "Art of War" skill experience +10, Lv3, 9/300] It
has finally been upgraded. These days, I discuss the art of war with Lin Mojun every day. It is also about training. The art of war has been upgraded to level three. Su Ze has done more training. knowledge of details.
Suppressing the knowledge that came to his mind, Su Ze started over again without any distractions, starting from cleaning the ignition hole and the gunpowder pool and preparing to shoot again.
This time there is no need to relight the match. You only need to re-draw the match to the appropriate length and press the trigger to ignite the shot.
There was a gunshot. Su Ze was lucky this time. The lead bullet hit the center of the straw man and made a big hole.
Cheers erupted from the school grounds, and Su Ze emphasized the action procedures again before having all the muskets brought up and ordered everyone to prepare to shoot.
Su Ze came to the school today to select a group of gunners.
In addition to the fifty muskets ordered from Zhang Haihu, Su Ze hopes to select 70 musketeers. Although it is still less than the 200 musketeers of Lu Dawang, Su Ze believes that relying on his own tactical training and battle formation skills can make up for the gap in numbers.
Each person fires three rounds in order to select qualified soldiers who meet the conditions of a gunman.
Lin Mojun simply took off his hood today, covered his mouth and nose with a veil, and stood next to Su Ze to watch the soldiers shoot.
Although Su Ze had lowered his expectations, the performance of these soldiers still made Su Ze feel outrageous.
The guard soldiers who listened carefully to Su Ze's military lectures these days were okay, and they could barely complete three shots. Although they often forgot to clean the fuse hole or the gun chamber, they could still remember the process.
The military remnants who had trained with Su Ze in the Yuanyang Formation were slightly worse, mainly because they often made mistakes in the steps. One man actually stuffed the propellant into the gunpowder pool. Fortunately, Su Ze quickly snatched the gun from his hand. That's why I didn't blow up this blunderbuss.
The performance of the last hundred Changning Wei Qingzhuang who had not been trained was very speechless.
Su Ze had just demonstrated it twice, but they basically didn't remember the steps correctly. They even forgot to do the step that Su Ze repeatedly emphasized to compact the lead bullet gunpowder with a rod.
Some were so smart that they even forgot to light the match and kept pulling the trigger.
If it weren't for Su Ze's quick reaction, these guys could have used twenty muskets.
In the end, Su Ze set the standard that those who could successfully fire twice out of three times were considered shortlisted for the team of gunners. As a result, only 70 people were selected out of the 300 people on the school field.
Now Su Ze understood why the gunmen were assigned to the industrial era army.
Without the strict discipline training of industrialization, it would be difficult for soldiers in the agricultural era to complete the operation of gunfire.
This was still a shooting practice, and Su Ze was guiding and watching. If he were on the battlefield, he would probably be killed before he could even shoot these people.
It took Su Ze thirty seconds to complete the entire loading and firing process of the musket, while the guard soldier who performed best took two minutes to shoot the lead bullet.
Without long-term discipline training and industrial production process thinking, it is too difficult to train illiterate farmers into gunshot players.
Thanks to the fact that hundreds of households in the Changning Guard have carefully trained their soldiers for generations, and the Changning Guard also has a tradition of militia training, they were able to scrape together the resources of these seventy gunmen. Among them, there were forty regular soldiers, twenty of them were Yuanyang formation soldiers trained by Su Ze, and the other ten were Changning Wei Qingzhuang summoned by my grandfather.
Those who were not selected as gunners were organized into a team of eleven to practice the Yuanyang Formation. Lin Mojun had already promoted the Mandarin Duck Formation in the main camp and conducted many drills.
Lin Mojun also remembered the training methods of the Mandarin Duck Formation. Su Ze let these people practice to Lin Mojun, and he took the 70 selected bird gunners to the other end of the school field.
Su Ze first asked people to distribute the bamboo spears used for training.
These guys can even make mistakes in the steps of shooting bird guns. If they were allowed to practice with real bird guns, all twenty bird guns would have exploded in less than a day.
This is a training prop made by Su Ze using his carpentry and stonemasonry skills.
Using bamboo as the barrel and stone as the weight, Su Ze also made a wooden stock and trigger, and hemp rope as a match rope.
Except that these training guns cannot be fired, their weight, length and shape are exactly the same as real muskets.
Su Ze asked them to use the training gun to practice the firing steps. The first step in building a gunman is to be able to fire bullets.
As for things like accuracy, that's not something these newbies need to consider.
After training at the school ground in the morning, Su Ze ate a piece of wheat cake for lunch and hurriedly found Lin Xianzong, the master craftsman of Changning Guard.
"Uncle Xianzong, can you make these parts?"
Su Ze held up a drawing of textile machine parts and handed it to Lin Xianzong.
Lin Xianzong frowned. The drawings Su Ze drew were of parts. The drawings were very detailed, but they did not show what they would look like after they were installed as a whole. It was just that some of these parts required very high precision, and his apprentices might not be able to do it well.
The drawings of these parts took up a whole piece of paper. Lin Xianzong had built ships, and of course he had seen more complicated drawings than this.
But what are so many small parts used for when put together?
Lin Xianzong was indeed a great craftsman, and he saw the purpose of this machine from the spinning wheel.
"This is? A loom?"
Women in Changningwei can also spin yarn, and looms are also common in Changningwei.
What Changning Wei uses is basically a handloom modified by Huang Daopo.
Of course Lin Xianzong could make that kind of loom, but the complex loom designed by Su Ze was something Lin Xianzong had never seen before.
Su Ze smiled and said: "Uncle Xianzong, I want ten sets of parts from the drawings, can you do it?" The
Jenny spinning machine is also hand-driven. In fact, the principle of weaving is similar to the hand-operated spinning wheel used in Songjiang Prefecture today. It’s the same, the difference is that the Jenny Spinning Machine can use multiple spindles to weave cloth at one time, which is eight times faster than a hand spinning wheel that can weave cloth with one spindle!
The significance of this eight times is huge. In other words, Su Ze only needs to build ten Jenny spinning machines, which can be equivalent to the working efficiency of 80 ordinary spinning wheels. Naturally, a major cost of spinning is labor cost. This This machine will greatly improve the weaving efficiency of cotton yarn.
Another function of machine production is that as long as you master the machine, you can master the production materials.
This is completely different from the handicraft production model. For example, Su Ze refines salt and makes sugar. In fact, strictly speaking, it is just a workshop, not a "factory".
To others, Su Ze relies on the so-called "secret recipe" to make refined salt and sugar. He can produce purer salt and whiter sugar by relying on several key "craftsmanship".
In particular, the method of removing the bitter taste in the final step of refining salt is not complicated to explain, and anyone can follow the trend and make it.
This is why Su Ze has done all the steps of refining salt and crystallizing rock sugar by himself until now. This is not because he doesn’t trust the people of Changning Wei, but because once these "secret recipes" are revealed, others can quickly catch up. The price of sugar and refined sugar will not be so high, and profits will immediately drop.
In fact, this is also true. At the end of the Ming Dynasty when Song Yingxing lived, the price of white sugar was only twice that of ordinary brown sugar. It was no longer the ten-fold profiteering during the Jiajing period.
The reason why salt prices can still remain high is because of the government's monopoly.
But the machines are different.
Machines are means of production. With textile machines, Su Ze can safely build a cotton yarn factory and let people from Changningwei participate in factory production.
The factory is a natural barrier. Without stealing a textile machine, others cannot imitate the textile machine. The production materials are in Su Ze's hands.
As long as the safety of the factory is ensured, the weaving factory can continuously bring profits without worrying about technology leakage.
The drawings Su Ze handed over to Lin Xianzong were only for some parts, not all the parts of the textile machine. The key shuttles and gears were made by Su Ze himself.
As for the women who weaved in Changning, Su Ze was not worried that they could memorize the structure of the loom. How could a woman who didn't know these words accurately describe the structure of the machine to outsiders?
Su Ze couldn't help but sigh, this is why there was a handicraft industry in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, but industrialization could not occur.
The production of the workshop relies on secret recipes that are not disclosed, and the money earned is the labor force. Even for the workshop owner, the expansion of the workshop scale means that more manpower is needed, but more manpower can only bring single-fold profits. , but the management cost has doubled.
For a carpenter like Lin Xianzong, his workshop relies on his apprentices and family members. Adding more manpower will make it harder to manage, and the money earned may not be more than maintaining the current scale.
But the factory is different. The textile machine brings an eight-fold increase in efficiency, which means that one more worker is almost eight times the profit. Only with such crazy profits can there be a large-scale expansion of industrialization.
There is only one word difference between workshop and factory, but the changes in production relations brought about are earth-shaking.
But Su Ze did not travel to the Ming Dynasty to become a capitalist.
In fact, Changningwei's society is more like a small autonomous society that reports to groups for warmth.
Su Ze plans to set up a textile cooperative in Changningwei, organize the women of Changningwei to participate, and let them manage themselves.
In this way, he only needs to purchase cloth at the normal cotton purchase price, and he can develop a new industry in Changningwei.
Now Su Ze has figured out that he cannot complete his career by himself. He must first unite the people around him, that is, the people of Changning Wei.
Although the weaving factory has considerable profits, it is nothing compared to the cannon foundry and gun-making factory.
The most important thing is the barrel of the gun, otherwise the better Changning Wei develops, the more it will be a fat sheep in the eyes of others.
(End of chapter)