Three Kingdoms

  Chapter 565 The bottleneck in the process

Huang Chengyan held it steadily, aimed at a wooden target a hundred steps away, and then pulled down the hanging knife. With a "bang", ordinary people's naked eyes could no longer catch such a fast crossbow arrow, as if it was going up. One second it was still on the track on the arm of the crossbow, and the next second it was viciously pounced on the wooden target!

The powerful vector acts on the wooden target, and the thickness of the wooden board, which is almost as wide as a palm, is like a piece of hemp paper that has been soaked in rain and exposed to the sun for days. , Sawdust flying everywhere...

  Huang Chengyan, Fei Qian and several craftsmen walked slowly in front of the wooden target, all dumbfounded. This kind of power, not to mention the shields held by ordinary swords and shields, even the carriages formed by the baggage carts, can probably still penetrate unambiguously!

Huang Chengyan handed the crossbow to the great craftsman who made the bow arm, and said: "Go and fix the bow arm first, then go to get the string opener, go to the side and try to shoot continuously, and see how many crossbows you can fire. arrow…"

The master craftsman led the way. This is a detailed test that must be carried out. The crossbow has been replaced with new materials. It cannot be said that it has been deformed or damaged before firing a few rounds. I really slapped myself in the face.

  Huang Chengyan looked at Fei Qian, and said: "My son-in-law's method is indeed excellent, but the cost is estimated to be quite excellent..."

   Bowstrings with more than four stones must be specially made, and the stronger the bowstring, the higher the quality of the raw material is required. The bowstrings of the Han Dynasty generally used animal tendons. It is recorded in the Rites of Zhou that "everything with a tendon should be long if it is small, and it will be lustrous when it is big. If it is long if it is small, it will be a beast. Thinking of a bow, is it different from other beasts, whose tendons want to be weakened."

It is very difficult to obtain strong animal tendons such as tigers and leopards, so most of them use beef tendon as the main source of bow strings, but to become a strong string of six stones, this is not all beef tendon. capable.

  Fei Qian suddenly realized that he seemed to have entered a strange circle, adding a strong bow arm, so he needed to match a strong bow string, and then needed a stronger crossbow bolt...

In this way, the cost is like buying a mobile phone in the future. Originally, I was only planning to look at more than 1,000 yuan, and then I aimed at a price of about 2,000 yuan. Think about it, it’s a few hundred more; the result is that I’m about to start At that time, the one with more than 2,000 yuan jumped into my eyes again, thinking about it anyway, it was more than a few hundred; when I came down to see it, I was shocked, and somehow I had increased my budget from more than 1,000 yuan to three or four. thousand…

  The cost has increased suddenly! Ordinary bows can be made of silk, but strong bows must be made of animal tendons, otherwise they will definitely not be strong enough.

The reason why there are fewer and fewer crossbows and more and more bows in the late Han Dynasty is that the population is increasing, so the value of life is getting lower and lower, and the cost of these bow arms and strong strings remains high , so in comparison, more people choose bows instead of crossbows.

   Headache, Fei Qian frowned.

What Huang Chengyan meant, Fei Qian naturally knew very well that this crossbow machine is full of power, but the cost is also full, and as an army, it is certainly impossible to just think about power without calculating the cost, otherwise a bearded man in World War II The Tiger and Leopard heavy tank will not be defeated by the shoddy "welded can" T34.

what to do?

  Although the steel wire bowstring is a way of the future, don’t forget that it’s the Han Dynasty, the Han Dynasty!

  Without a machine tool or a wire puller, how can a large amount of steel wire be produced?

   By the way, the wire puller!

  First of all, pig iron must not be used for wire drawing. It might break if it falls on the ground...

   Only steel with very good strength and toughness can be used as a raw material. Fei Qian raised his head and looked up at the sky, constantly searching in his head...

The Han Dynasty had the technology of frying steel. Although the purity of carbon cannot ensure that the content of each batch is the same, it is not a problem to use it to make weapons crudely. However, wrought iron or even steel ingots must be drawn into steel wires on a large scale , It is absolutely unrealistic to rely solely on manpower forging, and the drawing process must be solved!

   And once you tackle the benefits of the drawing process, it's kind of scary...

   Not only can it be used for mechanical equipment such as jacks, trebuchets, etc., but it can also be used in construction. Only a hybrid structure with added steel bars can be called a real rock-solid!

   And the defensive barbed wire...

   Once this is placed, unless the stakes nailed to the ground are pulled out together, there is no way at this stage! Used to block intersections and quickly deploy defenses, it is simply a supreme artifact!

  Dreams are beautiful, but reality is cruel.

  Before, Fei Qian had seen how Huang’s craftsmen made a steel wire, forcibly using a hammer to beat it with red hot steel on an iron plate with grooves...

  Not to mention labor-intensive, the yield rate is pitifully low.

  The amount of steel used may not be a particularly difficult task for Fei Qian. He has iron ore! Although the Lvliangshan area in Bingzhou is not an area rich in iron ore, it is used by Fiqian for mining, especially now that the Han Dynasty itself is in danger and has no time to control the local government. All the iron ore produced can be directly deployed and used. So in terms of raw materials, the problem is not too big.

   Now there are two main problems: one is the desulfurization technology of iron ore, and the other is the improvement of processing technology.

For desulfurization, the original method is to mix lime powder to remove sulfur and silicon in the iron ore and form slag. It only needs to be adjusted a few times to find a suitable ratio for the Luliangshan iron ore production area. It should be said that it is only a matter of time. The problem.

  In this way, the molten iron produced by rough refining must be above the average level, and then it is forged in the fried steel of Huang's craftsmen to form steel ingots with suitable strength and toughness, and finally become various weapons and agricultural tools...

  So the initial desulfurization is probably like this. If you want a more effective method, you may need to find some alchemists. Only by continuing to study this will there be a better method, but this steel processing technology...

   So now the problem is one, the wire drawing process...

  If it can be solved, all problems can be easily solved.

  The part of the crossbow machine is made of bronze, which can be made in batches!

  Frame structures such as crossbow arms can use wrought iron to find a suitable balance point in terms of weight and strength, or they can be directly molded!

   Then if the technical problem of the bow string can be solved, the entire crossbow can be replaced with metal materials, and large-scale production becomes possible!

   And interchangeability, unified standard becomes possible!

  Everything is stuck on this bottleneck...

   One day, Sun Quan found Wu Guotai worriedly...

   Sun Quan: "Mother, my son went to Ganlu Temple today, and ran into a girl offering incense, fell in love with her, and wanted to marry her."

   Wu Guotai: "Zhongmou, you can't be together, Shangxiang is your sister."

   Sun Quan: "..."

  (end of this chapter)