It was past noon, and the car finally stopped on the outskirts of Tianxingfu.

Su Chengyu had already thought carefully on the road, and if he wanted to form a generational advantage over the Qing army's weapons and equipment, the easiest thing to do was to make flintlock pistols.

At present, the Qing army is mainly equipped with arquebuses, and the Ming army even has a very low equipment rate of arquebuses.

This gun is a kindred hemp rope stuck on a curved rod next to the fire door, and when the trigger is pulled, the curved rod with the fire rope falls down to ignite the gunpowder and fire lead bullets.

Although a dominant weapon of the era, the arquebus had a series of drawbacks.

The first is that the preparation time before the launch is too long. After dozens of operation steps such as loading gunpowder, loading lead bullets, igniting the torch, loading the fire rope, blowing the fire rope, etc., those who can fire one shot a minute are all soldiers, and ordinary soldiers have two shots in three minutes, and even one shot in two minutes is normal.

Secondly, the arquebus is very "delicate", for example, it is easy to get damp, and even strong winds can blow it out, resulting in a slightly worse weather that cannot be used.

There are also soldiers armed with arquebuses who must keep a distance of at least one meter when shooting, otherwise the sparks flying on the arquebus can easily ignite the powder canisters of their comrades. Of course, you can insist on standing in a dense formation, but such a thing as detonating your own gunpowder is no less demoralizing than the enemy killing hundreds of you.

In addition, there are countless minor problems such as the smoke of the fire rope, the fact that you have to carry several pounds of the fire rope when fighting, and the fire rope that burns at night to expose the target.

The flintlock pistol, on the other hand, improved the bolt of the arquebus, eliminating the troublesome arquebus, and instead fixed a piece of flint to the hammer next to the fire door, and after pulling the trigger, the flint smashed on the fire sickle, striking a spark to ignite the gunpowder.

The benefits of this change are clear.

First of all, the flintlock pistol did not have time-consuming operations such as loading the arquebus, blowing the fiery rope, and removing the arquebus, and the rate of fire increased a lot. You know, the shorter the time interval between shots, the more bullets the enemy will eat.

The second advantage of flintlock pistols is that flintlock pistols can form dense formations.

That is, the number of soldiers per row can be doubled. In this way, the density of firepower is doubled! You must know that the muskets of this era were all smoothbore guns, and the bullets fired did not rotate, so they were inaccurate. It has been exaggerated that "shooting at a person is just as likely to hit an enemy as shooting at the moon."

Therefore, intensive shooting can also bring a higher probability of hitting, so the density of soldiers is doubled, and the combat effectiveness may be increased by up to three or four times! It can be seen from this that it is not a problem for a thousand flintlock muskezeers to get two or three thousand arquebusiers by simply comparing and shooting.

And even in hand-to-hand combat, the enemy faces a denser number of bayonets. This feature is especially important when fighting cavalry. Cavalry that charged the flintlock infantry phalanx usually suffered great losses and had a hard time breaking through the infantry phalanx. This was repeatedly verified by Europeans in the eighteenth century with the lives of countless cavalrymen.

It was the equipment of the flintlock pistol that made the cavalry of Europe gradually become a supporting role, and the biggest reliance of the Qing army was their cavalry!

As for the problems of what kind of arquebus smokes the eyes, is afraid of the tide, and exposes the target at night, the flintlock pistol is even more non-existent.

As a result of this chain of advantages, by the eighteenth century, flintlock pistols had completely replaced arquebuses.

Su Chengyu could already foresee how much advantage the Ming army, equipped with flintlock pistols, would have in the face of the Qing army with the new tactical use - the Ming army only had infantry, and it could basically resist the infantry and cavalry of the Qing army alone. At that time, the cavalry that has no one to contain will be able to teach the Qing army to behave as they like.

The goal of his trip was to get the flintlock pistol out.

In front of a large building, the four sides of the blue brick wall towering, the courtyard is full of smoke, two stone beasts more than one person high at the door, eight sword guards stand on both sides, it is the Fujing Ordnance Bureau.

Xu Tong, the ambassador of the Ordnance Bureau, was quite surprised when he heard that there was a rather talented son. The Ordnance Bureau is subordinate to the Ministry of Industry, and the most people who come here are officials from the Ministry of Industry, so is it the staff of which boss?

He pondered in his heart, and hurriedly brought two followers out to welcome him.

At the beginning of the Longwu Dynasty, he had never seen the prince of King Chen, a junior official of the ninth grade, stepped forward to take a look, and said, "Are you?" ”

Su Chengyu was about to say his identity, when he suddenly remembered the scene of kneeling down wherever he went in the palace, he couldn't help frowning, and changed his words: "My surname is Su." Come here...... Something. ”

Xu Tong saw that he was not from the Ministry of Industry, so he immediately became polite, "The Ordnance Bureau does not accept visitors. ”

As soon as he finished speaking, Qiao Qian quietly stuffed a small piece of silver into his hand.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, corruption among officials was commonplace. Xu Tong secretly weighed his weight, and then said with a smile: "Xu Tong, the ambassador of the Lower Ordnance Bureau, I don't know what happened to Su Gongzi?" ”

"I want to build a firebolt."

Xu Tong coughed dryly, signaled his entourage to avoid, and then motioned to Su Chengyu, "Come with me." Xu Tong's entourage turned around and left tacitly, looking at the situation, Ambassador Xu had not sold firearms once or twice.

Su Chengyu took Qiao Qian into the Ordnance Bureau and asked a few guards to just wait outside the door.

In the workshops of various sizes in the Ordnance Bureau, the sound of clanging wrought iron is incessant, and the craftsmen are busy with their bare arms.

Xu Tong walked all the way to a row of warehouses on the west side and asked Su Chengyu to wait outside the door.

He opened the lock and pushed the door in, and after a while, he took out an arquebus gun that was chest high and did not engrave the name of the craftsman and handed it to Su Chengyu, and said with a mysterious expression: "The newly made three-coin bird gun, each charge is three coins, shoot three-coin lead bullets, and the tiger and leopard are killed with one blow a hundred steps away." Only eight taels of silver. ”

Su Chengyu came here to make a flintlock pistol, but this little official actually regarded him as a boy who bought a gun to hunt, shook his head and said, "I want to customize a new gun, not a bird gun." ”

Xu Tong glanced at him disdainfully, and his tone was arrogant, "This is the most equipped bird gun in the Ming army now, and it can beat the Qing army!" What else do you want to make? That's it. ”

Can the three-money bird gun beat the Qing army's fart and urine? Su Chengyu, as a small moderator of the military forum, has seen a lot of posts discussing the equipment of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and he is definitely an expert in this area, how can he be fooled casually?

He swept the six or seven pounds of bird guns in his hand, looked at the slender guns and sneered: "It is difficult to shoot through the ordinary cotton armor of the Qing army thirty steps away, let alone the heavy cavalry with double armor." ”

The cotton armor mentioned here is not an ordinary cotton coat, but a composite armor made of iron sheets made of soaked cotton and repeatedly patted into hard cotton sheets, many of which are stacked together, and then dropped on the inner layer.

This thing was first used by Qi Jiguang to deal with the Japanese Kou, and it has an excellent defensive effect on firecrackers, especially light firecrackers. Now the Ming army has less equipment because of lack of money, but after the Qing army popularized cotton armor in large quantities, the field has always beaten the Ming army with light firearms.

Xu Tong didn't expect this Su Gongzi to be so professional, he was stunned for a moment, and said in his heart, does this guy want to buy a person with a cotton armor tattoo? But as long as he gives me money, what does it matter to me?

He whispered again, "I still have the Secret Gun here, which is extremely powerful. It's just that the name of the craftsman is engraved on the spot, so if you want it, you have to wait for a while. ”

Su Chengyu shook his head in his heart, the "extremely powerful" Lu Mi Gong in Xu Tong's mouth is also a light musket, although it is much stronger than the Three Money Bird Gun, but the firepower is still weak, and the most important thing is that they are all arquebuses.