2. Train the bird hand

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In the next few days, Li Zixiao asked Zhou Dazhu, Wei Hong and Liu Chong to lead the team and go out to sweep the mines in Yongcheng County, mainly coal and iron mines.

Li Zixiao didn't ask how they acted, he only looked at the results, he trusted the ability of his three henchmen, did not participate in their command, and let them play their respective strengths.

This made Zhou Dazhu, Wei Hong and Liu Chong suddenly respect Li Zixiao even more, felt Li Zixiao's trust in them, and at the same time they also cherished this opportunity to lead the troops independently.

Li Zixiao stayed in the cottage and waited for their good news, and at the same time sent Zhang Ergouzi to bring a few hundred taels of silver to Xiayi County in the west to buy a batch of mules and horses carts to come back to serve as the transportation capacity of their cottage.

After all, in the future, whether they are transporting grain, or hauling these coal, iron ore, etc., they will need mules and horses as transportation capacity, but now the mules and horses in their cottage are simply insufficient.

Anyway, now Li Zixiao has accumulated a lot of silver, and he has to spend what should be spent, and these mule and horse carts must be fully equipped as soon as possible.

As the number of cottage soldiers increased, he handed over the training of the recruits to those veterans, and selected elite soldiers from these veterans and let them act as junior officers, responsible for training those new recruits who joined the cottage.

And Li Zixiao divided more time to tinker with the captured birds.

When Li Zixiao had just crossed over before, he found a few worn-out three-eyed guns in the cottage warehouse, but unfortunately they couldn't be used at all.

And Li Zixiao has always had a soft spot for firearms in his heart, because he knows that the future battlefield will be the world of firearms, but it is not easy to build firearms by himself in this era.

And this time in the attack on Lin Jiabao, he captured a total of twenty-eight bird guns from the one-eyed dragon and Lin Jiabao, which made him really excited.

However, after Li Zixiao personally tested these bird guns, he was very dissatisfied with the performance of the bird guns at the moment.

First of all, the caliber of these bird guns is relatively small, although the range of the projectile is okay, but the power becomes limited.

Fifty steps away can only break the leather armor, eighty steps away according to the basis can not kill people, for the soldiers wearing iron armor and hanging iron cotton armor, the best killing distance is about thirty steps, such a power can only be said to be very general.

It's okay to deal with some bandits at the moment, but once he faces the elite officers and soldiers in the future, I'm afraid that people won't give him a chance to fire a few shots at all.

Although there are many advantages to training using a bird gun compared to an archer, such as the fact that it is easy to train, it can make the archer quick and effective.

However, its disadvantages are also very obvious, because at this time the bird guns are still front-loading smoothbore arquebuses, and it has been technically determined that their loading actions will be very complicated.

Every time a shot is fired, it has to go through a series of complicated actions such as clearing, charging, tamping gunpowder, loading lead, opening the fire door, lighting the gunpowder, closing the fire door, and lighting the fire rope.

Therefore, this also caused the bird's gun to fire extremely slowly, and the few recruits under his command who used the bird's gun could not be reloaded once a minute.

If they go to the battlefield, when they face the enemy, such a rate of fire is simply unacceptable, and they will only have one chance to shoot at most.

Then once they are close to the enemy, the bird guns in the hands of these bird gunners will all become burning sticks, and then they will not be able to play any role except to escape, and if they escape slowly, they will become corpses.

In addition, the quality of the manufacture of these dozen bird guns really disappointed Li Zixiao, not to mention the rusty barrels, and even the manufacturing process at the beginning was very problematic.

Cutting corners is really powerful, so the danger is very great when using it, a few days ago to hit Lin Jiabao, Li Zixiao witnessed the one-eyed dragon and Lin Jiazhuang Ding's bird guns, several times there were explosions of accidents.

In the explosion accident, all of them were either killed or injured, which made these guys with bird guns very scared.

As a result, the bird-bearers were frightened and either filled less or overfilled.

The charge is less, and the power of the bird guns is greatly reduced, and after the gunpowder is reduced, these bird guns can't even shoot through the rattan cards thirty paces away, let alone fight the enemy in armor.

And if the charge is too much, it will make the chamber of the gun very easy to explode, which makes these official bird guns of the Ming Dynasty really overwhelmed at this time, and the bird guns on the battlefield cannot replace the role of archers at all.

It's a pity that now Li Zixiao can get these twenty-eight bird guns, which is already very rare, and he has no conditions at hand to let him make bird guns by himself, so he can only make do with these bird guns that are not of good quality for the time being.

Originally, Li Zixiao caught a Sun Tong from the one-eyed dragon, this old man had worked in the Jinling Firearms Manufacturing Institute for 20 years, and he knew very well how to make bird guns.

Originally, Li Zixiao ambitiously planned to let the old man Sun Tong open a shop specializing in the manufacture of bird guns in his own cottage, so that he could have his own supply of bird guns in the future.

But who knew that the old man Sun Tong told him that the most important thing to build a bird gun gun is to build a gun barrel, and the manufacturing process of the gun barrel is very troublesome, and it is estimated that it will take ten days and half a month to make a gun barrel alone.

Moreover, their blacksmith shop here is not suitable for his use, and he needs to build a new blacksmith shop, and he must transfer a group of skilled blacksmiths, otherwise he will not be able to build this bird gun at all.

This undoubtedly poured a basin of cold water on Li Zixiao's head, and although Li Zixiao was disappointed, he also expressed understanding, so he ordered a new blacksmith shop to be built outside the cottage according to the request of the old man Sun Tong.

At the same time, five blacksmiths were dispatched to learn the skills of making gun barrels from Old Man Sun Tong, he didn't expect Old Man Sun Tong to be able to make him a bird gun immediately, so that he could take his time first and not be in a hurry.

The new bird guns he built will not be able to come out in a short period of time, even though these old bird guns have all kinds of shortcomings, but Li Zixiao still attaches great importance to these bird guns and intends to continue to use them.

After all, these bird guns were the only long-range weapons he could use at the moment, and there were also twelve archers he had forcibly brought back from the one-eyed dragon and the Lin family's Zhuang Ding.

If he didn't use them, his long-range firepower would be too weak, so while the veterans in the cottage were training pikemen and sword and shield soldiers, he was busy training archers and birdmen.

The training of archers, he really couldn't intervene, so he had to let him hand over to Quartz to train those archers, Quartz's archery skills are absolutely first-class.

Moreover, these archers have been trained before, and although they are not very accurate, they are much better than those who have just started to learn archery, and after a little training they will be archers.

For the training of the bird gunner, his experience comes from some materials and scenes in film and television dramas he saw on the Internet before the crossing.

So after he had gathered his thoughts, he asked the selected Birdsmiths to begin their practice according to his understanding of the use of muskets.

First of all, he asked the bird guns to practice the reloading of the birds, making them repeat each loading action over and over again.

Let them practice this simple reloading move until they are extremely proficient, and these guys in the province have made a mistake in reloading when facing the enemy on the battlefield.

In case they either have less gunpowder and the projectile is not powerful enough to kill the enemy at all, or they have too much gunpowder to explode, or they forget to load the projectile or forget to draw their cane and shoot it in vain.

This kind of repeated training can also allow them to greatly increase the speed of reloading, at least two or three times a minute.

In addition, Li Zixiao also found a problem, that is, the gunpowder equipped with these bird-screws was all powdered gunpowder when poured out.

In this way, the composition of gunpowder is uneven, which seriously affects the performance of gunpowder and naturally affects the power of the bird.

Smokeless gunpowder did not exist in this era, but even black powder was quite powerful as long as it could be made into granular gunpowder.

In this way, these Ming craftsmen who made gunpowder should not have mastered the production method of granular gunpowder.

These powdered gunpowder are extremely inconvenient to use, and many inexperienced people can easily fill more or less when they are charging, and the quality of the loading cannot be guaranteed at all.

Moreover, this powdered gunpowder will affect the reloading speed of the birdmen, and when they are on the battlefield, the reloading speed will be absolutely their shooting speed.

Originally, Li Zixiao thought that even in the arquebus era at the end of the Ming Dynasty, he should use custom-packed gunpowder, but now it seems that he is wrong again.

The so-called fixed gunpowder is actually to divide the gunpowder into some small containers in advance and pour it directly into the gun chamber when it is used, so as to ensure that the quality of gunpowder is the same every time it is filled, and greatly reduce the accident of exploding the chamber.

Li Zixiao belongs to the kind of activist who immediately takes action when he thinks of it.

Granular gunpowder is very simple to make, but it is to mix the powdered gunpowder well, spread it evenly on a basket, and then boil some glutinous rice juice.

Whether it is sprayed with a mouth or a watering can, the glutinous rice juice is evenly sprayed on the powdered gunpowder, and then gently shaken the basket, and the powdered gunpowder will condense into granular gunpowder by itself.

After being stored in the shade, granular gunpowder is considered to be completed, and such granular gunpowder is much more powerful than powdered gunpowder.

Moreover, it is not easy to shake during transportation, so that the heavier sulfur in the gunpowder sinks, and the charcoal powder floats on the upper layer, and it can also effectively reduce the moisture absorption and moisture of the gunpowder, which can be said to be a multi-task.

As for the gunpowder, it's even simpler.

As long as the gunpowder is redivided strictly according to the amount of charge, it is better to wrap it in oiled paper or use a small bamboo tube.

In short, it can not only make it convenient for the bird soldiers to take and fill gunpowder in wartime, but also effectively prevent moisture, and its effect is excellent.

Li Zixiao can't get oil paper now, so he can only use local materials, find some dried fine bamboo, cut it into sections, pack the gunpowder in these bamboo tubes, plug the mouth with a cork, and finally seal it with wax to prevent moisture, which is considered a complete success.

Then there is a problem that Li Zixiao also discovered, that is, the lead used by these bird guns is a bit irregular, either large or small, and it is not easy to load into the chamber when the large one is loaded, and it is easy to explode.

As soon as the small projectile is put into the barrel, it will fall in, and the muzzle is slightly lower, the projectile will fall out, and even if it does not fall out, it will be deflated when the gunpowder burns, causing the projectile to fly far and the power is greatly reduced.

So he could only ask a blacksmith to melt these projectiles and recast them, and then under the guidance of Old Man Sun Tong, he made new qualified projectiles.

The size and specification of the projectile must be matched with each gun, so that it does not appear in the above situation, and is as precise as possible, so that it can effectively cooperate with the chamber of the gun and improve the loading speed and power of the musket.

In just a few days, Li Zixiao made granular gunpowder through the above method, and then taught it to the bird-bearers and asked them to start practicing.

During the battle, they only had to bite off the wooden cork sealed with the bamboo tube with their teeth and pour the gunpowder directly into the muzzle.

Li Zixiao also asked the women in the fort to sew a set of belts with coarse cloth for each bird, and pinned the bamboo tubes filled with granular gunpowder to the belts, which were similar to the bullet belts pinned to the waists of gunners in later generations, and it was much easier to use.

At the same time, under Li Zixiao's training, these bird guns made rapid progress when loading.

The speed at which the projectile could only be loaded once in one or two minutes was greatly increased, and the speed at which they loaded the projectile reached the speed of two projectiles per minute, which made Li Zixiao much more satisfied.

In addition to letting these guys practice loading, Li Zixiao also forced these guys to practice aiming with their guns for a long time every day, and everyone held the bird gun, and they dragged it for a long time, and the tired guys' arms were unbearable.

This is not enough, Li Zixiao also learned the training methods of later generations, and gave each of them a stone to hang on the barrel of the gun to increase the weight and exercise the stability of their guns when aiming.

Li Zixiao has often seen this method on TV, and it is not designed randomly, and the effect is quite good.

However, Li Zixiao didn't expect all of these people to become sharpshooters, it was impossible at all, this kind of bird gun itself determined how accurate his accuracy would be.

Li Zixiao is more counting on training the bird gunners to learn to fire volleys, what two-stage shots, three-stage shots, this is what he thinks is the most suitable way to use muskets in this era.

It's a pity that the amount of gunpowder that Li Zixiao has on hand is too small, which makes Li Zixiao's idea of training this group of bird-chandlers with live ammunition also shattered.

In addition, the life of the barrels of these bird guns is very short, far less than the barrel life of later firearms, which can easily be thousands of rounds or tens of thousands of rounds, and one shot will be used less once.

Who knows when he will have the ability to make muskets on his own, so he is really reluctant to use the only twenty or so bird guns in this way.