There is a change at eight o'clock, to thank you for your monthly passes!

"Where is Defang? Call him to my calligraphy! ”

When he returned to the mansion in Anningfang, Chen Huaiqing immediately instructed his family to call his eldest son back from the newspaper office of the "Guangfu" newspaper.

"My lord, I don't know what you want to do if you call the children here in a hurry?" As soon as Chen Defang walked into the study, he saw Chen Huaiqing, who was smiling from ear to ear, walking around the room excitedly.

"Happy event, happy event, big event!" Chen Huaiqing slapped his face and laughed, "The matter of the princess of Dexing Shangsheng has eyebrows, and the official family has promised it in person today, and there will be no more changes." He turned his head and glanced at his son, "Defang, you work hard, immediately go to Sichuan." ”

"My lord, do you want the child to go and give the second brother good news?"

"The good news is only one of them, and it is important to call Dexing back as soon as possible...... The fight over Sichuan has been completed, and he should come back, this family affair with the Heavenly Family is more important than anything else! ”

Chen Huaiqing's words were already full of impatience, and he couldn't wait for Chen Dexing to immediately plug in his wings and fly back from Sichuan.

"By the way, after you arrive in Sichuan, you can talk to Dexing again, and let him check some ...... Now that he has made peace with the Tartars, Wuchen is not popular in the past. There are already many officials who have taken aim at the opportunity and are ready to impeach one or two commanders of the army to become famous! Chen Huaiqing's tone suddenly became solemn. Now there is an imperial historian who has impeached Chen Dexing for smuggling with a naval warship! Although the emperor didn't ask, there was something strange about this matter...... Chen Dexing is always a person who is made by Jia Rudao, how can he not open his eyes like Yu Shixian?

"In short, this is a critical time and we must be cautious...... As long as you marry the princess, you can make any money. But now we must not let anyone grab the handle! Otherwise, this splash of wealth will be lost. ”

……

"From the very beginning, we should not have pinned our hopes on Han Chinese officials! These Han civil officials are useless except for writing a few bullshit articles! I want to get rid of Chen Dexing. We still need the warriors of our true God! ”

It was a hideous-looking eater with a shaggy beard. The skin is tanned. At first glance, you can tell that he often runs around the sea.

Listening to him was Pu Shougeng, a wealthy man from Quanzhou, and Liu Xiaoyuan, the envoy of Jiangnan in Great Mongolia. Both of them were dressed as Han scholars, sitting in a high pavilion overlooking the West Lake, holding their knees and listening quietly.

"All we need now is a chance, as long as Chen Dexing's Thunderbolt army goes to sea, my fleet can attack, there is no one on the sea who is our big cannibal opponent! Our dhows are the overlords of the seas! Their Han sailing ships are not our opponents at all. Their sailors are no match for the warriors of the true God! ”

Pu Shougeng nodded in agreement: "Fu, this You Sufu is the best bow of our Pu family, and the fleet he leads is the most powerful in the entire Nanfan and Tianzhu Seas." Whether it is a pirate, or the navy of Srivijaya and Chola (one of the Indian states), it is not an opponent, let alone a weak Han navy? ”

As mentioned earlier, the Pujia maritime merchants have military force - the sea in this era is not a place where peaceful trade can be traded, and they all have to rely on a knife and a gun! The Pujia Maritime Group can monopolize the spice imports of the Great Song Dynasty and become the most powerful maritime group, of course, with strong maritime forces! Who would dare to steal business with them. That's really a knife licking blood!

The Southern Song Dynasty naval army has always focused on the Yangtze River, Huai River and Han River, although there is a little force along the coast, but compared with the Pujia with 2,000 sea ships. It's really not worth mentioning.

In addition, the Pu family, who has been at sea for six generations, also has a lot of friendship with all the pirate leaders in the South Seas and coastal areas of China. As long as they are willing to spend money, they can recruit tens of thousands of pirates! If it weren't for the fear of the Southern Song Dynasty's land force, they would have seized the rich Quanzhou and turned it into their own territory - similar things, the Arab maritime merchants did not do less in the South Seas and East Africa!

So these Arab maritime merchants, of course, will not take the Thunderbolt army too seriously before they have really gone to the sea!

Liu Xiaoyuan sneered: "What if he doesn't go to sea? His Thunderbolt Navy is nothing but the Sailor Army in the Yangtze River! And with his merits, he will soon become the lord of a state and a government, how can he go to sea at that time? He frowned, stared at Pu Shougeng and said, "Brother Haiyun." You don't need to deal with this Chen Dexing for the time being...... You help me arrange a celebrity identity, and I will personally go to Lin'an to make a trip to Shilin. When the time comes, there will always be a way to avenge the Great Khan! ”

……

Some people want Chen Dexing to return to Lin'an to get married, and some people want to kill him. The undercurrent surrounding the rising star of the Great Song Dynasty surged. Chen Dexing himself, who is far away in Sichuan. But I don't know at all.

For him, after all. It is enough to know the general trend of history and the truth of the regime coming out of the barrel of the gun. All he has to do now is to train his troops well, and at the same time hold the troops as firmly as possible.

Also, you have to arrange your backyard early.

In a newly built weapons workshop on Guangyang Island, Chen Dexing once again changed into coarse cloth clothes, and took a few carpenters and blacksmiths to tinker with something. Huang Zhishen, Qi Ta and Daoist Liu, who had just arrived from Yangzhou, as well as Daoist Ren and Monk Liu, who had been following Chen Dexing to fight in Sichuan, also gathered here, their military uniforms were neat, their combat boots were shiny, and they surrounded Chen Dexing, who had just finished his work, and carefully looked at the two strange-shaped weapons.

Both weapons had a thick round barrel with thick walls and two semicircular pillar-like sections joined together. The two semi-circular wooden columns were then tightly clamped together with several wrought iron rings – like large wooden barrels. The difference is that this "barrel" is a little elongated, and the hollow part of the "barrel" in the middle is very small, only an inch and a half in diameter, which is in stark contrast to the thick "barrel wall". And at the bottom of this "barrel" there is another small hole. The "barrel" was mounted on the wheeled base of a stone-hairing machine, and from a distance it looked like a smoothbore cannon!

In fact, this is a smoothbore gun! But it's not bronze or cast iron, it's a wooden cannon!

Several gunners were sweating profusely to reload the wooden cannon with gunpowder and cast iron shells, and Wang Lufei and Wang Shuifei among the Qionghualou brothers were also among them. Both of them were first-generation artillery generals in the Perak Navy, and they are now artillery instructors at the military academy, but this is the first time they have fiddled with this wooden cannon.

"Big brother, it's done as you instruct." The artillery crew commanded by Wang Shuifei first completed the loading, and then Wang Lufei's artillery crew also completed the task.

"Lu Fei, Shui Fei, pull the two wooden cannons farther away and then put them away, ignite them with a fuse, and after ignition, everyone retreats behind the bunker!"

Chen Dexing gave the order loudly. Of course, the actual combat value of this kind of wooden cannon is limited, this thing is too dangerous to use, and if you are not careful, the gunpowder will become a bomb to blow up your own people! So Chen Dexing didn't plan to make do with wooden cannons. He built these two wooden cannons just to be real...... This was a necessary step in the development of a bronze cannon.

It's the same as the previous building of the Stone Generator and the Three-Layer Slurry Battleship. Chen Dexing's cannon development work also started from the model, the wooden cannon is the model of the bronze cannon - bronze casting Chen Dexing does not understand, can only be handed over to the professional coppersmith to be responsible, the process of casting the cannon and the process of casting the bell is a bit similar. As long as you are willing to spend money and time to develop, you can still build it. Chen Dexing didn't have the time and money to toss these before, but now it's time.

Wang Lufei and Wang Shuifei commanded their subordinates, and they had already pushed these two cannons dozens of steps away, on a temporary shooting range. Two cannons, each facing a huge wooden target thirty paces away. The two brothers took out the fire breaker and lit the fuse almost simultaneously. Then I saw a group of people running quickly into a simple anti-artillery bunker a dozen paces away—a trench with a roof made of log sandbags.

Chen Dexing and a few people around him squatted behind a solid rammed earth low wall outside the workshop, holding their heads in disregard of the image. There were only two loud bangs, and everyone was shocked, and then the two wooden cannons fell backwards, and the muzzles of the cannons spewed flames!

After the two muffled sounds of the "pit", the two large wooden targets were splashed with sawdust. The power of the cannonballs tore the wooden strips and wooden blocks flying in all directions, and two holes with a diameter of four or five inches appeared on the wooden target!

"It's done! Big brother, the barrels of the two wooden cannons are intact! Looks like it works! ”

Wang Lufei's excited roar came, but Chen Dexing just nodded lightly.

"Big brother, it seems that this wooden cannon is usable, and the cost is low, do you want to ......?"

Daoist Ren said softly.

Chen Dexing shook his head, the wooden cannon has a certain practicality. But wood is not as good at bore pressure as metal. In the case of the reluctant use of wooden cannons, the safety factor could only be obtained by reducing the charge. As a result, the effective killing distance of the wooden cannon is not as good as that of the bow and arrow, and even less than the bed crossbow. It is better to pull a wooden cannon into the battlefield than to use a three-bow bed crossbow.

"Blacksmith," Chen Dexing turned back to call Zeta's nickname, "how about it, can such a cannon be cast in bronze?" ”

"No problem!" Zita pondered, "It's just a little more expensive...... If you want to build a one-and-a-half-caliber cannon, it is estimated that it will cost hundreds of catties of copper, which is hundreds of dollars! ”

"Where is an inch and a half enough?" Chen Dexing smiled, "At least three or four inches, if you can cast a cannon of five or six inches, it would be better." In the future, when we come to the sea, our warships will rely on this cannon to defeat the enemy! (To be continued) R580