As Lucia came of age, the frontier town entered the last month of winter. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

For the Demon Month, the end of winter does not mean the end, and the heavy snow tends to last until the following spring, and it is completely up to fate when it will subside.

According to past experience, the end of the first half of the first month of spring is a difficult time, the end of the second half of the first month is a very difficult time, and if it continues into the second month, it becomes a difficult day to survive.

But that's just what happened to the townspeople.

This year, the situation has changed dramatically, and even though the evil month lasts until the end of the second month of spring, there is enough wheat in the granary to fill everyone's stomachs.

Roland is naturally not satisfied with the passing line that everyone does not starve to death and freeze to death, and these days he has been lying at his desk with high spirits, drawing drawings one after another, and conceiving his next stage of large-scale production plans. The whole plan is divided into two aspects: military and civilian, the former includes the construction of new weapons factories, bicycle factories, docks, and shallow water heavy gunboats, etc., while the latter mainly focuses on the water, heating, and electricity links in residential areas, and the popularization of iron agricultural tools.

It was Lucia White who motivated him – after testing her new abilities in detail, it became clear to Roland that the last constraints of mass production had been solved, and that the town's productivity would reach a new peak as the population grew.

This limitation is precisely the availability of materials.

Modern smelting is a very complex subject, and steel production is also one of the most important parameters to measure an industrial country. Roland didn't know much about it, so that the town's iron-making capacity was still very backward, and the technology was not beyond its time, not to mention that it was not as large as the private smelters of some mining merchants. When the iron ore is smelted into pig iron in a brick blast furnace, the good quality is sent to make steam engines, and the poor quality is given to Anna for further smelting into steel. The process was completely uncontrollable, the carbon content was high, and the materials that could be used could sometimes only fill two or three wagons for a full day, greatly limiting the capacity of the steam engine manufacturing plant.

Anna's special furnace, on the other hand, was able to convert low-quality pig iron into steel of controlled quality, but the output was only enough for a military factory. In the autumn, it can basically meet the needs of the town, but after the arrival of winter, the army has been expanded twice, and the development of new guns and artillery has made this steel somewhat stretched.

Lucia's evolution is a shot in the arm, with targeted separation capabilities that can easily remove undesirable components from the material, and the ability to adjust the proportions of each element at the melting stage to maintain the same performance in each furnace.

It can be said that with Anna and Lucia, the smelting level of the border town is enough to instantly increase several grades.

To this end, Roland has asked Anna to put aside her other work and concentrate on building a new generation of super-melting pots.

Compared to the previous special furnace designed for her, the new furnace has been more than ten times larger, extending to fifty meters in length, ten meters in width, and nearly four meters in height, which at first glance looks like an elongated swimming pool. It is essentially the same as the previous generation of special furnaces, it is still an iron box, there is no heating equipment, and it is all smelted by Anna's black fire. However, it was buried in the ground, relying on the soil to support the pressure of the molten iron on the four walls, and there was a walkway in the center that allowed Anna to heat the ingots on both sides at the same time.

It has only one advantage, that is, the volume is large enough - if it is smelted according to the previous method, the limestone used to remove impurities alone is a large amount, and it takes a lot of effort to clean up the impurities generated, and the feeding and stirring are also a big trouble, so it must not be too large. Now, there are no such worries at all, as long as it is put in pig iron to dissolve, and then Lucia can remove harmful components such as phosphorus and sulfur.

Roland plans to build a new batch of furnaces, together with the old blast furnace and the old shaft furnace, which are only responsible for the initial smelting, and do not care about the quality of the finished product, as long as the ore can be melted and turned into square iron ingots. These ingots are then put into a new furnace for secondary refining, and the formed molten steel flows through the sluice gates into the lower formwork to form a material that can be processed directly - and then the steam engine factory will also switch to steel production, which will inevitably bring a stronger source of power to the town.

Roland refers to the new furnace as the "Iron Star".

Once Anna's manufacturing is complete and the Steel Star is in production, the town's steel production will increase tenfold.

It can be said that the new large-scale production plan is based on this basis.

In addition, the development of new light weapons has been concluded.

Roland found that his original idea was not appropriate, and he designed several prototype weapons by himself based on the principles of later air-conductive automatic rifles - in short, automatic weapons use a part of the high-pressure gas when the bullet is fired to complete the action of unshelling and loading, so as to realize the process of reloading.

The work lasted about half a month, and it was not difficult to say how difficult, but it was necessary to repeatedly test whether each component could function properly. He didn't have to memorize the specific structure of a particular rifle, as long as he knew how it worked, he could always piece together a useful weapon after a few more attempts.

That's where the problem lies.

The prototype weapon is stupid, black and coarse, and its parts are as many as nearly 100, each of which is processed by Anna herself, especially small gadgets such as springs, firing pins, and gas pistons, which are difficult to mass produce at the current level of machine tools. Trying to replace all the revolver rifles in the hands of soldiers with automatic weapons would not only be a huge burden on Anna, but also a waste of firearms processing equipment that has already been put into production.

In addition, if all soldiers are equipped with automatic weapons, the ammunition consumption is undoubtedly astronomical. Roland didn't pay much attention to this at first, thinking that it could be solved by increasing the number of people in production, but he soon discovered that once the new weapon was on scale, it could easily swallow up the entire output of the acid plant.

As for the small problems that often occur during test firing, such as jamming and firing failures, they are not important.

After much deliberation, he eventually dismissed the idea of a large-scale replacement of automatic weapons, but there was an urgent need to increase the army's firepower output, and he set his sights on another burst weapon.

That's a heavy machine gun.

Twenty to fifty people were assigned a heavy machine gun, so that the number of weapons was also greatly reduced, and two of the most difficult problems could be solved. It can also be automatically reloaded by gas conduction, the structure is similar to the prototype weapon of the trial production, and it can be used to modify it to put into principle tests, plus it can be made larger, and the parts do not need to be designed to fit tightly, which is equivalent to reducing the difficulty for itself.

. (To be continued.) )