After Lucia became an adult, Border Town also entered the last month of winter.
For the Demon Moon, the end of winter does not mean the end. The heavy snow in the sky often lasts until the next spring. As for when it will subside, it is entirely up to fate.
According to past experience, the evil moon ends in the first half of the first month of spring, which is a rather difficult day; it ends in the second half of the first month, which is a very difficult day; if it continues to the second After a month, it became a difficult day to even survive.
But that's just what happened to the townspeople.
This year, the situation has changed a lot. Even if the evil moon lasts until the end of the second month of spring, there is enough wheat in the granary to fill everyone's stomach.
Naturally, Roland will not be satisfied with the passing line that everyone will not starve to death and freeze to death. These days, he has been lying in front of his desk in high spirits, drawing drawings one after another, and conceiving his own large-scale production plan for the next stage. The whole plan is divided into two aspects: military and civilian. The former includes the construction of a new weapons factory, a bicycle factory, a dock, and a shallow-water heavy gunboat. The popularization of agricultural tools.
What motivated him was Lucia White. After testing her new abilities in detail, Roland clearly realized that the last limitation of mass production had also been resolved, and the productivity of the town would usher in the growth of the population. a new peak.
This limitation is material supply.
Modern smelting is a very complex discipline, and steel production is one of the most important parameters to measure an industrial country. And Roland didn't know much about this, so that the town's iron-smelting capacity was still very backward, the technology was not beyond this era, and the scale was not comparable to that of some mining merchants' private smelters. 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 sent to Anna for further smelting into steel. This process is completely uncontrollable, and the carbon content is also high and low. Sometimes the usable materials can only fill two or three carriages after a busy day, which greatly limits the production capacity of the steam engine factory.
And although Anna's special furnace can convert low-quality pig iron into quality-controllable steel, the output is only enough for military factories. In autumn, it can basically meet the needs of the town, but after the arrival of winter, the army has been expanded twice, plus the development of new firearms and artillery, this steel is a bit stretched.
Lucia's evolution can be described as a shot in the arm. The targeted separation ability can easily remove the bad components in the material, and it can also adjust the ratio of each element during the smelting stage, so that each batch of molten steel can maintain the same performance.
It can be said that with Anna and Lucia, Border Town's smelting level is enough to instantly improve several grades.
For this reason, Roland has asked Anna to put aside other work at hand and concentrate on creating a new generation of super melting pot.
Compared with the special furnace designed for her before, the new furnace is more than ten times larger, extending to 50 meters in length, 10 meters in width, and nearly 4 meters in height. At first glance, it looks like a slender swimming pool. It is essentially the same as the previous generation of dedicated furnaces. It is still an iron box with no heating equipment. It is all smelted by Anna's black fire. However, it is buried in the ground and relies on the soil to support the pressure of the molten iron on the four walls. There is a walkway in the center, which is just right for Anna to heat the iron ingots on both sides at the same time.
It has only one advantage, that is, the volume is large enough to be smelted by the previous method, and the limestone used for impurity removal alone is a large amount, and it takes a lot of effort to clean up the generated impurities, and feeding and stirring is also a big trouble. So it must not be too big. But now there are no such concerns at all, as long as the pig iron is put in and melted, and then Lucia removes the harmful components such as phosphorus and sulfur.
Roland planned to build a new batch of kilns. Together with the old blast furnace and the old shaft furnace, they were only responsible for the initial smelting, and did not care about the quality of the finished product, as long as the ore could be melted and turned into square iron ingots. Then all these iron ingots are put into the new furnace for secondary refining, and the formed molten steel flows into the lower formwork through the gate, and directly forms the material for processing. The town brings a stronger source of power.
Roland called the new furnace "The Iron Star."
Once Anna's manufacturing is completed and the Iron Star is put into production, the town's steel output can be increased by more than ten times.
It can be said that the new large-scale production plan is based on this foundation.
In addition, the development of new light weapons has also come to a conclusion.
Roland found that his original idea was not appropriate. He designed several prototype weapons by referring to the principles of later gas-operated automatic rifles. Simply put, automatic weapons use part of the high-pressure gas when the bullet is fired to complete the shelling and loading. action, so as to realize the process of refilling.
This work lasted for about half a month, and it is not difficult to say that it just requires repeated testing of each component for normal operation. He doesn't need to memorize the specific structure of a particular rifle, as long as he knows how it works, he can always put together a working weapon after a few tries.
The problem lies here.
The prototype weapon that was spelled out was stupid, big and black. There were nearly a hundred parts, each of which was hand-crafted by Anna, especially the gadgets such as springs, firing pins, and gas pistons. The level of machine tools is still difficult to mass-produce. If you want to convert all the revolving rifles in the hands of the soldiers into automatic weapons, not only will it be a huge burden on Anna, but the gun processing equipment that has already been put into production will also be a waste.
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, and felt that it could be solved by increasing the number of people in production, but he soon discovered that once the new weapon formed a scale, it could easily swallow all the output of the acid plant.
As for the small problems such as jams and firing failures that often occur during test firing, it is not important.
After repeated weighing, he finally dismissed the idea of large-scale replacement of automatic weapons, but increasing the firepower output of the army was an imminent need, 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 greatly reduced, and the two most difficult problems could be solved easily. It can also be automatically loaded by means of air conduction. The structure is similar to that of the prototype weapon. It can be put into a principle test if it is modified and modified. In addition, it can be made larger, and the parts do not need to be designed to be tightly fitted with cobwebs. It is equivalent to lowering the difficulty.
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