"Uh..." Sylvie looked at the cannonball for a while, and then took aim at Roland's design sketch for a long time before pointing to the part of the detonator and said, "It seems that this copper pipe is not aligned with the nail at the top."
"Where's the spring?" Anna asked, "Is it still stuck on both sides of the iron plate?"
"One is crooked."
"Left or right?"
Anna asked for details, and then recorded the questions one by one in a notebook.
After collecting the reasons for the failure, it is the next round of shooting - four shots can just use all of A-Xia's playback ability, so the efficiency of improvement naturally becomes unprecedentedly high.
Unfortunately, the next two rounds of test shots also failed, and Roland had no choice but to announce that the test would continue tomorrow.
For Asha and Sylvie, their work today is over, and they can go back to the castle to enjoy a delicious afternoon tea, or go to the convenience market to see if there are any novel goods. But for Anna and Agatha, grenade testing was just a small part of their busy work. In particular, Anna, in addition to improving the fuze according to the cause of the failure, she also had to complete the development and assembly of the steam turbine.
Roland planned to follow her to the backyard of the North Slope to see the progress of the steam turbine model, but Sean, the personal guard, brought news from the city hall.
"Your Majesty, the Deputy Minister of Construction, Losia, wants you to come to the furnace area. He said that the first retort furnace has been set up."
…
As an essential facility for a coking plant, the ten planned retort towers are all set up beside the furnace group at the foot of the North Slope Mine Area.
Due to the deforestation of bricks and iron, the furnace group has changed from a small open space of less than 1,000 square meters to a vast blank area extending along the mountain. If it wasn't for Roland forbidding workers to use the woods near the town, it is estimated that not even a single tree would be left in the north of the border area.
Although coal is now available, charcoal that is easily available is still the main force for iron smelting. As the location of the trees is getting farther and farther from the kiln group, the workers set their sights on the mountains on the north slope - there are hundreds of logs every day It was chopped off, and then dropped from the top of the mountain. From a distance, a small "bald spot" has appeared on the green peak.
Naturally, Roland wouldn't ask them to protect the environment in such a thing. As long as the raised sand and dust wouldn't affect the town, he wouldn't care if the North Slope Mountain was cut down. After all, compared to the desperate mountains, this protruding small mountain range is just an insignificant corner. There are leaves to maintain the basic vegetation, so there is basically no need to worry about soil erosion.
The reclaimed flat land at the foot of the mountain has naturally become the most suitable site for the coking plant.
Roland took Nightingale and his guards through the noisy furnace area and came to the first retort tower. Losia immediately came forward, bowed to him and said, "Your Majesty, I built this double-layer furnace with refractory bricks according to your request. According to the drawings, the upper furnace should be closed with an iron door, and the middle layer should be closed. There are also iron plates that can move freely, but I don’t know who to ask to make those two things. Also the copper pipes and chimney of the small stove on the side, except for these metal parts, the rest is complete.”
Roland got into the furnace and checked it out—it has to be said that as a former member of the Mason Society and an old friend of Karl Vanbert, Losja really has a lot of experience in masonry. The inner wall of the nearly two-storey retort tower changes evenly, the gaps between each brick are basically the same, and the brick joints are also staggered layer by layer, and there is not even a single straight seam. . Be aware that even with the same drawing, the finished product built by different people may be very different.
"Well done," he applauded after checking, "I will arrange for someone to cast the iron gate and iron plate, and then you just need to cover the fire-facing surface with refractory bricks."
"Your Majesty," said Losja hesitantly, "can you tell me how this furnace works?"
"Why, do you want to be a coking worker too?" Roland joked.
"Of course not," the other party hurriedly shook his head, "I have never built such a strange kiln before, so I can only rely on guesswork for the unclear descriptions on the drawings. If I can know its specific usage and function, build Not only can I finish the second seat faster, but I can also improve in some uncertain areas.”
It turns out that, Roland laughed, "This type of kiln is mainly used for dry distillation of coal. You should have seen how charcoal is fired, right? This is also similar, but the scale is larger. It's all coal."
"Baking coals with coals?" Losja asked in surprise.
"That's right, coal can be converted into coke after dry distillation, which burns at a higher temperature and is a good fuel for steelmaking. In addition, several by-products are produced during the dry distillation process. The chimney that collects them, not the exhaust."
"Then... why is there a small stove next to the stove
"There must be no air left in the upper layer during dry distillation, otherwise the coal will burn directly," Roland pointed to the hole reserved between the two furnaces, "The calcined limestone in the small furnace will produce a lot of carbon dioxide - you can understand it as a kind of unburnable Gas…”
"Your Majesty, I know this," Losja continued. "This part is taught in the evening class."
"That's easy," Rowlandon was pleased, it seemed that the work of popularizing education was expanding the content little by little under the efforts of the book, "CO2 will enter the upper layer of the kiln through the pipeline, and all the air will be squeezed out, so that the coal can achieve the effect of dry distillation. As for the limestone, the grayish-white stones used to make cement, it's all over the mountains on the northern slopes."
…
After inspecting the retort No. 1 tower, he stopped for a while beside the furnace area when he returned along the original road.
Just looking at the busy scene in front of him, Roland couldn't help but feel a little excited. All kinds of brick furnaces stand side by side, at first glance it looks like a neat red forest, dozens of smoke columns rise above the forest, gray, white and black are intertwined, with the plainly dressed workers and The backward utensils together constitute a picture with a sense of the times. More than a dozen steam engines are humming loudly, pulling the conveyor belt to send pieces of raw materials and charcoal into the blast furnace; the rail system has also been laid here from the mine, and small mine carts are running between the two places. In the meantime, the speed of iron ore transport has been far from what it used to be.
After the steelmaking plant and forging plant are completed, this place will inevitably become another core site of Neverwinter City - from ore mining to smelting into steel, and then from steel to various raw materials sent to the processing plant, the flower of industry will be there. It was conceived and born, and since then it has endowed human beings with extraordinary power and the courage to overcome everything.