As the most senior admiral among active-duty generals in the Navy, Dong Quankun was naturally very fierce in his taunting firepower. He slapped the table, spitted, and scolded several other people present.
This caused several other people to completely abandon the compromise plan and gave up the plan of a 200mm breech-loading cannon or a 300mm front-loading cannon, but continued to stick to the 300mm breech-loading cannon.
The generals at the top were all scolded, and the lieutenant generals, major generals, and brigadiers below were naturally unlucky. Wang Haiqing was so angry that when he returned, he scolded the director of the artillery department under his subordinates half to death.
In the end, he still couldn't get over his anger, so he sent a memorial directly to the emperor, and thus the unfortunate rear admiral was retired.
Later, Wang Haiqing went to the Shanghai Gun Factory in person. This time, he did not find any general manager or other person in charge of the factory, but directly found the engineer under their factory who was responsible for the research and development of the 300mm breech-loading gun.
A dignified admiral went directly to the factory to inspect.
At best, it's an inspection, but at worst, it's just to put pressure.
What it expresses is this: If you can't get it out, I will have a hard time, and none of you can escape. I will kill you all before I get unlucky. Don't even think about running away.
Wang Haiqing exerted pressure with the courage of an admiral, which naturally put the Shanghai Gun Factory under tremendous pressure.
In fact, not only the Shanghai Gun Factory, but also their parent company Jiangnan Weapons Corporation is under great pressure. The Navy has even vaguely stated that even the Guangdong and Luzon cannot be equipped with 300 mm breech-loading guns.
, were forced to choose a 200mm breech-loading gun or a 300mm front-loading gun, but your Jiangnan Weapon Company can't expect to get an order for even one artillery piece.
The Navy will all choose to order from Northern Arms Company or Southern Arms Company.
Although other companies currently do not have 300mm breech-loading rifled guns, there are 300mm front-loading rifled guns.
Not only for the main guns of these two battleships, but also for the main guns of subsequent battleships, you can't expect to get even one order.
As a result, the Jiangnan Arms Company was a little anxious. The company headquarters was hammering the Shanghai Gun Factory, saying that this matter was related to the Jiangnan Factory's plans for the next decades or even a century, and it must be taken down at all costs.
.
Otherwise, if it offends the Navy, the Shanghai Gun Factory, which mainly produces naval guns, will no longer exist.
The defense industry of the Tang Empire has been developing for many years, and the three major domestic weapons companies have been competing with each other for many years, and they have been fighting fiercely for military orders.
Although the three major arms companies are all enterprises directly under the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises, and the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises does not have any profitability requirements for them, it only requires them to be ready to supply a large number of advanced weapons at any time.
However, for the three major arms companies that specialize in ordnance production, the bigger the output, the better during wartime. However, during peacetime, there are no huge orders, making it difficult to maintain the production line.
Therefore, the gap in production capacity between wartime and peacetime is huge, but the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises requires them to maintain the ability to expand production at any time. Equipment and raw materials are also said to be directly sealed, but personnel are not so easy to maintain.
The skills of skilled workers who have no work to do will be wasted. In order to provide skilled workers with work, it is also to allow skilled workers to hone their skills so that they can quickly master them during the war and even teach ordinary workers to master them.
This requires the three major arms companies to maintain production lines for all product categories as much as possible, even if the production line is small in scale and does not make money or even loses money.
Orders are needed to maintain the production line!
However, in peacetime, the military's orders are naturally few, and the three major weapons companies are also fighting for orders!
The military also considers maintaining production lines, promoting manufacturers' equipment design, and developing new products, so it tries its best to keep everything even.
For example, in terms of artillery, the three major domestic weapons companies and the Northwest Arms Company, a joint venture established by the three major weapons companies, all have artillery factories under their subsidiaries. Of course, the focus is often different.
Some focus on the production of small-caliber shotguns, some focus on the production of army field guns, some focus on the production of naval small and medium-caliber long-barreled artillery, and some focus on the production of large-caliber naval guns.
The Shanghai Gun Factory focuses on the production of medium and large-caliber naval guns and is also the largest supplier of naval guns in the country.
However, this weapon is limited to the era of smoothbore guns!
All this has changed since the Tang Dynasty Navy began to equip front-loading rifled guns in batches three years ago.
Nowadays, Foshan Gun Factory, a subsidiary of Southern Arms Company, is the largest supplier of rifled naval guns for the navy. The two types of front-loading rifled guns they provide have become the main naval guns of the current navy.
Among them, the 200mm 22x forward-loading rifled gun they provided is currently the main naval gun of the navy.
The main guns of the Guangxi-class battleships that are being built in batches and are in service are this type of artillery. At the same time, some of the Shanxi-class battleships that are already in service are equipped with this type of artillery.
In addition, their 150mm 25x forward-loading gun is also the main artillery of the Navy's new cruisers and frigates, and the main secondary artillery of the battleships.
The Chang'an-class cruiser is equipped with this gun.
The main gun equipped on the Haizhou-class frigate is also this type of artillery.
The two types of artillery produced by the factory have become the main guns of the Navy. If it were not for the limited production capacity, the Navy would also consider it and estimate that it would not be long before entering the era of rear-loading guns. Otherwise, they would have to upgrade on a large scale.
, replacing the smoothbore cannons of many existing battleships with front-loading rifled cannons.
At the same time, last year, their 300mm 22x forward-loading gun successfully passed the test. The Navy has already purchased a few of them on an experimental basis, but they have not been put on the ship, but are used as weapons in the naval base.
Coast defense artillery is mainly for testing, and the test results are pretty good.
However, although the power is good, the inherent limitations of large-caliber front-loaded artillery have prevented the Navy from making the determination to equip them on a large scale.
After all, everyone knows that breech-loaded rifled guns are the future!
The Navy knows this, and so does the Foshan Gun Factory, so in recent years they have concentrated their efforts on developing breech-loading rifled guns.
It's just that the factory's main focus is not on large-caliber breech-loading cannons, but on small- and medium-caliber breech-loading cannons, because the technical difficulty is relatively low. It is said that when their 150mm breech-loading rifled cannon was tested
The performance is quite good.
In addition to the strong rival Foshan Gun Factory, the Shanghai Gun Factory also has a major rival, which is the Tianjin Gun Factory, a subsidiary of the Northern Arms Company. In the era of smoothbore guns, the factory almost dominated the army's large-caliber siege artillery.
It can be called the largest supplier of large-caliber artillery used by the Army.
After entering the rifled era, although their front-loading rifled guns were not as good as the Foshan Gun Factory, they had a 120mm front-loading rifled gun with quite good performance and received a large number of orders from the Army and Navy.
In addition, their technical reserves for breech-loading rifled guns are quite good thanks to the support of the Army. A few years ago, the Army said that it would build a thousand-ton armed train and be equipped with a 300 mm breech-loading rifled gun. It is expected to use
The artillery is actually a 300mm rifled breech-loading gun from this factory.
In recent years, Foshan Gun Factory and Tianjin Gun Factory have swept the world with their excellent front-loading rifled gun products in the era of rifled rifles, leaving Shanghai Gun Factory breathless.
Because the Shanghai Gun Factory has never produced a front-loading rifled gun, it had been counting on a breech-loading rifled gun many years ago.
It’s just that after so many years, although a two-hundred-millimeter breech-mounted gun was developed before, due to its short lifespan, high cost, and still high failure rate, the Navy only equipped a few experimentally, but not on a large scale.
equipment.
The breech-loading rifled gun has not been released for a long time, and the front-loading rifled gun is not available. The most terrible thing is that the Foshan Gun Factory and Tianjin Gun Factory have invested huge manpower and material resources in the research and development of breech-loading artillery in recent years, and the progress is not yet
slow.
This caused the Shanghai Gun Factory to feel a profound crisis.
Even the headquarters of Jiangnan Arms Company felt the crisis!
In order to solve the problem, the breech-loading rifled gun was brought out as soon as possible. Jiangnan Arms Company did not continue to sit back and watch the Shanghai Gun Factory fiddle with itself. The head office personally took action and invited people from the Royal Institute of Technology to Shanghai to analyze the problem and solve it.
There were not many people from the Royal Institute of Technology, only a dozen or so, and there was only one full professor leading the team.
But this full professor is no ordinary person. He is Wei Qingxin, deputy director of the Department of Physics at the Royal Institute of Technology.
He is an imperial viscount with a fiefdom in Beihai. He enjoys the treatment of the first and second rank. He is escorted by the Guards when he comes in and out. He lives in a mansion granted by the Holy Emperor. Even when he got married last year, it was granted by Empress Dong personally.
You may be wondering why Wei Qingxin just got married last year at a time when people in the empire generally get married at the age of fifteen or sixteen. This is naturally because of his young age!
This guy just turned eighteen this year!
I still have acne on my face...
When the people from Jiangnan Weapons Company who were picking up people at the train station saw Professor Wei Qingxin, many of them had extremely strange expressions on their faces.
Ji Haifan, the deputy general manager of Jiangnan Weapons Company, looked at the professor in front of him who was younger than his eldest grandson and was filled with emotion!
Monster!
He's only a little older now, but he's already a full professor, so why don't he let others live?
There are rumors in the world that this man has been a monster since he was a child!
He started his studies at the age of six, entered primary school at the age of seven, entered middle school at the age of ten, entered the preparatory course at the age of eleven, was admitted to the Royal Institute of Technology at the age of thirteen, graduated at the age of sixteen, and was awarded the title of associate professor upon graduation.
The past two years have become even more abnormal. Last year, when he was seventeen, he became a full professor. This year, he defeated the competition from a group of scientific leaders and became the deputy director of the Department of Physics at the Royal Institute of Technology.