Chapter 357 The most powerful industrial country in the world
In Xingquan City, Li Xuangang saw the battle report sent back by Hao Bainian a few days ago. The battle report said that the First Infantry Regiment was about to arrive in Liping City and would launch a tentative attack on Liping City to prepare for the subsequent Second Infantry Regiment.
After arriving, join forces to prepare for a general attack.
At the same time, they also sent back the collected intelligence about the Ming army. According to the intelligence, there were only more than a thousand regular defenders in Liping City, and the rest were young men recruited temporarily with weak combat power. Moreover, no provincial capital was found.
A large number of Ming troops were heading in that direction.
Judging from the intelligence obtained from various sources, Zhu Zhihai, the governor of Guiyang, the provincial capital, attaches great importance to the fall of Xingquan Prefecture and is preparing to mobilize a large army to attack Xingquan Prefecture. He predicts that the number of assembled troops will not be less than 30,000, and there will be a high probability
The number may be as high as 50,000 or more.
But because the more attention is paid to it, the larger the army becomes, the more difficult it is to assemble troops, and the later the troops are sent out.
If Zhu Zhihai wanted to mobilize troops, he could only mobilize troops from across the province. At the same time, he would also recruit a large number of young men to fight, and he would also need to organize many civilians to transport baggage.
This kind of thing is not that easy to do. Not to mention the difficulty of raising food and wages and coordinating various ministries, it would take at least one or two months for Zhu Zhihai to gather troops from all over Guizhou Province and then arrive at Liping Prefecture.
In this era when marching can only rely on legs, it is extremely difficult to mobilize a large army in Guizhou, a mountainous area. From assembling the troops to launching an attack, it is impossible to do it in less than a month or two.
In this way, the New Army of the Tang Dynasty will be given enough time. At least in the next half month or even a month, the New Army of the Tang Dynasty will not be subject to a large-scale attack from the Ming army.
In this case, it will not be too difficult to capture Liping Mansion!
Therefore, Li Xuan did not put too much pressure on the frontline generals, let alone interfere with the frontline generals' operations. This Xingquan Mansion is several days' round trip from the frontline. If he learns how to play with a bald head and personally directs and interferes
Based on the detailed operations of the troops, it is impossible for the new army of the Tang Dynasty not to be defeated.
Furthermore, Li Xuan was relatively confident about the abilities of Hao Bainian and Li Chunjing. The new Tang Dynasty Army had been established for more than a year, and there were hundreds of officers who had studied in the Royal Academy. Li Xuan only promoted and reused these two men.
The personal reason is that their abilities are better than others.
Therefore, Li Xuan was not too worried about the attack on Liping Mansion. He was more worried about how to face the Ming army's counterattack after taking Liping Mansion.
Zhu Zhihai in the provincial capital has to assemble tens of thousands of troops. It is difficult to maintain it with just the two infantry regiments currently in Liping Prefecture. What's more, the main task of these two infantry regiments is not to defend Liping Prefecture, but
I want to continue south to Guangxi.
The future task of defending Lipingfu will largely rely on the troops that subsequently march into Lipingfu.
Therefore, in recent times, Li Xuan has focused a lot of time and energy on the subsequent expansion of the army.
Even though the Third Infantry Regiment and the Fourth Infantry Regiment have not yet fully formed an army, the plan to establish the Fifth Infantry Regiment has been confirmed by Li Xuan, and the departments under the Privy Council have been asked to make relevant preparations in advance.
For example, the battalions of the Fifth Infantry Regiment, the chief officers of each team, the grassroots officers of each platoon, and the key non-commissioned officers need to be arranged in advance.
In this way, after the recruits recruited from Liping Prefecture have completed one month of basic training for recruits, they can be immediately added to the Fifth Infantry Regiment, so that the Fifth Infantry Regiment can be established immediately and start training, so as to form an army as soon as possible.
Now, with the First Infantry Regiment and the Second Infantry Regiment entering Liping Prefecture one after another, even though Liping Prefecture has not yet been captured, officials from the Ministry of War have already penetrated deeply into the eastern area of Liping Prefecture and began to recruit soldiers. Hundreds of people come to the station every day.
Recruited as new recruits of the Tang Dynasty's new army, these recruits will enter the two temporary recruit camps set up by the Privy Council for training.
These people will be able to complete basic physical fitness, discipline, and tactical training in one month. Some of them will be replenished to the First Infantry Regiment and the Second Infantry Regiment to make up for the battle losses of these two infantry regiments, while most of the rest will be
Will become members of the 4th Infantry Regiment and the 5th Infantry Regiment.
In other words, the Fifth Infantry Regiment will be able to receive a large number of new recruits in one month, so there is not much time left for Li Xuan to prepare for the Fifth Infantry Regiment.
In addition to personnel preparation, ordnance preparation also cannot be slacked off.
Cold weapons are okay. Although the number of cold weapons made by the new army of the Tang Dynasty is not large, there are many cold weapons captured from the Ming army. Armor, waist knives, spears, bows and arrows are almost everything you need, and the workshop of the Tang Dynasty
Some of the cold weapons they built themselves were also imitated from the Ming Army's standard swords. This resulted in the fact that the cold weapons equipped by the New Army of the Tang Dynasty were all Ming Army's standard weapons, from swords to bows and arrows.
However, the ordnance difficulty that restricted the expansion of the new army of the Tang Dynasty was not the lack of cold weapons, but the lack of firearms, especially muskets and artillery.
Li Xuan has asked the Ministry of Industry several times to find ways to increase the production of artillery and muskets as much as possible!
To this end, the craftsmen in the Ministry of Works have tried their best and used every conceivable method, such as forcing skilled craftsmen to lead apprentices, and bringing many apprentices, such as formulating a unified
manufacturing standards and simplify the production process.
After the final scale expansion, an assembly line production method was developed according to Li Xuan. For example, a musket requires multiple parts, and each part requires multiple processes.
To this end, the Ministry of Industry separated all the processes involved in manufacturing muskets, and then formulated standard parameters so that everyone could specialize in one of the processes.
From the raw material to the factory, a gun needs to pass through the hands of at least hundreds of workers. It is no longer done by those craftsmen personally as in the past. From the beginning to the end, one craftsman and several apprentices are responsible for it.
The musket workshop established in Xingquan Prefecture has been the first to adopt this assembly line production model. Hundreds of people in the entire workshop do what they are best at in different divisions of labor. What is good at?
In the past, a skilled craftsman might take a month to build a musket, which meant that they would only do the same process once a month. But now, the craftsman might have to do the same process again and again every day.
The process has been accumulated day and night, and the technology for this process is far better than that of the craftsmen in the past.
Similarly, such large-scale assembly line production also greatly improves the yield rate and reduces costs. At the same time, there is no longer a large need for skilled craftsmen. These skilled craftsmen can serve as team leaders of some groups.
, responsible for technical adjustments and improvements, but the people who actually build the muskets have become ordinary workers.
This production model is actually almost the same as the production model in the late 19th century. Of course, it is still very different from the extensive assembly line production model in the later 20th century in which the whole society participated.
It is the most preliminary and basic narrow-sense assembly line production model. It is inaccurate to directly say that it is assembly line production. It should be said that it is a combination of 'object specialization' and 'parts standardization'.
The combination and widespread application of these two production models began in the early 19th century, and developed into Ford's extensive flow-through production in the 20th century.
Datang's workshops began to standardize parts and specialize objects. To put it a bit exaggeratedly, it has actually entered the category of modern industry.
Therefore, if Li Xuan was more shameless, it could be said that the Tang Dynasty was already a modern industrial country, and it was also the most advanced industrial country in the contemporary era. The model of industrialized production was enough to defeat the Ming Dynasty and many messy countries in Europe.
The Tang Dynasty has become the world's most powerful industrial country, there is no doubt about this!
The only troublesome thing is that this production model almost treats workers like robots. It is repetitive and monotonous and the labor intensity is quite high, which can easily cause physical and psychological fatigue of workers.
Because a worker has to repeat monotonous work on the assembly line, which lasts for more than ten hours every day. In order to increase production, the workers' rest time has been extremely compressed. Since the musket workshop in Xingquan Prefecture adopted the assembly line
After delivery, several workers were already exhausted and collapsed, and accidents occurred due to excessive exhaustion, which led to accidents and many casualties.
However, the officials of the Ministry of Industry naturally turned a blind eye to this. As long as they could significantly increase production and meet His Majesty's requirements, thereby retaining their official titles or even being promoted to a higher level, they did not care about the lives of those workers.
After the official in charge of the Xingquan Fucheng musket workshop was promoted due to the substantial increase in output, other workshops under the Ministry of Industry also adopted the assembly line production model one after another, and the output of various ordnance products also increased in a short period of time.
Substantial growth.
For this reason, Li Xuan will naturally not begrudge his rewards. Recently, he always hears about the promotion of officials from the Ministry of Industry, which makes officials from other cabinet departments jealous.
Officials at the Ministry of Industry have regarded increasing the production of ordnance as the main achievement for promotion. Li Xuan is not too worried about this, but the development of new ordnance still needs to be watched by Li Xuan personally.
.
After all, without him personally watching, who knows what weird ordnance those at the Ministry of Industry would come up with. For example, some people had a whim a while ago and said they wanted to build a weapon that could fire dozens of rounds at the same time.
Musket.
This sounds like a repeating rifle, but in fact, the craftsmen of the Ministry of Industry tied dozens of barrels together, then loaded them and fired them at once.
The power was indeed quite strong, so strong that the continuous and intensive recoil directly shook away the iron frame holding dozens of gun barrels, because the bullets in dozens of gun barrels were not fired at the same time.
After the gun frame fell apart, the subsequent bullets fired turned a craftsman who participated in the experiment into a hornet's nest on the spot, as well as three others.
After hearing this, Li Xuan was a little helpless. On the one hand, he complained that these people were messing around. It was okay now, not to mention wasting a lot of resources and causing an accident and killing someone. But on the other hand, he was
I'm a little lucky, because these craftsmen from the Ministry of Industry are not resting on their laurels, but are actively exploring new technologies and weapons.
Therefore, Li Xuan himself was a little helpless. Naturally, this punishment could not be punished. He had to properly handle the funeral and provide generous pensions to the families of the deceased craftsmen.
But on the other hand, he has also strengthened his control over new weapons research and development projects that require a large amount of resources. All research and development plans for major projects that require a large amount of resources must be approved by him.
The 1,300-pound artillery project was one such project. Li Xuan was keeping an eye on this project throughout the entire process. When the artillery was just manufactured and ready for live ammunition testing, Li Xuan personally went to the Xingquan Mansion of the Ministry of Industry.
We watched the test firing at the artillery workshop.