Chapter Five Hundred and Twenty Five Machine Guns Debut
On February 6, Eternal Fifty-Third Year, Lin Ziran and a group of military and senior officials entered the weapons testing site of the Fuyuan Ordnance Factory on the outskirts of Luohai City.
The director of the Small Arms Department of the Ordnance Department of the Army Command was leading Lin Ziran and others in while introducing: "Since last year, our Firearms Department has established a machine gun department and organized Fuyuan Factory, Luoan Factory, Luohai Factory
Experts from different institutions such as the Polytechnic University and Nanzhou Higher Normal University jointly established a machine gun laboratory and experimented with more than 30 different machine gun designs."
"We conducted comprehensive research and evaluation on the performance, industrial production difficulty, cost, etc. of different design solutions!"
"In October last year, we completed the preliminary research and determined the final two different structural design plans for the next step of research. We set up an air-cooled machine gun group and a water-cooled machine gun group respectively, and started the next step of prototype gun manufacturing and live ammunition testing.
wait!"
"The whole process lasted for three months. During the experiment, we learned a lot of problems, improved the exposed problems, and further improved the design plans of the two projects!"
"Finally, the research of these two project teams has reached the final stage. In the internal test organized by our ordnance department three days ago, both test prototype guns successfully completed various tests!"
"Although these two different prototype guns still have problems of one kind or another, we firmly believe that automatic rapid-fire weapons will be the future of war!"
"I believe that after seeing it, sirs and colleagues, they will have the same feeling as me!"
Listening to the director of the Firearms Department of the Ordnance Department swearing these words, a group of senior generals of the Daheng United Army had dull expressions. They were all veterans and knew that there were countless new people in the Ordnance Department.
Weapons research project.
But in fact, most of them are useless gadgets in their opinion. For example, at the end of last year, the laboratory under the Ordnance Department teamed up with Fuyuan Ordnance Factory to develop a so-called volley gun.
What is that thing? It means loading many bullets into fifty barrels at the same time, and then firing them at the same time. Dozens of bullets are fired at the same time.
This sounds powerful, but after this round, the barrels are reloaded one by one. The reloading time is enough for a rifle to fire hundreds of bullets...
Among countless project teams, few can actually be put into practical use and enter military service.
In fact, the Ministry of Ordnance itself knows that most of the projects it funds are useless in the end. However, the reason why they still fund laboratories in various schools and research project teams of enterprises and issue large amounts of research funds is because of advanced weapons.
It does need to evolve from numerous research projects.
Well, the research on new weapons is basically a whirlwind, finding some relatively reliable projects from many seemingly inconspicuous research projects, continuing the research, and then obtaining practical weapons or equipment.
Many weapons and equipment currently in service in the Daheng Unified Army were made in this way, the most typical of which is the collision fuze.
This thing seems inconspicuous, but in fact this thing is an important part of the breech-loading rifled gun project. Without this thing, even if a cylindrical shell is used, the detonation of the shell can only be compared with the traditional round gun.
Like grenades, only fuzes such as disc delay fuzes can be used.
However, after using the collision fuse and adding the cylindrical shell, the two can form a perfect combination. After the shell is fired, it will explode directly when it hits the target, neither early nor late.
The initial research and development of the collision fuze was extended from more than twenty different fuze projects. At that time, Lin Ziran funded more than twenty different collision fuze project teams at the same time. In the end, only one succeeded, and this one
The successful collision fuze directly perfected the breech-loaded artillery in the Daheng unified army.
The same goes for research on rifles. Although Lin Ziran proposed the concept of a breech-loading rifled rifle very early, which is a rough design, there are still multiple project teams conducting different research at the same time.
There are only two project teams studying the locking scheme, one researching the front-end locking and the rear-end locking respectively. For example, the locking scheme of the modified rifle used by Fuyuan Rifle was selected from multiple different locking schemes.
Before the Luoan III rifle was finalized, it already had three different calibers of eight millimeters, 11 millimeters, and 13 millimeters, and had a variety of locking schemes, a magazine, and the ability to fire paper-cased bullets and metal bullets.
Ten different research plans were finally tested and selected before many technical plans were finalized.
It's a pity that the last one was useless, because the technicians discovered that the Nanhai rifle produced by Nanzhou Bank was more complete than the new rifle they produced, with better bolt action, locking and other designs. All that was needed was
Improve the firing pin part one or two to fire metal bullets with tail primer ammunition.
And the production line can be slightly modified!
But you can't say that the research at that time was of any use. It was precisely because of so much research that we were able to know the many advantages of the Nanhai rifle and modify the firing mode. Moreover, the metal bullets were developed by the Daheng United Army themselves.
of.
After the two were combined with each other, the Luoan III rifle was born!
At the same time, the Ordnance Department has not given up research on new rifles. Today, the Ordnance Department still has multiple rifle research project groups, including research on improved Luoan III rifles, including reducing the caliber to 11 mm, increasing the magazine, etc.
, in addition there are newly designed 11mm rifles and even 8mm rifles.
Research on the above three major new rifle projects has been ongoing, but there is still a long way to go before they are completed and finalized.
It can also be seen from all of this that if you want to obtain a perfect new weapon, it is not something you can do casually. Even if you know the concept or even the general design, there are many details.
Details still require constant research and improvement, and even differences in details can lead to different solutions. If you don't study and experiment one by one, how do you know which solution is feasible?
The Luoan III rifle and steel rifled breech-loading gun in the Daheng Unified Army are mature products that were developed after long-term research and countless tests.
Furthermore, although many research projects are useless in the end, the research process can also cultivate talents or produce some by-products that can be used in other aspects!
This time we were looking at machine guns. Many generals wanted to see the fun, but they had also seen early prototype guns or concepts, technical information, etc., and they all recognized the potential of machine guns.