Three Kingdoms

Huang Chengyan held it steadily, aiming at a wooden target a hundred steps away, and then pulled down the hanging knife. With a "boom", ordinary people's naked eyes could no longer catch such a fast crossbow arrow. One second it was still on the track on the crossbow arm, and the next second it was already viciously hitting the wooden target!

A powerful vector acts on the wooden target. The wooden target, which is almost as thick as a palm, is like a piece of hemp paper that has been soaked by rain and exposed to the sun for days. It is fragile and vulnerable, and a big hole breaks open in the entire wooden target in an instant. , sawdust flying everywhere...

Huang Chengyan, Fei Qian and several craftsmen slowly walked to the wooden target, and they couldn't help but be a little stunned. This kind of power, let alone the shield held by ordinary sword and shield hands, can probably penetrate even the train carriages of the baggage train without any ambiguity!

Huang Chengyan handed the crossbow to the big craftsman who made the bow arm and said: "First fix the bow arm, then take the string opener, go to the side and try firing continuously to see how many crossbows can be fired. arrow……"

The great craftsman took the order and left. This was a detailed test that must be carried out. The crossbow was replaced with new materials. It cannot be said that it was deformed or damaged before it fired many rounds. Then I really slapped myself in the face.

Huang Chengyan looked at Fei Qian and said, "Xianxiu's method is indeed wonderful, but I guess the cost is also quite wonderful..."

Bow strings of four stones or more must be specially made, and the stronger they are, the higher the quality of the raw materials required. Bow strings in the Han Dynasty were generally made of animal sinews. It is recorded in Zhou Rites, "If the tendons are small and long, and large knots and glossy. If they are small and long, and big knots and glossy, then they must be cut from animals." If you think of a bow as a bow, it is no different from the beast, its sinews are exhausted."

It is quite difficult to obtain strong tendons from animals such as tigers and leopards, so most of them use beef tendons as the main source of bow strings. However, to become a six-stone strong string, not all beef tendons can be used. Competent.

Fei Qian suddenly realized that he seemed to have entered a strange circle, adding a powerful bow arm, so he needed to match it with a strong bow string, and then he needed a stronger crossbow arrow...

In this way, the cost is like buying a mobile phone in the future. Originally I was only planning to look at one that cost more than one thousand, but then I set my sights on one that cost around two thousand. After thinking about it, it was only a few hundred more; but I was about to buy it. At that time, a person next to me with more than two thousand yuan jumped into my eyes again. I thought it was still a few hundred anyway. When I finally came down, I was shocked. I didn’t understand that my budget had increased from more than one thousand to three or four. thousand……

The cost has increased suddenly! Ordinary bows can be made of silk, but strong bows must use animal sinew, otherwise they will definitely lack strength.

The reason why there are fewer and fewer crossbows and more and more bows in the late Han Dynasty is that the population is increasing, so the value of life is getting lower and lower, and the cost of these bow arms and strong strings remains high. , so in comparison, more people choose bows instead of crossbows.

I have a headache, Fei Qian frowned.

Fei Qian is naturally very clear about what Huang Chengyan means. This crossbow machine is very powerful, but the cost is also very high. As an army, it is certainly impossible to just think about the power without calculating the cost. Otherwise, a bunch of beards would have been killed during World War II. The Tiger Leopard heavy tank will not be defeated by the shoddy "welded can" T34.

what to do?

Although steel wire bowstrings are a way of the future, don't forget that this is the Han Dynasty, the Han Dynasty!

How can we produce a large amount of steel wire without machine tools or wire pullers?

By the way, the wire puller!

First of all, pig iron cannot be used for wire drawing. If it falls on the ground, it may break...

Only steel with very good strength and toughness can be used as a raw material. Fei Qian looked up at the sky, searching in his head...

The Han Dynasty had the technology of frying steel. Although the purity of carbon cannot ensure that the content is consistent in every batch, it is not a problem to use it to roughly make weapons. However, wrought iron or even steel ingots need to be drawn into steel wire on a large scale. , it is absolutely unrealistic to rely solely on manual forging, and the drawing process must be solved!

And once the benefits brought by the wire drawing process are solved, it is a bit scary...

Not only can it be used for cranes, trebuchets and other mechanical equipment, but it can also be used in buildings. Only hybrid structures with added steel bars can be called truly rock-solid!

And defensive barbed wire...

Once this is revealed, unless the wooden stakes nailed to the ground are removed together, there is nothing that can be done at this stage! Used to block intersections and quickly deploy defenses, it is simply a supreme artifact!

Dreams are beautiful, but reality is cruel.

Fei Qian had already seen how Huang's craftsmen made a steel wire before, using a hammer to beat the red-hot steel on a grooved iron plate...

Not to mention the effort, the yield rate is pitifully low.

The amount of steel may not be a particularly difficult thing for Fei Qian, he has iron ore! Although the Luliang Mountain area in Bingzhou is not an area rich in iron ore, it is supplied to Fei Qian for mining and use. Especially now that the Han Dynasty is unable to protect itself and has no time to control local political power, all the iron ore produced can be directly deployed and used. So in terms of raw materials, the problem is not too big.

The main problems now are two: one is the desulfurization technology of iron ore, and the other is the improvement of processing technology.

The original method of desulfurization is to mix lime powder to remove sulfur and silicon from the iron ore to form slag. It only takes a few adjustments to find the ratio suitable for the Luliang Mountain iron ore origin. It should be said that it only takes time. The problem.

In this way, the crudely refined molten iron must be above the average level. It is then forged by the Huang craftsmen to form steel ingots with suitable strength and toughness, and finally become various weapons and agricultural tools...

So the initial desulfurization is probably like this. If you want a more effective method, you may need to find some alchemists. Only by continuing to study this will there be a better method, but this steel processing technology...

So now the problem is one, the wire drawing process...

If it can be solved, all problems can be solved easily.

The crossbow machine part is made of bronze and can be made in batches!

The crossbow arm and other frame structures can be made of wrought iron to find a suitable balance point in terms of weight and strength, or they can be directly molded!

Then if the technical problem of the bow string can be solved, the entire crossbow can be replaced with metal materials, and large-scale production will become possible!

Moreover, interchangeability and unified standards become possible!

Everything now is stuck on this bottleneck...

One day, Sun Quan found Wu Guotai worriedly...

Sun Quan: "My dear mother, I went to Ganlu Temple today and met a woman offering incense. I fell in love with her and wanted to marry her."

Wu Guotai: "Zhongmou, you can't be together. Shang Xiang is your sister."

Sun Quan: "..."