War Palace and Knee Pillow, Austria’s Destiny

Austria, Tyrol

In a canyon covered with mountains and dense forests, there are several ancient courtyards.

There are steep cliffs on one side and a clear, cold lake on the other side. The scenery of the lakes and mountains echoes the thousands of years of snow and frost, making people feel like they are in an inaccessible wonderland.

It's just that a very abrupt fence ruins the aesthetics, and the wooden sign of the Swarovski Lumberyard hanging on the gate makes people feel tacky.

This seemingly ordinary farmhouse workshop hides a huge secret unknown to outsiders - a secret research center for new weapons, and the final testing of breech-loading guns is being carried out intensely indoors.

If you are a sharp-eyed professional, you can tell at a glance that this gun is more complete than Dreiser's rifle, and even the big problem that plagues the entire world's weapons industry-air tightness has also been overcome.

Although the research center occupies a small area, the advantage is that although the sparrow is small, it has all the internal organs. There are not only specialized gunpowder factories and fine iron factories inside, but also a rubber factory, and the sealing rubber ring is their masterpiece.

Currently, countries around the world, including Prussia, still use the single-point hook cutting method to manufacture gun rifling. This method has been used as early as the sixteenth century, but it has a fatal flaw, that is, it is inefficient.

Craftsmen who use this rifling method must use a hook-shaped sharpener that is hard and sharp enough to turn and cut inside the barrel, slowly carving out the rifling one by one.

Generally speaking, one rifling needs to be broached more than twenty times. If you want to make a good gun, the same rifling needs to be broached more than 100 times, because the more times you pull, the thinner and tighter the grooves formed.

But a barrel usually has 6-8 riflings, and at that time it was almost all done by hand. The workload was very scary. However, precisely because of the guaranteed quality, the craftsmanship of gunsmiths is often sought after.

Of course, Franz would not adopt this production method. Instead, he suggested the die extrusion method, which is a method that has been used since the end of World War II.

In fact, the manufacturing process of this method is not complicated. It is to first drill a hole in the barrel that is slightly smaller than the barrel of the gun, and then use a high-hardness die with protrusions corresponding to the bore line, and then use the assistance of a high-pressure machine to make it. Turn and press down in the hole, squeezing the inside of the barrel into the female and male lines.

This law has three obvious benefits. The first is precision. The rifling produced by the die extrusion method can be worth hundreds of broaching operations by a skilled gunsmith.

The second is the unparalleled manufacturing speed. A master craftsman takes his apprentice to hammer out a work that takes a month to complete in this arsenal in only ten minutes (the speed of rifling).

If it is only compared to the production of gun barrels, Franz's small arsenal's daily production of rifled gun barrels has exceeded the total output of the entire German Federation.

The third is the price. With the help of the hydraulic press, the entire cost has dropped sharply to only a few tenths of that of a hand-made gun.

A brand-new bullet was also produced in this factory, which was the famous Migne bullet in later generations.

Compared with the past spherical bullets that needed to be struck with an iron rod when loading, the diameter of this conical bullet is slightly smaller than the diameter of the gun bore. At the same time, in order to cooperate with the breech-loading gun, Franz added wooden or paper to the bottom of the bullet. Quality bullet casings.

When loading, just put the bullet into the gun chamber, close the pull bolt, and pull the trigger. The firing pin stimulates the explosion of mercury at the bottom of the bullet. The gas compresses the cork, causing the bottom to expand, close to the rifling, and seal the gap between the warhead and the gun chamber. The gap prevents gas from leaking out, and allows the warhead to rotate and fly out at high speed under the pressure of the rifling.

This kind of bullet can greatly improve the range and accuracy of the rifle. The range of this currently unnamed rifle can reach a terrifying 800 meters, which is twice that of the M1841 Dresser rifle at this time. The stopping power of the bullet is very good and the lethality is amazing. , the rate of fire is as high as 12 rounds per minute.

However, this is not a work that satisfies Franz, because the design of metal fixed-loading ammunition has been completed at this time. In fact, the earliest metal fixed-loading ammunition appeared as early as 1836, but it is different from the modern fixed-loading ammunition. It's not directly related. It's a deflection-fire bullet, but it does effectively increase the air tightness of the breech-loading gun.

Franz tried to invent a modern metal fixed-loading bullet, but what he didn't expect was that due to the problem of propellant, the power of this bullet was very impressive.

Not to mention killing people, there is even a chance that it will not be able to penetrate a target made of hard wood. Later, an engineer proposed using nitroglycerin, which Franz knew was the main ingredient in the yellow gunpowder that was later commonly used.

So the engineer named William Ogle was promised half a million florins as long as he could develop a safe propellant.

Then the engineer was directly killed during the first test. Due to the special nature of the work, the Austrian government had to declare to his family that he had suffered a mining accident.

William Ogle and his two assistants were also the first victims of this arsenal. Franz was well aware of the risks of developing smokeless gunpowder, but he had to do it because the competition in military technology was not If you die, we will die in a war, and there is no room for mercy.

Austria's chief weapons expert, Vincenz Augustine, was a very old-fashioned man, but after seeing the invention of the arsenal, he joined the army of military reform.

Historically, Austrian artillery has gone astray. Due to the disastrous defeat during the Napoleonic Wars and the military reforms of Archduke Karl, they worshiped artillery extremely.

This "big" is in a physical sense. The Austrians like to build large-caliber artillery, but historically their steelmaking technology was poor, and the steel they produced was of poor quality and expensive.

So the Austrians chose to use bronze-cast cannons. Yes, they chose the technology of the last century, but after these people's magical modifications, they came up with a front-loaded cannon that fired faster than a breech-loaded cannon.

However, casting bronze cannons has always been a counter-current behavior. Finally, with the end of the Austro-Prussian War, the Austrian Empire's dream of artillery also ended.

In fact, unlike what many people imagined, the Prussian Krupp cannon not only failed to suppress the Austrian bronze cannon, but was defeated by the Austrian bronze cannon.

Of course, Krupp also absorbed the Austrian cannon-making technology. Later, the Krupp cannon showed its prowess in the Franco-Prussian War, establishing its important position in the world's military history.

However, at this time, Austria's steel quality ranked first in the world, especially in the field of special steel, which was far ahead of this era.

Manganese steel cannons have become an inevitable choice. If other European countries want to mass-produce manganese steel, it is not only a technical problem, but also a resource problem, because only Austria and Russia in the entire Europe have large-scale manganese ores.

Cannons made of this material did not have alternatives until World War I, so Franz could safely let these engineers build "big" cannons.