After Lucia came of age, Border Town also entered the last month of winter.
But for the Months of Demons, the end of winter did not mean the end. The heavy snow often lasted until the next spring. As for when it would subside, it was completely up to God.
Based on past experiences, the Months of Demons ended in the first half of the first month of spring, which was quite a difficult period; the second half of the first month was a very difficult period; if the Months of Demons continued to the second month, it would be very difficult to even survive.
But this was only the situation that Border Town residents had encountered.
This year's situation had greatly improved. Even if the Months of Demons lasted until the end of the second month of spring, the stored wheat in the granary would be enough to fill everyone's stomachs.
Naturally, Roland would not be satisfied with the passing line of not starving or freezing to death. These days, he had been lying in front of his desk in high spirits, drawing drawings, and thinking about his next stage of large-scale production plan. The entire plan was divided into two aspects: military and civilian. The former included the construction of new weapon factories, bicycle factories, docks, and shallow water heavy gunboats. The latter was mainly about water, heating, and electricity supply in residential areas, as well as the popularization of iron farming tools.
It was Lucia White who made him full of motivation. After testing her new ability, Roland clearly realized that the last restriction of large-scale production had been solved, and the productivity of Border Town would usher in a new peak with the growth of the population.
This restriction was the supply of materials.
Modern smelting was a very complicated subject, and the output of steel was one of the most important parameters to measure an industrial country. But Roland did not know much about it, so the iron-making ability of Border Town was still very backward. The technology was not beyond this era, and the scale was not even comparable to some private smelters of mining merchants. When the iron ore was smelted into pig iron in the brick blast furnace, the good quality was sent to make steam engines, and the bad quality was given to Anna for further smelting into steel. But this process was completely uncontrollable, and the carbon content was also high and low. Sometimes the usable materials could only fill two or three carriages after a whole day of work, which greatly limited the production capacity of the steam engine factory.
And although Anna's special furnace could transform inferior pig iron into quality controllable steel, the output was only enough for the military factory. In autumn, it could basically meet the town's needs, but when winter came, the army went through two expansions, and in addition to the development of new firearms and cannons, this amount of steel was a little insufficient.
Lucia's evolution could be said to be a cardiac stimulant. Her targeted separation ability could easily remove the undesirable components in the materials, and she could also adjust the proportion of various elements during the smelting stage, so that each furnace of molten steel could maintain the same performance.
It could be said that with Anna and Lucia, the level of smelting in Border Town was enough to instantly improve several levels.
For that, Roland had asked Anna to put aside all her other work and focus on building the new-generation furnace.
Compared to the special furnace designed for her before, the new furnace was more than ten times larger. It was fifty meters long, ten meters wide, and nearly four meters tall. At first glance, it looked like a slender swimming pool. In essence, it was no different from the previous generation of special furnaces. It was still an iron box without any heating equipment. It relied entirely on Anna's Black Fire to smelt. However, it was buried in the ground and relied on the soil to support the pressure of the molten iron on the walls. There was a walkway in the center, just enough for Anna to heat the iron ingots on both sides at the same time.
It only had one advantage, which was that it was large enough. If smelting according to the previous method, just the amount of limestone used to remove impurities would be a large number, and it would take a lot of effort to clean up the generated impurities. Adding materials and stirring would also be a big trouble, so it couldn't be made too large. But now, these concerns were completely gone. As long as the pig iron was melted, and then Lucia would remove the phosphorus, sulfur, and other harmful components, it would be enough.
Roland planned to build a new batch of furnaces together with the old blast furnace and the old shaft furnace. They were only responsible for the initial smelting and didn't care about the quality of the finished product, as long as the ore could be melted and turned into square iron ingots. Then these iron ingots would all be put into the new furnace for secondary refining. The molten steel would flow through the gate into the lower terrain template, directly forming materials that could be processed. After that, the steam engine plant would also be converted to steel production, which would inevitably bring a stronger source of power to the town.
Roland called the new furnace "Star of Steel".
Once Anna's manufacturing was completed and the Star of Steel was officially put into production, the town's steel production would increase by more than ten times.
It could be said that the new large-scale production plan was built on this foundation.
In addition, the development of new light weapons had also come to a conclusion.
Roland found that his original idea was not appropriate. He referred to the principle of the gas conductive automatic rifle in the future and designed a few prototype weapons himself. Simply put, automatic weapons used a part of the high-pressure gas when the bullet was fired to complete the unpacking and loading action, thus achieving the process of reloading.
This work lasted about half a month. It wasn't very difficult, but he needed to repeatedly test whether each part could work properly. He didn't need to memorize the specific structure of a certain rifle. As long as he knew how it worked, he could always put together a usable weapon after a few tries.
This was the problem.
The assembled prototype weapon was not only big and black, but there were nearly a hundred parts, each of which was personally made by Anna. Especially the springs, firing pins, gas conductive pistons, and other small things, it was difficult to mass produce with the current level of machine tools. If he wanted to replace all the revolving rifles in the hands of the soldiers with automatic weapons, not only would it be a great burden on Anna, but it would also be a waste of the gun processing equipment that had already been put into production.
In addition, if all the soldiers were to be equipped with automatic weapons, the ammunition consumption would undoubtedly be astronomical. At first, Roland didn't pay too much attention to this, thinking that it could be solved by increasing the number of people in production. However, he soon discovered that once the new weapons were produced on a large scale, they could easily swallow all the output of the acid factory.
As for the small problems that often occurred during the test firing, such as jams and firing failures, they were not important.
After repeatedly weighing the pros and cons, he finally gave up the idea of a large-scale replacement of automatic weapons. However, increasing the firepower output of the army was an urgent need, so he set his eyes on another type of continuous firing weapon.
That was the heavy machine gun.
If twenty to fifty people were assigned a heavy machine gun, the number of weapons would be greatly reduced, and the two most troublesome problems would be easily solved. It could also be automatically loaded using gas conductive methods, and its structure was similar to the prototype weapon. After some modifications, it could be put into principle testing. In addition, it could be made a bit larger, and the parts didn't need to be designed to be as tight as spider webs, which was equivalent to reducing the difficulty for him.
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