Chapter 14: 14 qian is a catalyst

After watching Tang Mo's continuous shooting performance, Mathews's aloof demeanor had completely dissolved.

He was like a curious baby, wanting to touch but hesitant to reach out, craning his neck with curiosity as he examined the left-wheel handgun in Tang Mo's hand.

While looking, he kept muttering incessantly, "It looks like a very complex rotating structure... You use it for continuous shooting?"

"Yes," Tang Mo said as he fired six shots in a row, only beginning to clean the gun's chamber after the bullets were all spent.

The process was actually quite annoying, but it had to be done—Tang Mo felt more and more that developing smokeless powder was necessary.

He really missed that feeling of continuous firing, then easily ejecting the magazine, coolly reloading, and fiercely strafing the enemy once more.

Standing there, trying to get a better look at the left-wheel handgun in the spotlight in Tang Mo's hand, Dwarf Mathews kept whispering in admiration, "What a genius idea! You are simply a genius!"

It seemed he couldn't properly express his reverence for this exquisite design without speaking out, yet he feared being too loud and disturbing Tang Mo, making him annoyed, so he could only murmur quietly.

Finally, he couldn't resist any longer; he carefully pointed to the left-wheel handgun in Tang Mo's hand and asked, "Could you tell me what this is?"

"I call it a revolver," Tang Mo replied, picking up the handgun and responding to Mathews.

Mathews looked like a child who had seen a beloved toy but didn't have the money to buy it. He just stared at the gun, continuing to mutter to himself, "My God! Incredible! Gods above... it's unbelievable."

"You see? This thing represents the future!" Tang Mo said to Mathews with a smile.

"You're right, we are destined to win... no, we are destined to win!" Mathews corrected himself subconsciously, "Clever linkage... how did you think of this?"

Tang Mo laughed, with an unrestrained grin. He handed the handgun to Mathews, "Take a closer look."

In fact, as long as one takes a good look at the structure and disassembles it, replicating it is almost effortless.

The only technical difficulty was with the fulminate. Without the percussion cap, the thing was almost worthless.

But with the percussion cap, it became the most advanced king of close combat of the era, and without a doubt, even Wes described it as the bane of the Rangers!

"Stay and work for me, and you will see a different world," Tang Mo offered as he watched Mathews handling the handgun.

"I will go make the parts you need right now! I can finish them before dark! As long as you don't send me away, I'll stay here until I die," Mathews said to Tang Mo earnestly, looking up.

As he spoke, his eyes shone with sincerity; Tang Mo knew that this old dwarf truly saw this place as his lifetime workplace.

Everyone knew that the Shireck conglomerate, which had infiltrated the Leite Kingdom, was a monstrous super arms dealer. Once they got their hands on a sample of Tang Mo's new weapon, it would be very easy for them to mass-produce replicas.

And since Tang Mo had been showcasing his weapons around, no one could guarantee that the information wouldn't reach the ears of those at Shireck.

Tang Mo first brought out the needle gun actually as a way of deliberately setting a trap for Shireck, this potential adversary. Once the opponent fell into the big pit of the needle gun, it meant they were led astray and would naturally waste a large amount of resources.

By the time Shireck realized what was happening, Tang Mo would have had a brief respite and could calmly respond and bring out better weapons for yet another leap forward.

What if Shireck played fair and did not copy Tang Mo's needle gun design? Wasn't the needle gun still more advanced than Shireck's flintlock? The superiority was obvious at a glance, and Tang Mo wouldn't suffer, would he?

Besides this insurance, there was another very direct reason—Tang Mo was just the owner of a handicraft workshop, and he really could not mass-produce paper cartridges with caps at the bottom in any proper sense at the moment.

Although this item was not too sophisticated, it still demanded higher requirements than the cap that was simply wrapped in the middle of paper cartridge powder, so Tang Mo could not ensure quality control.

If he had the support of Count Fisheo, Tang Mo could expand his production line and hire more workers. Then he probably could mass-produce paper cartridges with primers at the bottom, but he did not currently have the capability.

Therefore, the more rudimentary, and the easier to manually produce ammunition for the long-needle gun, became Tang Mo's temporary choice.

He really had no other choice, as his small workshop of about a hundred people truly had limited productivity, which couldn't keep up with Tang Mo's demands.

Among these hundred people, there were seventeen or eighteen traditional blacksmith and smelting workers who operated the furnaces and processed metals into usable materials.

There were also less than twenty parts manufacturing workers, who were true craftsmen. They operated simple equipment and relied almost entirely on handicraft to create some parts, drilling out expensive gun barrels!

Do you know how many days a proper worker in this era, using a semi-automatic method, needs to drill a qualified gun barrel? About three days!

How many guns could Tang Mo's small workshop produce each day? Roughly one-third of a gun! It took him about three days to make a rifle, and equipping an infantry company with weapons would keep him busy for a year!

Therefore, his trip to the Northern Ridge to meet with Lord Earl was actually not just for a weapons production order but also for a full support from Lord Earl and a series of plans to expand the workshop's capacity!

He intended to consume almost all of the steel output of Northern Ridge in the future and then begin by making two coal-fired steam engines in his own workshop. With these modern machines, he would manufacture perfect gun barrels.

In short, everything needed time, effort, technology, and talent to accumulate...

And before all of this, before anything was ready, Tang Mo needed to prepare another catalyst for these "chemical reactions"—money!

Yes, he needed a lot of money! Everything needed money for support, without money everything was just a dream.

Now he had money, so everything could start to be deployed and implemented—and that was indeed what he was doing. At present, the parts for the steam engines were still under manufacture, but soon Tang Mo would have two boring machines that could work day and night!

With this equipment, his production speed could be multiplied, and Lord Earl's order would no longer be an unattainable goal.