Chapter 90: 90 you still laugh

"What are you making there?" Alice asked listlessly, watching Tang Mo who had be sitting still for over an hour, fiddling with the strange parts in his hand.

"If I really had to name it... you could call it... a fuze," Tang Mo replied without taking his eyes off the componts in his hands, with a steady gaze.

"A fuze? What's that?" Alice, who had never heard the term, continued to ask with a puzzled look on her face.

"Perhaps it's a switch for some kind of superweapon in the future," Tang Mo said with a smile, threading a part made by Mathews through a spring, carefully attaching it to a device.

What he was currtly working on was a percussion fuze, a crucial device for artillery shells, without which a shell would not be able to explode at the most needed time.

In fact, after developing fulminate, Tang Mo had begun working on this device. However, it was clear that the device was too intricate for his factory to mass-produce.

Mathews and a few sior technicians helped make some parts, and th Tang Mo himself made one fuze a day, managing to barely produce a few doz pottially usable artillery fuzes.

This was why Tang Mo was eager to start producing cannons; he truly had the capacity to create new artillery, which explained his rush to melt down half the cannons from the armed merchant ships, using the steel to manufacture his own cannons.

Tang Mo was aware that he couldn't accomplish everything at once, so the cannons he intded to make wer't exactly cutting-edge.

The blueprint he drew was of the rowned Krupp first-geration breech-loading cannon, specifically the C64 recoil gun.

The recoil gun indeed had many flaws and was an early artillery piece not considered advanced. However, this type of gun had the advantages of a relatively simple structure and lighter weight.

Of course, for Tang Mo, there was another significant advantage of this cannon: it had a low technical barrier to production, making it easier to manufacture!

This cannon used a breech-loading mechanism, which was much more advanced than the widely used front-loading Shireck Automatic Cannon.

Its main feature was the wedge breech block, which utilized a screw-driv wedge. Wh retracted, the breech block thinned, allowing for easy removal, and wh pushed forward, it thicked to achieve a seal.

Differt from modern cannons, this breech block was slid out from the side of the barrel, which looked quite strange.

Using breech-loading provided evidt advantages in terms of rate of fire and airtightness, so in terms of range, accuracy, and loading speed, Tang Mo's new cannons far surpassed contemporary standards.

According to the paper specs of the Krupp cannon, the C64 field recoil gun had a caliber of only 80 millimeters, or 78 millimeters excluding the rifling— not very large.

Yet, this cannon had an effective range of 3500 meters! That was indeed astonishing. Shireck Automatic Cannons, being front-loading guns, had poor airtightness, and to achieve a similar range, they needed a larger caliber and more propellant.

Moreover, Tang Mo's new artillery used an tirely new shell structure, employing real high-explosive grades, significantly hancing their power.

For a front-loading Shireck cannon to compete in range and power with Tang Mo's new artillery, it had to weigh at least two tons. Such heavy artillery had poor mobility and couldn't keep pace with the Troops' movemt speed.

Cannons of this size were typically fixed artillery in castle forts, akin to fort cannon. Field artillery that accompanied Infantry could not match the performance of the C64 cannon, no matter what.

"What, you're not happy to have me?" Alice had grown accustomed to Tang Mo, the man of steel, in the past two days, hce she wasn't as puffed up with anger. On the contrary, she played to her natural female advantages, feigning ignorance and acting cute, which had Tang Mo somewhat at a loss.

Seeing that Tang Mo was determined not to talk, she continued: "Actually, I'll be leaving soon too. The 0 steam gines you promised me have already be delivered in batches, with 5 shipped out. I've writt to my father telling him that I'll follow the last batch back to Northern Ridge."

"You're leaving?" Hearing that the clingy and beautiful girl was going back to Northern Ridge, Tang Mo suddly felt a sse of joy as if he were being released from a stce.

"You seem very pleased." His joy was so obvious that after he spoke, Alice detected a hint in his words that irked her.

Tang Mo quickly feigned a dejected look: "No, of course not, I'm very regretful. I won't be able to see a beautiful girl like you anymore; I'll be very despondt."

"Your acting is really terrible!" Alice complained dissatisfied.

"I'm not acting." Tang Mo argued.

Alice angrily prested her evidce: "The corners of your mouth are almost split up to your ears!"

"How is that possible, I'm not a snake." Tang Mo was unfazed by her accusation and continued to refute.

"You're still laughing!" Alice pretded to be angry.

Tang Mo persisted in his dial, which was one of his ultimate tactics against Alice: "No, it's just because I remembered something funny."

"Don't get too happy too soon!" Alice revealed a mischievous smile.

"Why?" Tang Mo was tak aback, instinctively ssing danger.

Sure ough, Alice suddly began speaking with a triumphant tone: "Because I lied to you! I didn't write to my father! I'm going to stay here and see what kind of mess you're really up to."

Tang Mo slapped his hand onto his face, covering his eyes—he knew that the most difficult thing to deal with in the world was not the F Raptor Fighter trailing behind his own aircraft, but wom.

Before his transport to this world, he had many wom, all kinds: beautiful, chanting, sexy, wild. But the woman who left a scar that could not heal for a long time, was only one.

Whever Tang Mo thought of that woman, he would have a momt of trance. There wer't many good wom in the world, and ev fewer who would willingly die for a man... Regrettably, Tang Mo had met one and lost her.

Just as Alice was making Tang Mo think of the blurry figure of the woman he could never meet again, a fast horse dashed through the streets of Brunas town like a bolt of lightning.

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7 updates today, Dragon Spirit needs a break. The remaining draft is a bit messy and needs to be sorted out, I'll continue posting tonight, aiming for updates today!

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