Datang Live Room

"Chun Yuzhen, come here and take a look at this."

Whether something is useful or not depends ultimately on the user.

The next day Yan Kai found Chun Yuzhen with a conspicuous bag.

"This is... a crossbow machine?" Chun Yuzhen asked curiously, looking at something he had never seen before.

If he hadn't seen the crossbow arrows exposed from the firing port above, he might not have been able to recognize them.

"Yes, you give it a try." Yan Kai said.

Chun Yuzhen directly raised his hand and fired it towards the side.

"Hey, so fast!"

Chun Yuzhen said with some surprise.

"How? Is it useful?"

Ah!

Chun Yuzhen nodded and said, "It's enough to deal with pirates and the like."

"It means that fighting is of little use, right?" Yan Kai asked.

Chun Yuzhen was quite honest, and he would answer whatever Yan Kai asked.

"Yes, it will be of little use if we fight the Turks, Goguryeo, and Tubo."

"Because they basically have armor and shields, especially shields. A slightly thicker wooden shield and crossbow arrows are useless."

Yan Kai nodded. If it were a thick wooden shield, it would indeed be able to effectively block such crossbow arrows.

"But if we expand this crossbow machine, the stronger the machine expansion, the heavier and larger the crossbow arrows it can fire, which should increase the power a lot."

Yan Kai was stunned. He was still thinking about making a pistol, but Chun Yuzhen was already thinking about making a sniper!

But what he said seems to be true. If a rotatable base is added to this crossbow and then enlarged, it will naturally have a stronger range and power.

In the Song Dynasty, there was a three-bow crossbow that could even be used to attack cities. The crossbow arrows could be shot directly into the bricks of the city wall, and then the siege soldiers could climb up the city wall on those bows and arrows.

So those arrows are also called Taque arrows.

Chun Yuzhen's words also gave Yan Kai new ideas.

After returning home, he first asked the craftsmen to double the size of the one-handed conspicuous bag and make it into a two-handed repeating crossbow.

The weight of this crossbow makes it difficult to lift it.

But Chun Yuzhen's subordinates have no problem.

The power has also been greatly enhanced. Not only has the effective range increased to more than forty meters, but even an ordinary thin wooden shield will be broken by such a crossbow in a few hits.

Not to mention ordinary leather armor, silk armor, wood armor, and bamboo armor. If they are basically aimed at the vital point, they will have a killing effect.

Only iron armor such as mail armor and Mingguang armor can have a certain degree of defense.

This time, even Chun Yuzhen was a little excited.

"This thing is good. If you want to fight the Turks, their horses don't have much armor. This thing is good at shooting horses. Unfortunately, even if it shoots fast, if there are many Turkic cavalry, it will be useless after one round."

"Use three stages of shooting." Yan Kai said: "You can divide people into three teams. After one team shoots, go back and load new crossbows. Then the second team starts shooting, and then the third team, so that you can attack in a cycle."

"Yes! Uncle, your brain is really good!"

Chunyu Zhen was so happy that he couldn't put it down and touched the crossbow arrows, and then asked: "Uncle, how much does such a crossbow machine cost?"

"Probably..." Yan Kai estimated the wages he paid to the craftsmen, as well as the prices of various raw materials: "Not including the crossbow arrows, it costs more than [-] yuan!"

"How much?" Chunyu Zhen shook his hands and looked at Yan Kai in disbelief.

"More than six hundred pieces of literature."

Yan Kai didn't lie. For this enlarged crossbow, the wood should not be too poor, and the machine expansion and string strings inside are not cheap.

Six hundred yuan is already the lowest cost price.

"So expensive!" Chun Yuzhen sighed.

At this time in the Tang Dynasty, the government army system was still in place. The government soldiers did not receive military pay, but they would be allocated fields.

The fifty people brought by Chun Yuzhen were actually Chun Yunan's private armed forces in the past, that is, professional soldiers, which was equivalent to the later recruitment system.

These soldiers are all paid, but the annual salary is only 12 shi of corn and 7 bolts of cloth.

Don't think this treatment is low. During the Tang Xuanzong period, except for the Shence Army, the border troops were treated like this.

Calculating based on the price of food here in Dengzhou, one stone of rice only costs about a few dozen cents. The cost of this crossbow is already more than half a year's military salary for a professional soldier.

After thinking for a while, Chun Yuzhen said: "If my uncle can equip my people with ten crossbows like this, even if there are two to three hundred pirates coming, we will definitely be able to defeat them!"

"Ten?" Yan Kai looked at Chun Yuzhen doubtfully.

"If uncle thinks it's too expensive, five will do, as long as it can hold us back!" Chun Yuzhen said after thinking about it.

"Shouldn't each person have two of these?" Yan Kai said, "If it weren't for the lack of materials, lack of time, and too few craftsmen, I think there could be more."

"How much?" Chun Yuzhen was a little doubtful whether Yan Kai meant two handfuls for each person or two handfuls for them in total.

"Each person has two crossbows, one longbow, and a set of hardwood armor. When we have money in the future, we will replace it with iron armor. As for the more crossbow arrows, the better!" Yan Kai said: "Of course these things may be a bit heavy. , figure out what kind of baggage truck, one for every five people."

Raising troops, especially elite troops, is expensive, but raising such fifty people would not put any pressure on Yan Kai.

Yan Kai continued: "I'll ask someone to see if we can make a larger push-cart crossbow. It doesn't need to be fired twice at a time, but one round at a time but can be fired continuously."

Chun Yuzhen's words also reminded Yan Kai, weren't there heavy machine guns with wheels that could be pushed when watching movies and TV shows in the past?

That thing definitely can't be produced, but it is possible to change this idea and make this kind of continuous-fire crossbow machine!

At this time, apart from the crossbows used by individual soldiers, the crossbows were the big bed crossbows, which were specially used to attack cities.

Making such a large crossbow to use against ordinary soldiers is considered by others to be a waste of time and extremely uneconomical.

But Yan Kai doesn't see it that way. He is a typical conservative in modern times.

What's the first shot and the second shot? In modern times, he felt that such an idea should not have occurred. It would have been directly bombarded by artillery shells, fired by missiles, and charged with white phosphorus to wash the ground with tanks.

When he arrived in the Tang Dynasty, he also felt that it was not impossible to use swords and guns to get close to hand-to-hand combat, but that was a last resort.

Use bed crossbows and trebuchets first, then longbows and finally crossbows. At least one-third of the charging enemies should fall on the way to the charge.

Chun Yuzhen was dumbfounded. He had long heard that this uncle was extraordinary. He actually wanted to equip everyone with armor. Wooden armor in front and iron armor in the back?

Each person needs to be equipped with two crossbows, and there are even so many weapons that what kind of baggage carts are needed?

Did the uncle really ask people like him here to deal with those pirates?