Lucia was on her way to meet His Royal Highness with the ore, the words of Nightingale still echoing in her ears.
She had to admit that she was shocked by the frankness the other party had shown.
Although she didn't quite understand the matter of emotions, a witch and a prince... were simply impossible, right? In that case, shouldn't she carefully hide her feelings in her heart and not let the other party know?
And why did even she, as a listener, feel her face burning and extremely embarrassed?
Standing at the door of the office, Lucia took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
"Your Highness, I've brought the ore."
"Let me see," Roland yawned.
The ruler of Border Town looked just like usual, his sleepy appearance suggesting he had just woken up from a nap. He leaned back in his chair, his expression natural, his tone easygoing, completely unlike the sharpness of other nobles.
Lucia's inexplicably nervous mood also relaxed a lot. She took out the ore particles found in the North Slope Mine from her leather bag and placed them one by one on the desk.
After ability analysis, these particles looked almost the same, their colors either silvery-white or grayish-white. Perhaps only the learned and talented Prince could tell what kind of ore this was.
The Prince frowned and examined them for a long time, weighing each one in his hand, and carefully scrutinizing them against the sunlight behind him. Finally, he waved his hand and said, "Ahem, I'll hand these ores over to Mr. Streel for identification. You continue to practice your ability in the North Slope backyard. If you don't understand something, ask Anna for guidance."
"..." Eh, even His Highness doesn't recognize them? Lucia quickly lowered her head and said, "Yes."
Just as she was about to leave the office, Roland stopped her again.
"Oh right, your test results this time were good, ranking ninth with a score of sixty. It's not easy to have such a performance after only studying with everyone for a month, so you must keep it up. Also..." He paused, "Next time, I hope Ling can also participate with everyone."
"Yes!" Lucia responded excitedly.
*******************
Watching the little girl happily bow and leave, Roland sighed as he looked at the metal particles on the desk.
He was still too naive. He thought that after decomposing them into elements, he might be able to figure out what mineral veins were contained in the North Slope Mine, but the truth made him realize the huge gap between mechanical engineering and geology—these stones would eventually differentiate into three or four kinds of metals. The pile with the highest abundance could be considered the ore of that metal, but they were almost identical in color and shape. For example, iron, aluminum, magnesium, and potassium are all silvery-white metals in a high-purity state, making it extremely difficult to distinguish them with the naked eye.
He should still leave this problem to the chief alchemist to solve. After all, verifying the properties of materials through chemical reactions is much more reliable than guessing blindly.
After dealing with this matter, Roland pulled out a piece of paper and began to plan how to deal with this year's Months of Demons.
Seeing that summer was about to end, the three months of autumn would be his last preparation time. In addition to resisting the demonic beasts invading from the west, he also had to be wary of Tifico and the Church in the east. Unlike the previous year when he was stretched thin, his population and income had increased significantly, iron production was also gradually improving, and there were more than a dozen more witches. He was fully confident of turning the Western Territory into an insurmountable iron wall.
Based on last year's combat experience, the biggest threat to the city wall was undoubtedly the Mixed Breed demonic beasts. Especially when the enemy had heavy armor that bullets could not penetrate, either detonating charges at close range or sending witches out of the city to fight would greatly increase the risk.
In addition, the enemies he faced were mostly cavalry and infantry. He had not yet seen any siege weapons of this era. If the other side could set up torsion catapults, or even more advanced counterweight catapults, he would probably encounter no small trouble—after all, it was very inconvenient to shoot downwards with muzzle-loading cannons, and the muzzle needed to be raised again each time it was reloaded, making it easy for the cannonballs to roll out of the barrel.
Developing a more powerful cannon was
imperative.
Roland pondered, listing the indicators he needed one by one on the paper.
First, it should have sufficient range and power to penetrate the armor of Mixed Breed demonic beasts at a distance of one kilometer. Second, it must be a breech-loading cannon with adjustable elevation and depression angles and the ability to fire quickly. Finally, to reduce redundant development time, the design should consider multiple uses for one cannon, that is, it can be used as a fixed turret to suppress the enemy, or it can be directly pulled onto a ship and used as the main weapon of a future shallow-water heavy gunboat.
So it should be a large-caliber, long-barreled heavy cannon.
Roland first thought of the behemoths on battleships, those fifteen or sixteen-inch guns with a range of tens of kilometers, whose one shot could dig several meters deep into the ground. But he quickly rejected this unrealistic idea. Although there was no problem with processing, with Border Town's current level of materials, at least nine out of ten shots would explode. Even if the barrel wall was thickened to more than one meter, the resulting object would lose its practicality because it could not be moved.
He could only produce high-purity wrought iron and ordinary steel at most now, so the plan should be more conservative.
Roland finally set the caliber at the sacred number of "152 millimeters."
The cannon adopted a vertical sliding breech, similar to a door that could slide up and down, exposing the bore when lowered for loading the shells, and achieving locking when raised, causing the propellant gas to spray forward. Compared with screw breeches and horizontal sliding breeches, its firing speed was the fastest, and the principle was also very simple. Its mechanical structure was already thoroughly familiar to him.
However, to achieve rapid firing, the cannon also had to be equipped with a recoil mechanism, which was simply like two air pumps, one filled with oil and the other with a recoil spring or gas. When the muzzle recoiled, it pulled the connecting rod of the two cylinders, simultaneously compressing the oil and the recoil mechanism. The oil was used to cushion the recoil force, and the recoil spring completed energy storage, pushing the barrel back to its original position after the cannon fired.
Finally, there were the shells.
Since he was using Saint cannons, he naturally could no longer be satisfied with clumsy solid iron balls and paper-wrapped explosive shells. Roland decided to develop two types of fixed ammunition at the same time out of prudence: one was an enlarged version of the bullet with a solid metal warhead; the other was an explosive warhead with a trigger fuse, that is, a howitzer shell. After all, the latter had certain technical difficulties and required repeated testing of the reliability of the fuse, making it impossible to guarantee that it could be equipped for the troops before the Months of Demons. Therefore, it was necessary to produce the former first to solve the problem of whether there was any. Even solid warheads could easily deal with slow-moving, heavily armored demonic beasts and fixed siege equipment.
Of course, both types of shells would consume a large amount of smokeless gunpowder. Before two-acid was produced on a large scale, the new cannon could only be used as a special weapon, and it was impossible to achieve a hearty artillery barrage.
At this moment, the guard pushed the door open and walked in.
"Your Highness, there is a secret letter from the Royal Capital."
Roland put down his quill and opened the envelope. The letter was unsigned from beginning to end, and the handwriting was also very unfamiliar, but the content of just one sentence indicated that this letter was undoubtedly sent by Tasa.
"A team of about a thousand people left the Royal Capital today and is heading towards the Western Territory."