NEC Chapter 133: Vast Sea Military Factory, Cold and Hot Dual Armament

Over the next few months, the lord devoted almost all his attention to the steel industry chain.

Initially, the lord's seemingly random planning left the territory's craftsmen and engineers bewildered and confused.

Today a machine gleaming with cold light would arrive here, tomorrow some equipment covered with gauges would be added there. The dwarf team had just racked their brains to learn metal surface treatment, while human engineers were frowning as they received training on nitrocellulose-related knowledge.

The awkward chemical symbols and rigorous operating procedures left everyone puzzled, yet they could only memorize by rote.

However, no matter how confused they were, no one would question this.

In Vast Sea Territory, when the lord spoke, you just listened and that was that.

Of course, the lord was modest and humble, and didn't support this behavior. He repeatedly pointed out at the territory's council meetings that everyone should be realistic and offer more opinions!

Then, Chen Mo received a bunch of opinions like these:

"Lord, you're so busy with countless affairs that you don't pay attention to your own health. You need to rest!"

"Yes, yes, Lord, you haven't been eating properly lately, always having cold rice with water. This is too harmful to your body. You should still ask the cafeteria to keep a small stove for you. After all, Vast Sea's rise and fall depends on the lord alone!"

"Lord, you don't even have a serving girl by your side. I have several girls of suitable age at home with gentle temperaments..."

Chen Mo, who couldn't bear to listen anymore, waved his hands repeatedly, "You're all talking nonsense. Get out, get out, all of you go work!"

In September, as a new batch of equipment was installed and completed preliminary installation under the guidance of engineering robots, some sharp-eyed members of the territory council finally understood the lord's overall layout.

Chief Administrator Herlan was amazed and repeatedly emphasized at the council meeting, "When we do things, we always go from one to two, from two to three. At most, we can make some foreseeable preparations for the next step while doing the previous one."

"The lord's planning is simply untraceable, like placing a five here and setting up a ten there. At first glance, there's no pattern, but when you look at the end, truly every position is just right, and the timing and steps match seamlessly!"

"A perfect whole, like divine inspiration!"

"I originally wanted to call on everyone to learn, but after thinking it over, this is beyond your capabilities. Everyone should just work steadily, fulfill their duties diligently, and not disappoint the lord's cultivation and support."

So, what kind of industrial system did Lord Chen Mo plan, or rather, what did East Xia's central planning department plan for Vast Sea Territory?

Simply put, this was a dual-track, high-low configuration steel industry.

The low-end route was called the ordinary short-process steelmaking production line, abbreviated as the ordinary steel line.

East Xia's planning department raised a key issue. Although Vast Sea Territory seemed to have strong soldiers and horses, compared to those traditional major powers, Vast Sea Territory had an obvious weakness: scarce weapons and severely insufficient armor coverage.

Full equipment with East Xia standard thermal weapons? Unrealistic and too dangerous.

In the short term, the most ideal combination for Vast Sea Territory was widespread cold weapons plus elite thermal weapons.

Vast Sea's population consisted mostly of slaves purchased from the bitter cold lands of the north, with quite healthy age structure, mainly young men and women, plus some youths and a small number of infants.

Slaves who weren't physically strong enough simply couldn't survive.

In some sense, all the slaves from the north had undergone round after round of brutal natural selection and elimination.

These people in Vast Sea, besides daily work, also participated in simple militia military training: morning exercises once a day, formation drills twice a week, through wind and rain, never stopping.

Once needed, according to the current territory scale, full mobilization including half-grown children could muster over four thousand militia.

Truly universal military service.

However, militia weapons were severely insufficient.

During training they could use wooden sticks, but what if real fighting occurred?

The ordinary steel production line was what East Xia prepared to temporarily arm these grassroots militia.

The pig iron with impurities from the First Steel Factory reduction workshop, that is, the [Molten Iron Nest], would enter this ordinary steel production line, undergo two simple processes, and transform into the territory's basic armament.

The first process was steel furnace melting. Under East Xia's technical guidance, maximally utilizing Starry Continent's local raw materials while minimally matching technological equipment, the melting temperature was around sixteen hundred degrees, just enough to melt hard pig iron into red-hot molten iron.

The soul of this production line was a core device specially made by East Xia, called the carbon powder precision delivery machine.

This thing would automatically sense the production process and complete carbon powder addition to the molten iron at the appropriate time. Patrol personnel only needed to maintain manual supervision, regularly check the machine, and replenish carbon powder...

The low-carbon steel after carbon powder addition could achieve tensile strength of 250-300 MPa. Although it still had some gap compared to local refined-grade equipment materials, it was more than sufficient for arming militia.

The second process was sand mold casting.

The blazing, carbon-adjusted molten iron was guided and poured into neatly arranged sand molds in the casting workshop.

Steam rose, iron smell permeated, and the molten iron rapidly cooled and solidified in the molds, formed in one piece!

The weapon design also followed East Xia's suggestions. The basic weapon for Vast Sea militia was chosen to be spears.

East Xia was one of the few modern armies on Blue Star that still used cold weapons in combat, but they hadn't studied large-scale cold weapon warfare for quite some time.

A group of military experts had to dig out old tactical manuals from years past and specially arranged multiple rounds of live troop simulation exercises before finally determining the recommended direction.

In the proposal, the expert group gave this assessment:

[Sword and blade weapons not only consume more materials but also have greater operational difficulty, longer learning time, and higher usage thresholds, making them more suitable for professional standing armies capable of long-term high-intensity training.]

[Spears, as typical long weapons, in situations where warriors' skill levels are similar, give holders significantly more sense of security than short weapon users, helping maintain basic morale of troop formations.]

[For militia, with proper basic formation training, spear formations' power and stability far exceed individual sword and blade fighting.]

Having selected spears as the main weapon, the casting workshop would also equip some shields, as well as chest armor for ordinary militia, half-body armor for militia captains, full-body armor for ranked warriors, and javelins as medium-range projectile weapons.

Only when actually organizing and training cold weapon troops did Chen Mo deeply understand why orcs chose javelins as ranged weapons.

Bow making was simply too complex.

Both bow backs and bowstrings required special materials, with complicated processing techniques and long production times. Moreover, training was also difficult.

Inaccurate arrows posed less threat than thrown stones.

Javelins were much simpler, like spears: a metal head plus a wooden shaft, some simple javelin throwing training, and the rest was just a matter of accuracy.

Actually, accuracy didn't matter much. Being able to scare people was already effective.

Moreover, according to the cold-hot combination principle, spear formations plus shield formations to protect thermal weapon firepower was obviously more suitable.

The second route the lord planned was called the high-purity steel production line.

Raw materials were still those pig iron pieces, plus recycled scrap steel eliminated from cold weapons and such.

This route concentrated almost all recent altar transport capacity, using plasma furnace primary melting plus vacuum self-consuming electrode remelting, supplemented with alloy additives, finally achieving production of high-quality steel billets and steel coils.

These materials flowed to the depths of the Industrial Concentration Zone, backed against the reduction workshop with specially set deep concave styling, in a strictly sealed military restricted zone.

The security here was so tight it was outrageous. The open space in front of the factory area was strung with barbed wire and dug with various horse traps. The territory's only two heavy machine guns were mounted on permanent fortifications at the factory entrance.

There were also open and hidden fire points, with sniper rifles and grenade launchers alternately blocking access. A squad selected from Torch Phase One, loyal backbone members from the Youth Corps, carried various types of cold and hot weapons, guarding this factory area around the clock.

This meant that to attack this area, one would either have to break through the steel factory reduction workshop presided over by a seventh-tier Void Breaking undead, or frontally assault through this death zone controlled by thermal weapons.

This was also the place Lord Chen Mo visited most frequently.

After completing today's cultivation tasks, Chen Mo once again led his personal guard and hurried to this factory.

Before the carriage stopped, a towering figure was already standing and waiting outside the first warning line: it was none other than the personal guard captain Simple Bull, who had just recovered from injuries and still had his left arm in a sling.

Liu Zaiyue heavily pounded his right fist to his chest, raised it up, and performed a standard military salute.

"Are your injuries almost healed? Do you feel uncomfortable anywhere now?"

Old Liu scratched his head slightly, "No... it's just, it's just that thinking of that black guy behind makes my back feel a bit chilly."

"Haha, no problem. As long as you don't run to the reduction workshop, he can't see you!"

After chatting for a few sentences, they passed through three inner and outer guard posts and arrived at the factory entrance. As the main gate slowly opened, Copperbeard, the base's processing department head, ran over to greet them.

Although Copperbeard had no dwarf bloodline, he had learned smelting and processing from his father for many years, absorbing knowledge through exposure and becoming skilled in techniques. So he could stand out among the technical personnel and become the factory's technical backbone and production manager.

The entire factory was divided into five areas.

The first area Chen Mo inspected was called the cartridge case stamping workshop.

What was set up here was a multi-station high-speed cold heading machine. This thing didn't have particularly high technical content, but to control weight while ensuring equipment reliability in desert environments, plus guaranteeing durability of key components and convenient replacement and maintenance of wearing parts, East Xia's engineers had broken their hearts over it.

Six major heavy industry groups repeatedly tested before finally producing this big guy weighing less than four hundred kilograms with maximum processing speed up to 2000 rounds per minute.

When Chen Mo arrived, the cold heading machine was only operating one station, steadily and efficiently pressing steel strips that had been previously pickled and drawn into standard cup-shaped cartridge cases with "click, click" sounds.

Copperbeard, wearing gloves, carefully lifted several still-warm cartridge cases and held them before the lord.

"Sir, the machine's stability is very good. We have completed testing of processing pass rates for all stations, all have been debugged and qualified, and can begin mass production at any time."

"Awaiting the lord's command!"

Area Two was the primer assembly workshop.

The production line here was embedded with a row of automatic mechanical arms. Workers placed fixtures filled with cartridge cases on the production line and put materials to be filled in hoppers on the other side. The mechanical arm groups completed primer filling for an entire group of bullets instantly through powder placement and fixture shaking.

"Currently, the main problem is still raw material stability."

Copperbeard's voice was somewhat helpless, "If using the raw materials the great lord requested from the Mechanical Emperor, the East Xia deity, there's no problem at all!"

"But using local materials, with large quality differences, precise control is currently very difficult. We may still need... still need some time for research."

Chen Mo deeply understood this point.

Whether equipment or raw materials, East Xia excelled in standardization.

Whether mercury fulminate or primer powder, one batch was the same as the next.

However, locally produced nitrocellulose analogues and gunpowder particles ground by dwarf workshops, not to mention differences between batches, even within the same batch, quality was uneven, high and low.

Chen Mo now understood why dwarf masters had created primitive thermal weapons like dwarf firearms and heavy explosives like thunder jars many years ago, yet continental nations still used sword and magic warfare modes and showed little interest in thermal weapons.

Handicraft workshop output: one dwarf master, one standard. That was manageable.

Even the same master had differences between sunny and rainy days, having or not having alcohol, even arguing with his wife at home today and being in a bad mood would produce different results.

Each piece was a limited edition.

Chen Mo had heard from mercenary group shooters that one gun's ignition time might be three seconds, while another gun might be two seconds.

This was barely acceptable, but the fatal issue was that thunder jar explosion times also varied long and short, which was terrifying.

Not to mention occasional barrel explosions.

So "great weapons" like thunder jars had even lower adoption rates on the continent than dwarf firearms.

Chen Mo had commissioned Seven-Radiance Garland Trading Company to purchase some dwarf workshop-produced gunpowder. So far, they hadn't completely figured out the optimal usage method, and could only wait for analysis results from East Xia to see if there were better testing and adjustment equipment.

Area Three was called the bullet head casting workshop, Area Four was the final assembly and testing workshop. After the lord completed today's inspection, he finally saw baskets of finished bullets in the warehouse area.

"This is the latest final inspection results report."

"When using fully automatic production modules for processing, approximately ninety-five out of one hundred bullets produced are qualified."

"Bullets made by the factory's manual processing modules can select seventy-three to seventy-five qualified products out of one hundred."

"We're still urging workers in each work group to strengthen skill training, striving to further improve the pass rate!"

Actually, this was decent. It could compare to a certain eastern great nation on Blue Star.

Regardless of how difficult the process or how stumbling the construction, Vast Sea Territory finally had its own bullet processing capability.

According to the Vast Sea Industrial Development Plan Point Nine repeatedly revised version, after the Vast Sea Military Factory bullet workshop was completed, it could achieve monthly production of 500,000 to 600,000 bullets and over 3,000 artillery shells, with reserved space for further capacity expansion at any time, sufficient to provide continuous fire support for the territory.

Chen Mo slowly gripped the bullet in his hand tightly.

At this moment, in the distant north, a new storm was about to sweep across the continent, dragging the southern nations, which hadn't yet emerged from the shadow of the last war and were still licking their wounds, into a new abyss once again.

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