Chapter 1481 - Marquis

The group fled the casting and forging workshop. Whether on Hale's instructions or through prior arrangement, several native workers stood waiting outside with tea buckets. The black tea imported from Lingao, lightly sweetened and chilled with well water, was a refreshing relief. But the moment the Spaniards caught their breath, Hale dragged them onward without pause. The next destination was the machining workshop, built adjacent to the river channel and the great waterwheels. Compared to the suffocating casting hall, this workshop was filled with the pleasant scent of freshly cut timber. Wood was certainly no rarity in the Philippines; striped hardwood of excellent grain—worth tens of thousands in a certain East Asian country of later generations—was sawn here to make machine-tool frames, bases, transmission shafts, or even the cargo tracks paved on the ground. The air was filled with the squeaking and banging of transmission shafts and gears and the screech of cutting tools and drills biting into metal. Noisy and piercing, certainly—but nothing like the hellish din of the forge. The Spanish gentlemen seemed to recover some spirit. They circled the massive boring lathes built for cannon production, uttering clicks of admiration.

Around the drilling and boring machines, native workers walked about at intervals, holding wooden shovels to scoop flying iron filings into baskets, ready to be sent back for remelting. Marcos knew that over seventy percent of the iron and nearly ninety percent of the copper currently imported by the Spanish Philippines was consumed in this factory. Of course, what Manila's citizens cared most about was the vast sums of silver pesos it swallowed. But Governor Salamanca saw things the opposite way: whether iron, copper, or silver, he sought to double the investment into this gold-eating beast of a munitions factory, so long as the golden eggs it laid would bring glory and promotion to himself and his allies in office. Commodore Marquis Don Juan de Baza y Cordova had come precisely for this purpose.

The Marquis grabbed a handful of iron filings from the ground and rubbed them between his fingers. His pristine white silk glove immediately showed a large black stain, slick with the soapy water used as lubricant and coolant, covered in disgusting foam. Iron filings pricked the skin of his palm—hard and rough, as if to remind him that they had been planed and peeled from the parent metal by steel drills even harder and sharper. As a senior naval officer, the Lord Marquis was no stranger to the naval cannon foundries of Seville and Liérganes; he had also traveled to France, Germany, and Venice, visiting weapon-manufacturing workshops there. Prototypes of these machines did exist in European workshops. But in scale, precision, and efficiency, comparing those European goods to the miraculous works designed by this Japanese priest was scarcely different from comparing children's toys. Even among Europe's most renowned cannon-casting experts, who would believe one could forcibly "hollow out" a cannon bore from a solid iron blank with a boring bar?

Marquis Bazan threw down the soiled glove and selected a fresh pair of white silk gloves from the wooden tray a follower had carried all the way. But inner excitement caused his hands to tremble uncontrollably; he could not put them on. He tossed the new gloves back into the tray. "What is that?" He crossed his arms and pointed toward a machine tool fitted with a spiral cutter.

"It is a machine for cutting rifling."

"Rifling—" Marquis Bazan repeated the unfamiliar word. Clearly interested, he nonetheless strove to maintain a dignified expression and not let ignorant doubt show on his face.

The Japanese priest suddenly seemed to open a floodgate. He spoke eloquently about various scientific theories, stretching from the principle of the Archimedean spiral to planetary rotation. The Commodore listened as though lost in a fog, vaguely grasping something: that rifling designed according to spiral and rotational principles would increase shell accuracy more than tenfold. That if gunners were equipped with telescopes, rifled cannons could precisely destroy warships sailing a league away.

Equipping gunners with telescopes was rather extravagant—telescopes did not come cheaply in Europe these days. But a cannon with a range exceeding one league that could precisely strike a ship? That was shocking beyond measure for this era.

"The problem lies with the shell," an artillery officer said. "Spiral-rifled cannons have already proved their power in the Pangasinan suppression campaign. It is truly a terrible weapon—a genius invention. There is only one drawback: only shells manufactured with great precision in size and shape can match the rifling. Producing such shells is unquestionably difficult. We can make do with old-style round cannonballs in the new guns, but then achieving the effect Mr. Paul describes is impossible."

"You are absolutely right." Hale immediately took up the thread. "I have devised a method. Using precision machines to manufacture precision objects is far more efficient than relying on manual production of clumsy goods. Gentlemen, please follow me to see how machines are used to manufacture shells. Marcos, take us to the front."

In a corner of the machining workshop sat two small lathes powered by animal traction. Shell blanks transported from the casting workshop were ground and shaped here, and threads for installing fuzes were cut into the shell noses. Several selected Chinese workers carefully checked finished products with special calipers. Hale took one from among the inspected shells, displayed it for the guests, and asked them to imagine the terrifying scene when the hollow warhead—filled with gunpowder or canister shot—exploded, controlled by a fuze screwed into the nose.

"Spiral-rifled artillery must form a tight fit with the shells it uses; all of its superiority stems from this. The fundamental principle is that no gap may exist between shell and bore. All thrust generated by the gunpowder explosion is used to push the shell—not leaked and wasted through gaps, as in smoothbore guns. Only when the projectile body completely conforms to the bore can it obtain friction from the spiral rifling and form a stable spin perpendicular to the line of flight. As for smoothbore guns, due to those gaps, from the instant of ignition the ball rolls along an irregular path inside the bore. This chaotic rolling continues from the bore into the air. The final result? One simply cannot predict where the shot will roll and land."

Hale grew more excited as he spoke. Since arriving in this spacetime, he had rarely enjoyed such an opportunity to display his technical authority and advanced knowledge before an audience. "Muzzle-loading rifled guns present two contradictory principles. To load the shell quickly and effortlessly requires that friction between projectile and bore not be too great—but that violates the first principle, that no gap exist between shell and bore. If it were a breech-loading gun, this contradiction would not exist; one could simply make the shell slightly larger than the bore diameter. But we cannot yet manufacture reliable large-caliber breech-loaders. To resolve the contradiction, my first thought was a chemical-mortar-style shell—oh, you don't know what a chemical mortar is? Um—it is a kind of... well, a rather terrible mortar. The shell is the elongated cone you saw at Cavite Naval Fortress, with a steel disk inlaid at the bottom, connected to the shell by a copper ring. When explosive force pushes the steel disk, it presses forward against the copper ring. The softer copper ring expands outward to fit the bore."

"Simply marvelous," Marquis Bazan sighed, entranced.

"But this is still too complex—unfavorable for mass production. Initially, our shell output could not keep pace with the number of newly cast cannons. I constantly experimented with improvements. What you see here is the result of my most recent concept. Doesn't this shell look somewhat like an elongated water droplet? Look—we cut away a layer of the projectile body below the centering portion. This section will be entirely wrapped in a material that can expand under thrust, and it is much cheaper than copper."

"What material?"

"Papier-mâché."

"Paper?" The Commodore asked skeptically. Incredulous expressions appeared on several officers' faces.

"Yes. Strictly speaking, paper pulp."

Prepared papier-mâché pulp was poured into special molds, wrapping the lower half of the projectile. After demolding, it required drying and compression. Finally, workers trimmed the papier-mâché sabot surface with scrapers and calibrated each warhead's outer diameter with calipers. After completing all this, the shell was sent to the charging workshop.

"Then, Mr. Paul, may I presume to offer my congratulations—on having solved the problem of new shell production volume?" Standing by the stove in the drying room, Marquis Bazan asked, gazing at the sabot shells packed densely on the drying rack.

"Currently, some defects in factory operations remain. First, a shortage of labor—especially workers skilled in operating machines. At present, we can produce only about one hundred explosive and canister shells per day." Marcos sucked in a breath of cold air. Hale's production figure included large numbers of unfireable rejects; actual daily output was less than one-third of that.

The arsenal's operating efficiency was extremely poor. Both Hale and Marcos knew this well.

Hale, however, continued with unruffled composure: "As long as sufficient manpower and supplies can be provided, we can increase shell production three- to four-fold. Ideally, more Chinese. The time and energy required to train a Chinese worker to operate a machine is five times less than for a native, and work efficiency is five times greater. If His Majesty deigns to dispatch European craftsmen skilled in instrument-making, that would be even better. We have recruited some German artisans to undertake important technical work, but regrettably, there are still too few. There is only one instrument craftsman from Augsburg in the entire factory. All precision optical instruments and shell fuzes depend on his skill. He also repairs clocks. His craftsmanship is impeccable—but the problem is he simply cannot handle all the work."

(End of Chapter)