Joseph II looked at the documents in his hand, and the expression on his face was very complicated, a little excited and a little regretful.
Joseph II never had a good opinion of the Ottomans, both in public and private, and the conflict of interests between the two sides in the Balkans and the Mediterranean led Austria to regard the Ottomans as the greatest enemy outside the Holy Roman Empire.
Although after the rise of the Russian Empire, the Ottomans devoted more energy to dealing with the Russians in the north, three centuries of confrontation made both sides regard the other as their lifelong enemies.
"Hey.................."
With a sigh, Joseph II shook his head, and then he handed the document to the long-awaited Archduke Leopold.
Unlike Joseph II, when Leopold read the contents of the document, the Archduke's face suddenly flushed with excitement "Your Majesty, this is definitely a good opportunity for us!
The 200,000-strong Ottoman army has launched an attack on the Russians, which means that in the Balkans, the power of the Ottomans has been greatly weakened, and this is our excellent opportunity!
” When the words landed, Leopold looked at his imperial brother excitedly, but unlike what he thought, Joseph II did not seem very excited at this moment, his face was expressionless and unmoved.
Kaunitz, who was standing next to the two brothers, saw this scene and had to stand up and make a round "Your Majesty the Emperor, Your Highness Leopold, I think we should take a long-term view of this matter.
It's too early to draw conclusions, and there has been no internal harmony among the Russians lately.
I think we'll need to watch for a while now."
Kaunitz's words forced Leopold to bow his head, and Joseph II was very relieved to hear Kaunitz say this "Alright, Leopold, you step down first, I still have something to discuss with His Excellency the Prime Minister."
"Obedience" With that, Leopold left the room.
Joseph II picked up the document placed on the table, waved it, and said with a wry smile: "I really don't understand what Paul thinks, even I have heard about the Black Sea at this time, although the Ottoman empire is gradually declining.
But the emaciated camel is bigger than the horse, and he himself is not unified internally, so I really don't know what he thinks about going to war at this time."
The document that Joseph II had was the credential that Paul I had given to Austria, who hoped that Austria would declare war on the Ottomans in accordance with the Russo-Austrian Treaty of Alliance signed in 1781.
Paul I's request was appropriate, since the two main objects of the treaty of alliance were the Ottomans besides Prussia, and now the Ottoman attack on Russia has given the treaty the effect of urging the Austrians to send troops.
"Kaunitz, what do you think?"
Joseph II set his sights on Kaunitz.
As one of the most prominent aristocrats in Austrian history, Kaönitz had something reassuring enough to make people feel at ease, and that was wisdom.
"Your Majesty, after all, you have to decide this matter for yourself, and your body is the most fundamental attitude of our Austria."
Hearing Kaunitz's words, Joseph II's heart was unwilling.
Pass the examination of those court doctors.
Joseph II's health was not optimistic, and even an upright medical officer directly explained to Joseph II that he would live until March of this year at most, and of course, these medical officers mysteriously disappeared from this world after examining Joseph II's body.
If God could give him another ten years, no.
Even if it was five years, defeat the Ottomans, another old enemy of the Habsburgs.
This would be the supreme glory of Joseph II.
Kaunitz looked at Joseph II with an unwilling face, and he sighed in his heart, for Joseph II's feelings, Kaunitz could understand.
If Joseph II had been in good health, he would not have had so many troubles at all, and Joseph II would have absolutely declared war on the Ottomans in response to the Russo-Austrian alliance agreement of 1781, but now he did not have much time.
If Joseph II knew him best, Kautz was the second to know him.
As a wise man of Austria, Joseph II did not doubt Kaunitz's loyalty to the Habsburgs and his love for Austria.
Now that Joseph II was running out of oil, he knew that Austria's stability was paramount.
Leopold's succession to the throne seems to be a logical thing, but everyone knows that there are not a few people in the entire empire who peep into that seat, not to mention that Prussia, a hostile country, has voices against Leopold within the Habsburgs.
So at this moment, Joseph II felt that his every move had to lay the foundation for the future stability of the empire, and Kaunitz was the helmsman that Joseph II left behind to escort the entire empire.
"Kaunitz has decided, leave this matter to you and Leopold, and your decision is mine.
As you know in my body, although the empire seems to be calm at the moment, this calm is more easily broken than glass.
If Leopold insisted on declaring war on the Ottomans, you didn't have to stop him, as long as you did your best to help him.
Maybe war is also a medicine that can make people grow quickly."
Hearing Joseph II say this, Kautz was taken aback.
What are you kidding, now that the emperor has not lived long, stability is the first priority at this time, if you fight against the Ottomans at this time, not to mention how many troops the empire can draw, say a disrespectful word, if the emperor's body does not last until the end of the war, then it will not be Austria busy fighting in vain. ...............................
Sanssouci Palace, China Building, there is a long table in the palace, and on the long table is a box of ammunition and a rifle.
When William hurried to the palace with a large group of people, the rifle had just been placed sideways by the attendants on the long table.
William hurried to the table in three steps and two steps, and walked excitedly to the table.
When he picked up the rifle, his hands even trembled a little.
William's eyes were very gentle when he looked at the rifle.
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It was as if he was holding his lover instead of a gun, and he was even reluctant to put it down when he held it in his hand.
This rifle was presented by the R&D Department of the Brandenburg Military Academy, and only thirty of them have been produced so far, and this rifle is tentatively named, Friedrich Type 1790.
The caliber of this rifle was almost a quarter smaller than that of the previous Prussian army, and the use of a stronger and more durable steel barrel, as well as the granulation of gunpowder, especially with the use of new bullets, further improved the performance of the Friedrich 1790.
Brass castings.
The barrel was cast of steel, fifty-eight inches in length, forty-three inches in barrel, eight pound three, and had a maximum range of four hundred and twelve yards, a maximum effective range of three hundred and fifty yards, and the best range was within three hundred and twenty yards.
Five inches of oak can be pierced within one hundred and fifty yards!
As for the failure rate of bullets.
Reduced to 25%!
In fact, the so-called Friedrich 1790 is the big killer introduced in a novel that Wilhelm had read before crossing over, that is, the Minnie gun.
The Mini rifle was a front-loading rapid-fire rifle developed around 1849 AD by the inventors of the Mini bullet, Captain Claude Edirne Mini and Captain Henri Gustav de Vickine of the Orleans Chasseurs of the French Army.
When the French fought against the Algerian revolutionaries in North Africa, they found that although their rifles were much better in workmanship, they could not maintain heavy firepower.
Unable to withstand the onslaught of the enemy.
Based on this, Minnie and others boldly improved the French rifle and created a new type of rifle cartridge, the Minny bullet.
In order to match this bullet, Minnie and others developed a new rifle after repeated designs.
This is the famous Mini rifle.
The advent of the Mini rifle heralded the official arrival of the era of rifled rifles as mass equipment for infantry.
The Mini rifle uses the cylindrical shell lead bullet invented by Mini.
Due to the fact that this bullet is slightly smaller than the rifle caliber.
Therefore, it solves the embarrassing situation that the front loading bullet of the old rifle cannot be stuffed into the barrel or clogs the barrel due to the large bullet.
Mini rounds can be easily pushed into the chamber with a ram lever, which greatly increases the rate of fire.
The bullet is threaded around the body to match the rifling, and the middle of the thread is stuffed with animal oil.
The bottom of the bullet uses a cork material.
When fired, gunpowder gases hit the cork, and the cork was hit by an instantaneous impact, and then the bullet was violently propped up.
Because the bullet is propped up, the chamber can be sealed by the bullet itself at the moment of firing, without leaking gunpowder gases and causing the kinetic energy of the bullet to be lost.
In this way, the problem of the chamber sealing of the old front-loading gun was solved, which greatly enhanced the rate of fire of the gun, and the firing range and safety were well sealed, which was not easy to cause gunpowder residue residue to block the barrel and cause explosion).
Before the advent of the Mini rifle, smoothbore guns were practical weapons, and the armies of the great powers all used smoothbore guns.
The rifled gun is only an experimental weapon, not a workhorse on the battlefield.
The main problem with rifled guns is that due to the engraving of rifling, it is difficult for the front-loading bullet to keep the chamber air-tight, and the power is greatly reduced.
In order to achieve good breath-holding, rifled gun bullets are often made of the same caliber as the gun caliber or even slightly larger.
As a result, loading is extremely laborious, and it is often necessary to hammer the pusher lever to propel the bullet into place.
As a result, this often leads to a more dangerous rupture of the breech.
When the bullet is advanced to the position of the medicine room, it is often deformed due to rough operation, and the killing effect cannot be achieved.
The advent of the Mini rifle solved these problems.
After solving these problems, the power of the rifled gun is fully revealed.
The armament of the Mini rifled gun greatly increased the firepower of the French army.
In fact, the power of the Mini rifle proved to be amazing.
In 1846, French hunters used mini rifles for the first time in Africa, and the results were good.
It was also used in small quantities in the Crimean War.
At the outbreak of the American Civil War, the Mini rifle quickly became the standard equipment of both armies due to its great lethality.
Beginning in 1851, the British army also experimented with the Mini rifle.
Later, the Mini rifle was modified into the U.S.
Army Springfield Rifle and the British Army Enfield Rifle.
Some people may ask why the Minie gun appeared nearly 50 years earlier, but in fact, the Minny gun is not very complicated for those who know how to use firearms.
There were two problems that the Mini gun needed to solve: the first, to create a spiral-shaped rifling, and the second, to solve the problem of loading from the muzzle.
First of all, let's talk about the first problem, making spiral-shaped rifling.
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Actually, the question is not very complicated, you know, in the late eighteenth century.
The development of firearms is still relatively mature.
Although the current mainstream of the world is still equipped with large-caliber smoothbore guns, this does not mean that rifled guns do not have a market.
However, in the 17th century, the Danish army began to be equipped with rifled guns on a large scale.
Early firearms were front-loading guns.
In 1 year, Gort, a blacksmith in Nuremberg, Germany, simplified the preloading procedures, the gas was discharged, so that the projectile played a tight role in the chamber and increased the loading speed, and invented the linear rifled gun, which used a round lead ball projectile.
Since the English transliteration of the word "rifling" is "back and forth".
Therefore, rifled guns are also called rifles.
After the conquest of Denmark, Wilhelm relocated the Danish Ordnance Factory outside Copenhagen on a large scale, and the Danish Ordnance Factory became the R&D department of the Brandenburg Military Academy after moving to Prussia.
There are four main methods for manufacturing rifling, but at present, the most mature technology is the hook knife broaching method and the combined ring knife broaching method.
The hook cutter is placed on a steel lever slightly thinner than the diameter of the chamber, and the height of the hook blade can be adjusted The screws on the tie rod layer are adjusted.
With each pull through the barrel, the lever moves a few microns, rotating with the barrel at a constant speed.
Pull out a certain winding rifling wire, reach a predetermined width, and then change the position to pull the second rifling.
Early rifled guns only needed to pull a rifling wire about 20 times, while a better gun had to pull the same rifling wire about 100 times.
The more times you pull, the finer and more precise the groove formed.
The combined ring knife broaching method is to fix 25 to 30 carbide steel rings on a single tie rod.
The distance between each steel ring is equal, and each steel ring is processed with the same number of equally distant scrapers as the number of rifling wires, and each cutting knife can be connected with the cutting knife on the next ring according to its entanglement, and can be regarded as a spiral line from the beginning to the tail.
The protrusion of the blade on each ring is slightly larger than that of the previous ring, forming a series of cutters.
The opened grooves have a stable width, depth and spacing.
This combination annular broaching knife passes through the chamber — times.
The whole rifling can be cut, the working time can be shortened, and the output and quality can be improved.
As for solving the problem of reloading, it's even simpler - sub-caliber!
That is, the outer diameter of the bullet is smaller than the inner diameter of the barrel, which is convenient for loading; When the tail of the bullet is hollow (of course, the traverser cannot use the 1853-type Enfield bullet of the popping chrysanthemum type) to fire, the gas makes the tail of the bullet expand, close to the rifling chamber embedded in the rifling, and under the rotation and pressure of the rifling, the warhead can rotate out at high speed, and the hitting accuracy is greatly improved.
Some people may ask, why the rifling technology in Europe was already mature in the eighteenth century, so why is the main force still used by smoothbore guns in the main armies of various countries?
In fact, the barrel of the ancient gun has been forged by craftsmen by hand, and almost all of the smoothbore guns used on the battlefield are sub-caliber in order to reload the rapid projectile, although this sacrifices the range and accuracy, but it can rely on salvo to improve the density of fire and the hit rate; In addition, because of the high technical requirements of a rifled gun, its cost may be the price of two or three smoothbore guns, and because of rifling, the residue generated after the ammunition is fired is not easy to clean, and the life of the gun is shorter than that of the smoothbore barrel, and the rate of fire is slow; For the same price, an army rifled gun can fire one bullet per person per unit of time, while a smoothbore gun can reach 9!
Such a cost-effective ratio is naturally not favored by the rulers of various countries, so it is installed on a large scale.
In addition, the caliber of the barrel created in the era of handicraft industry is different, and the requirements for the barrel in the era of smoothbore guns can be said to be very low, as long as the bore is not exploded, the bullet can be fired, which is enough; With the manufacturing standards of that era, there was no way to pursue accuracy if you wanted speed, and it was completely dependent on the density of firepower to stack the hit rate; However, rifled guns are different, rifled guns require the bullet and the barrel to fit closely; In the era of pre-loading guns, if the rifled gun projectile is still a sub-caliber, it will not be embedded in the rifling and will not rotate, and it will lose the meaning of rifling; But if the projectile is too big There is no way to load the chamber; It can only make the size of the projectile conform to the caliber or slightly larger than the caliber of the gun, but it cannot affect the loading into it; Therefore, rifled guns have much higher requirements for the accuracy of projectiles than smoothbore guns; The Minnie bullet is special in that it is embedded in the rifling by the expansion of the tail; So the advent of the Mini gun and the Mini cartridge was a world-changing invention altogether, and although Friedrich cost three times as much in 1790 as the rifles currently in the Prussian army, Wilhelm thought the money was well spent.
In fact, as early as 1783, William quietly sent people to investigate the famous gun factories across Europe, especially those factories that made rifled guns were the key targets in William's mind.
And after several years of hard work, William finally paid off.
"Bouel!"
"Your Majesty, I beg you to command" "Canonize Karon as Viscount of the Kingdom and reward him with 500 gold thalers" "Obedience" Buel answered, and one of the people in the crowd heard the conversation between William and Buel, and his face instantly turned red, he was Caron, who William had just ordered to be canonized as a viscount.
Caron was once a master gunsmith in Bohemia, but was forced to come to Prussia for some reason, and happened to be a researcher in the research and development department of the Brandenburg Military Academy when Wilhelm ordered the establishment of the research and development department.
And this Friedrich 1790 in Wilhelm's hands was born in Cuarón's hands.
"Thank you, Your Majesty!"
Without waiting for Caron to bend down and salute, William smiled and said: "You deserve it, and I'll continue to give you additional funds, and remember that I'm going to see this rifle in mass production by June of this year!"
To be continued.
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