Rise of Empires: Spain.

Chapter 118 Vitali M1872 Rifle
Now that the decision has been made to carry out military reform, the sooner the better.

No matter how the situation in Europe changes, Spain will always have peace of mind because it has a strong army.

Spain is currently unable to develop its navy, and even if it can, it will not be able to develop it. After all, there is the British Empire, the number one navy, which is crazy about making trouble. Unless it wants to compete with Britain in all aspects, it is better to give up developing the navy.

If we do not want to attract the attention of the British, the size of the navy must be kept below that of the great powers, and the main battleships cannot threaten the British Royal Fleet.

In addition, due to the extremely high cost of the navy, Carlo currently has no intention of developing the navy. The Spanish fleet consists of only three or two small ironclad ships, which look quite shabby.

Since the navy was not developed, the army became Spain's only hope to strengthen its military power. On this point, Carlo, Prime Minister Primo and Archduke Serrano all had a tacit understanding.

Military reform must also be accompanied by reform in weapons technology.

Spain's current standard rifles are relatively complex, including outdated muzzle-loading rifles and paper-wrapped bullets, as well as relatively advanced breech-loading rifles and metal-cased bullets.

Since a large-scale reform of the army is to be carried out, it is natural to take the opportunity to comprehensively upgrade the rifles equipped by the Spanish army.

The good news is that after more than a year of hard work, Spain has made progress in breech-loading rifles.

Because Spain had two technologies from Italy and Austria-Hungary, it only needed to integrate the two technologies with the help of Austro-Hungarian technical experts to improve the standard rifle belonging to Spain.

Under such circumstances, the Spanish Vitali M1872 rifle was successfully born based on the new generation model improved from the Italian Vitali rifle.

The Vitali rifle is the first generation of breech-loading rifles developed by the Swiss, and the Italians made improvements on this basis. The Spanish made further improvements on the Italian improvements, which basically made up for the shortcomings of this rifle.

The caliber of this rifle is 10.35 mm, and it uses a uniform 10.35x47 mm black powder bullet.

Smokeless gunpowder has not yet been developed, and all countries in the world use black powder bullets, which have major disadvantages in terms of power and accuracy.

Carlo's military factory is currently engaged in the research and development of smokeless gunpowder. Once smokeless gunpowder has a certain appearance, Spanish weapons will be equipped with smokeless gunpowder bullets.

The entire rifle weighs 4.6kg, is 1350mm long, and has an initial firing velocity of 415 meters per second.

Italy maintained the basic appearance of the Swiss Vitali rifle, but changed the loading method from a tubular magazine to a single-shot feed.

The Spanish military factory made improvements on this basis and added a magazine that could hold four bullets.

The Spanish Vitali M1872 rifle and the Italian Vitali rifle use the same caliber, which also facilitates logistical supplies.

If Spain's ammunition production capacity is insufficient in the future, it can easily purchase bullets from Italy, since the ammunition of the two countries is universal anyway.

Similarly, if Italy lacks rifles or bullets, the bullets produced in Spain can be loaded into Italian rifles, which will be a huge help to the logistical supply of the two countries.

Unifying the army's weapon series can greatly facilitate the army's logistics supply. After all, if the soldiers all use the same type of rifle, they only need to transport and supply the same type of bullets.

But if several types of rifles are used, especially those with different calibers, it will be a huge problem for logistical supplies.

The front line finally waited for a large amount of supplies, but it turned out that there was no bullet that was compatible with their rifles, which meant that this batch of supplies was completely useless to the army.

Carlo understood this point, so when developing this rifle, he made it clear that the caliber must be consistent with Italian rifles.

When smokeless gunpowder is successfully developed in the future, it will not be too late to change the caliber of the rifle. Now that they are all black powder bullets, it is better to keep them consistent to facilitate logistics supply in the rear.

Since it was decided to reform the army, Carlo ordered the Royal Arsenal to conduct a final test on the Vitali M1872 rifle. As long as the military gave the nod, it could be mass-produced and equipped to the army at any time.

Upon hearing that Carlo had even prepared the army's standard rifles, Prime Minister Primo and Archduke Serrano were naturally very curious and expressed their willingness to go together to watch the rifle test.

Carlo had no objection. Prime Minister Primo was in charge of the Ministry of Finance, and Archduke Serrano was in charge of the Ministry of Defense. As long as they agreed, the Spanish army would basically be able to purchase the Vitali M1872 rifle.

Carlo had no selfish motives for this. The main reason was that the current Vitali M1872 rifle was indeed the most advanced rifle in Spain, and even one of the most advanced rifles in Europe.

Even the technical experts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire admired this rifle design, not to mention Spain, where military technology was not very developed.

If this rifle can be equipped on a large scale, the combat effectiveness of the Spanish army will definitely be improved. Coupled with the reform of the Spanish army, the combat effectiveness of the Spanish army with successful reform in the future will be greatly improved, which is also what Carlo hopes to see.

Compared with the Vitali M1872 rifle, there are various rifles originally equipped by Spain, as well as the Austro-Hungarian Wendell M1867 rifle and the Italian Vitali M1870 rifle.

Carlo was quite confident in the Vitali M1872 rifle improved by the Spanish arsenal. The reason why he compared it with these rifles was naturally to show the advanced nature of the M1872 rifle.

The Royal Arsenal naturally learned that Carlo and Prime Minister Primo and Archduke Serrano were coming to observe the rifle experiment. The personal visit of His Majesty the King and the two government leaders naturally attracted the Royal Arsenal's great attention. Before the public test, the Royal Arsenal also carefully inspected and tested the M1872 rifle to ensure that there would be no problems during the public test.

However, the Royal Arsenal technicians' worries were unnecessary. Originally, the Vitali M1872 rifle was an improvement on the Italian Vitali M1870 rifle, so it couldn't be made worse by the changes.

Most of the various Spanish rifles are muzzle-loading rifles. How can muzzle-loading rifles be compared with breech-loading rifles?

The only rifle that really competed with the Vitali M1872 rifle was actually the standard rifle of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Wendell M1867 rifle.

The full name of the Wendl M1867 rifle is the M1867 Werndl-Holub rifle, which was jointly developed by Wendl and Holub.

The reason for developing this breech-loading rifle was naturally due to the excellent performance of the breech-loading rifles in the hands of the Prussian army in several wars.

In fact, it was not just the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This period was an important period for the whole of Europe to switch from muzzle-loading rifles to breech-loading rifles, and also an important period for the switch from paper-wrapped bullets to metal bullets.

In addition, it was also an important period for the transformation of ordinary black powder into smokeless powder.

This also means that during this period, European countries' weapons and equipment and military technology will usher in a period of explosive development.

In addition to these weapons and equipment for the army, the navy will also see great progress. Ironclad ships will evolve into battleships, battleships will evolve into dreadnoughts, and then into super dreadnoughts, and so on.

Although it seems that many generations of evolution are needed, in fact, this period of time is only thirty or forty years.

This is also the reason why Carlo vigorously built military factories. If Spain cannot catch up in this golden period of development of military technology, it will lag far behind in military technology in the future.

Although Spain does not currently plan to develop its navy, Carlo still attaches great importance to shipyards and related shipbuilding technology.

Italy's level of shipbuilding is quite excellent, and Carlo also introduced Italy's shipbuilding technology in cooperation with the Italian government.

However, this kind of cooperation is relatively secretive, and the expansion of the Valencia Shipyard in Spain is basically kept secret. As long as the warships are not built in a high-profile manner, other countries will basically not be able to discover the changes in the shipyard.

Back to the rifle test.

Witnessed by Prime Minister Carlo Primo and Archduke Serrano, the Vitali M1872 rifle was formally put into competitive testing with a range of rifles.

This test will directly affect the future rifle equipment of the Spanish Army. Whichever rifle wins the test will basically become the priority purchase target of the Spanish Army.

As expected, the Vitali M1872 rifle won.

As mentioned before, the only rifle that was actually qualified to compete with this rifle was the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Wendell M1867 rifle.

But the Wendell M1867 rifle had two fatal flaws.

One is that this rifle uses 11.15x42MM flanged metal fixed ammunition, the bullet mass is less than 20 grams, and the bullet's killing power is insufficient.

The second is the breech locking device. Although many breech-loading rifles of this era adopted a locking device, the Wendell M1867 rifle still needed to rotate the locking device when loading, which greatly reduced the number of bullets that could be fired per minute.

The bullet was not powerful enough and its firing rate was not as fast as that of the Vitali M1872 rifle, which resulted in the Wendell M1867 rifle performing far worse than the Vitali M1872 rifle in the test.

But from the code names of the two rifles, it can be seen that there is actually a five-year difference between the two rifles. Even compared with the Italian Vitali M1870 rifle, there is a three-year difference between them.

In this era, three years of military technology has made a huge difference. The Austro-Prussian War and the Franco-Prussian War lasted only three or four years (in this world), but the Prussian artillery went from being unable to beat the Austrian artillery to suppressing the French artillery, which shows the difference that three or four years can make in military technology.

Since the Vitali M1872 rifle won the final victory, there was nothing much to say about what happened next. Archduke Serrano smiled and said that he would use the military funds of the Ministry of Defense to purchase a batch of Vitali M1872 rifles.

After the military reform is completed in the future, the Vitali M1872 rifle will be fully adopted to increase the combat effectiveness of the Spanish army.

In addition to an order from the Ministry of Defense, Carlo also placed an order for his own Guards.

The Guards could have purchased Vitali rifles from Italy, but Carlo did not equip them with Vitali rifles on a large scale, considering that Spain was also developing breech-loading rifles.

Now that Spain's own breech-loading rifle technology has been developed, it is naturally time for the Guards to equip themselves with the new Vitali M1872 rifle on a large scale.

The first update of 3,000 words, please support!
I had something to do yesterday and forgot to ask for leave. Sorry.

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(End of this chapter)