Anti-Japanese War, weapons designer at Fengtian Arsenal

After drawing the blueprint, Li Qinwu began to estimate the cost. Director Li is a practical person who often goes to the workshop. He can estimate the price of materials needed to manufacture various parts based on the current technology mastered by the factory.

He took out a piece of scratch paper and started writing and drawing for a while. In a few minutes, he came up with a cost price of 28 dollars.

Li Qinwu scratched his head. This was somewhat different from his expectation of less than 20 oceans. Britain was able to reduce the cost of each gun to less than 9 US dollars, but he came up with a cost of 28 oceans. How could there be such a big difference?

After a little thought, Li Qinwu understood that the reason why Britain was able to reduce the cost of the Sten submachine gun to such a low level was because of its industrial strength.

The appearance of the Sten submachine gun is a cylindrical gun body and a cylindrical heat sink. These two things can be manufactured by a stamping machine of less than 100 tons, which can be done by any British private water cup production company.

However, the Xiaoyi Arsenal only had five stamping presses, one of which was used to produce stamping parts for the flamethrower submachine gun. The others had their own production tasks, and the production capacity was already full. If they wanted to expand the production of the Sten submachine gun, they would need more stamping presses.

Li Qinwu sighed again, saying that an industrially strong country hides its wealth among its people. In times of national crisis, a wave of civilian-military transfers can directly increase production capacity to maximum capacity. In the current Republic of China, it is difficult to find a company that can carry out civilian-military transfers.

He turned his attention back to the submachine gun drawings. He could not accept the cost of 28 dollars. Of course, if he purchased a stamping machine and put the Sten submachine gun into production, the cost would be greatly reduced. He estimated that it could be reduced to about 26 dollars.

The stamping machine could not solve the problem, so he planned to reduce the cost of the gun in other ways, and he looked at the cooling sleeve of the Sten submachine gun.

"Well, for a submachine gun, the heat sink sleeve is not needed. Cancel it."

Li Qinwu waved his pen and the cooling sleeve of the Sten submachine gun was melted away, leaving only a bare barrel outside.

The Sten submachine gun has a slow firing rate, about 550 rounds per minute. Why would a heat sink be needed for such a firing rate? Isn't it just to provide a place for the soldier to hold the gun?

Now that Li Qinwu has lengthened the magazine well and used it as a vertical grip, soldiers have a better grip position, so the existence of the heat dissipation sleeve is meaningless.

This directly eliminated a major component, and the cost of the Sten submachine gun was reduced by one dollar. There were many small holes on the heat dissipation sleeve, and the processing was somewhat cumbersome. This greatly simplified the process.

Of course, as I said before, everything in this world has a price. Without the heat dissipation sleeve, the barrel is directly exposed to the air, and soldiers may accidentally touch it and get burned during combat.

Fortunately, the genius Li Qinwu had a solution. He planned to learn from the AK's solution, move the AK's handguard here and use it, and carve out two cylindrical pieces of wood, one above and one below to surround the rear end of the barrel of the Sten submachine gun.

Of course, this wood does not come into contact with the barrel. It will be screwed onto the base of the gun body, which is equivalent to replacing the metal heat sink of the Sten submachine gun with a wooden sleeve. In China, replacing all unnecessary parts with wood is definitely a good way to reduce costs.

After completing a series of designs, the paper cost of the gun came to 25 dollars per gun.

Li Qinwu took a few steps back, stood farther away, and observed the gun drawing as a whole, and then he thought to himself, "Fuck!"

The original Sten submachine gun was ugly to begin with, and after Li Qinwu's transformation, it became even uglier!

The original Sten submachine gun was made entirely of metal, which at least achieved a unified style. But when it came to Li Qinwu, it was pieced together with wooden parts, and it looked like assembled junk no matter how you looked at it.

He felt a little guilty. He was a staunch believer that appearance equals combat effectiveness. This thing completely violated this principle, making him doubt the performance of the gun.

But at least the drawings have been made and we'll take them to the workshop to make a sample gun.

Li Qinwu put away the drawings and planned to go to the workshop to find the old fireman to give the master a hearty red stone fight. However, just as he had packed up, he saw someone peeking at the door. It was Hu Xiaoming.

"It's Xiao Ming. Have you finished your housework? Are you going to come back to work? Look at this weapons design department. I think we are the only two who can be engineers. Haha."

Li Qinwu hadn't seen Hu Xiaoming for several days. Since arriving at the Xiaoyi Arsenal, Hu Xiaoming had been with his parents. Hu Xiaoming's family seemed to be quite wealthy. They had been robbed by refugees before, but they didn't know where they got the money and planned to buy a house in Gong County.

Hu Xiaoming's parents didn't want to share a bungalow with ordinary workers, so Hu Xiaoming accompanied his parents to arrange for the purchase of a house.

When Hu Xiaoming walked into the office and saw Li Qinwu calling him, he felt a little embarrassed. This young man has always been so shy.

He grabbed something from his pocket and handed it to Li Qinwu.

"Director Li, I've already finished my family affairs. These past few days, I've been working on the bullet production workshop and have produced the intermediate-power rifle bullets you mentioned. Director Li, please take a look and see if this is the case."

He held three bullets in his hands. Unlike ordinary bullets, these bullets were shorter and contained less gunpowder.

Li Qinwu took the bullets and examined them carefully. He could roughly see three types of bullets. One was the 7.92mm bullet of the old slide cut short, one was the 6.5mm plate bullet cut short, and the other was the 9mm ammunition of the Mauser pistol extended.

Li Qinwu and Hu Xiaoming talked about the development direction of intermediate-power bullets, which is actually copying the more mature intermediate-power bullet plans of later generations, such as the 47x7.62mm ammunition of the AK39 and the American 5.56x46mm small-caliber rifle bullets.

These data provided Hu Xiaoming with a general research direction and gave him a basic understanding of intermediate-power rifle bullets, but the things he made were obviously not good enough.

Li Qinwu grabbed the old sleeve bullet and shook it in front of Hu Xiaoming.

"Xiao Ming, the caliber of this old sleeve bullet is nearly 8mm, the bullet is too big and too heavy, and you have reduced the charge, so will the trajectory be okay?

And this Arisaka rifle bullet, its caliber is small, but look at how long the bullet is? And look at the small amount of powder, after being triggered, the bullet will spin less than 100 meters away! "

Those who have never seen a plate bullet may not know that the Japanese Type 75.7 rifle is very long. The total length of the bullet is 32.51mm, and the warhead alone is mm. As you can imagine, with such a long warhead and reduced charge, if it is used as an intermediate-power bullet, the warhead will definitely lack thrust after firing, causing the warhead to spin in flight.

Li Qinwu grabbed the last bullet. This bullet was based on the Mauser 7.63x25mm pistol bullet, with the shell lengthened and the amount of powder increased.

"Well, this is a bit like an intermediate-power rifle bullet. The pistol bullet is low in weight, so it is more suitable. However, this pistol bullet is a round-headed bullet, which is not conducive to long-distance flight. After all, a rifle is used to attack targets three or four hundred meters away, so a pointed bullet is more suitable for flying."

Although all three types of ammunition were criticized by Li Qinwu, Hu Xiaoming was very excited. Originally, in his mind, the concept of intermediate-power rifle bullets was very vague, but with Li Qinwu's explanation, he felt that this concept became clearer and clearer.

"Director Li, do you mean to reduce the charge and change the weight of the bullet?"

Li Qinwu nodded and said, "Of course. With the amount of powder reduced, the weight of the bullet also needs to be reduced to achieve a stable trajectory."

A look of hesitation flashed across Hu Xiaoming's face.

"Director Li, I've been hanging out at the bullet factory these days. Adding or reducing the length of the cartridge case is simple, just slightly modify the machine data. But changing the weight of the bullet is probably a bit technically difficult. And I've been tinkering with it at the bullet factory these days, and the old masters there are getting annoyed with me. They think I'm just messing around and hindering their work. If I ask them about changing the bullet again, they'll probably get angry."

"Hi!"

Li Qinwu patted Hu Xiaoming on the shoulder.

"You should have come to me first. How can you do research and development without R&D funds?

So, I will approve 2000 yuan for you first, you can use it to do the initial research, you can spend some money at the bullet factory, buy some cigarettes and alcohol for the old craftsmen there, I will go to Director Huang to ask for a written document for you, so that the bullet factory can cooperate with you without affecting production, and then let Lao Huotou make a few ballistic guns for you, well, the vacant land next to us is good, you can use the experimental bullets here, but..."

Li Qinwu whispered, "The research data must be kept confidential. Be careful of outsiders snooping."

Li Qinwu knew that given Director Huang's philosophy of doing things, he would not be able to support his own research and development. Hu Xiaoming had also paid for his own research and development, so he naturally could not let others get involved in his own achievements.

But he didn't want to tell Hu Xiaoming about these trivial things, for fear of disturbing his mood.

Hu Xiaoming is a bit cowardly, simple, and likes to study. When he was told about the intermediate-power rifle bullet before, he quietly made a test product. Li Qinwu decided to protect him and provide him with a simple research environment.

The two chatted for a long time, and Li Qinwu planned to provide Hu Xiaoming with a more precise research direction.

"Xiao Ming, you should focus your research on the old sleeve rifle bullet. Although the bullet is heavy, it can still be used after some modification. Moreover, many factories in our country can manufacture this kind of bullet. It is easy to roll out the production of the intermediate-power rifle bullet based on it.

You can try shortening the cartridge case to 33mm and reducing the cartridge head from 12.8g to 8g. I personally think this data is more in line with the requirements of an intermediate-power rifle bullet. "

Hu Xiaoming took out his notebook and started recording on the spot. The data reported by Li Qinwu was the ammunition of the German stg44 automatic rifle, which was modified from the Mauser 7.92x57mm rifle bullet.

Ammunition research and development is extremely difficult. It would be impossible to popularize it without tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ballistic shootings. Now they don't have support from the factory, and even the mid-power rifle bullet research and development team only has Hu Xiaoming. They can't do any serious research at all.

Li Qinwu could only report the answer, hoping to reduce research time and costs. The Germans used this data to create an intermediate-power rifle bullet. There was no way they couldn't make it by copying the answer. Even if the performance was slightly worse, it was fine as long as it could be used.