Lucia came of age, and Border Town entered the last month of winter.

For the Month of Demons, the end of winter didn't mean the end. The heavy snow would often last until the following spring, and when exactly it would stop was entirely up to fate.

According to past experience, if the Month of Demons ended in the first half of the first month of spring, it would be a rather difficult time; if it ended in the second half of the first month, it would be a very difficult time; and if it continued into the second month, it would be a time when even survival was difficult.

However, these were just the situations the townspeople had encountered in the past.

This year, the situation had greatly improved. Even if the Month of Demons lasted until the end of the second month of spring, the wheat stored in the granary would be enough for everyone to fill their stomachs.

Roland was naturally not satisfied with just barely keeping everyone from starving and freezing to death. These days, he had been excitedly hunched over his desk, drawing blueprints and conceiving his next stage of large-scale production plans. The entire plan was divided into military and civilian aspects. The former included the construction of new weapon factories, bicycle factories, shipyards, and shallow-water heavy gunboat programs, while the latter mainly focused on the water, heating, and electricity connections in residential areas, and the popularization of iron farm tools.

What motivated him was Lucia. White. After thoroughly testing her new abilities, Roland clearly realized that the last restriction on large-scale production had been resolved, and the town's productivity would usher in a new peak with population growth.

This restriction was the material supply.

Modern smelting is a very complex subject, and steel production is one of the most important parameters for measuring an industrialized country. Roland didn't know much about this, so the town's ironmaking ability was still very backward. Not only was the technology not beyond this era, but the scale was not even as large as some mining merchants' private smelting plants. After the iron ore was smelted into pig iron in brick high furnaces, the high-quality iron was sent to manufacture steam engines, and the poor-quality iron was handed over to Anna for further smelting into steel. This process was completely uncontrollable, and the carbon content was also high and low. Sometimes, after a whole day of busy work, only two or three carriages could be filled with usable materials, which greatly restricted the production capacity of the steam engine factory.

Although Anna's special furnace could convert low-quality pig iron into controllable steel, the output was only enough for the military factory to use. In the autumn, it could basically meet the needs of the town, but after the winter came, the army had expanded twice, and coupled with the development of new firearms and artillery, this little steel was somewhat stretched.

Lucia's evolution was like a shot in the arm. The targeted separation ability could easily remove undesirable components from the materials, and could also regulate the proportion of each element in the smelting stage, so that each furnace of molten steel could maintain a certain performance.

It can be said that with Anna and Lucia, the smelting level of Border Town was enough to instantly improve by several levels.

For this reason, Roland had already let Anna put aside her other work and concentrate on manufacturing a new generation of extra-large furnaces.

Compared to the dedicated furnace he had designed for her before, the new furnace was more than ten times larger in volume, extending to fifty meters in length, ten meters in width, and nearly four meters in height, looking like a slender swimming pool. In essence, it was no different from the previous generation of dedicated furnaces, still an iron box without heating equipment, relying entirely on Anna's Blackfire to smelt. However, it was buried in the ground, relying on the soil to support the pressure of the molten iron on the walls. There was a walkway in the center, which allowed Anna to heat the iron ingots on both sides at the same time.

It had only one advantage, which was that it was large enough—if the previous method was used for smelting, the amount of limestone used for impurity removal alone would be a large number, and it would take a lot of effort to clean up the generated impurities, and feeding and stirring would also be a big hassle, so it must not be made too large. Now there were no such concerns at all, as long as the pig iron was put in and melted, and then Lucia removed harmful components such as phosphorus and sulfur.

Roland planned to build a new batch of kilns, along with the old high furnaces and old vertical furnaces, only responsible for the first smelting, regardless of the quality of the finished product, as long as the ore could be melted into square iron ingots. Then, all these iron ingots would be put into the new furnace for secondary refining, and the formed molten steel would flow through the gate into the lower-lying mold, directly forming materials for processing—after that, the steam engine factory would also be converted to steel production, which would definitely

Bring a stronger source of power to the town.

Roland called the new furnace the "Star of Steel."

Once Anna completed the construction and the Star of Steel was put into formal production, the town's steel production could be increased more than tenfold.

It can be said that the new large-scale production plan was based on this foundation.

In addition, the development of new light weapons also had a conclusion.

Roland found that his initial idea was not appropriate. He referred to the principle of gas-operated automatic rifles in later generations and designed several prototype weapons himself—simply put, automatic weapons use part of the high-pressure gas generated when a bullet is fired to complete the actions of ejection and loading, thereby realizing the reloading process.

This work lasted for about half a month, not difficult, but it required repeated testing to see if each part could function normally. He didn't need to memorize the specific structure of a certain rifle, as long as he knew how it worked, he could always put together a usable weapon after a few tries.

The problem lay here.

The prototype weapons that were put together were clumsy and crude, and their parts were as many as nearly a hundred, each of which was hand-processed by Anna. Especially small things such as springs, firing pins, and gas pistons were difficult to mass-produce with the current level of machine tools. If he wanted to replace all the revolver rifles in the hands of the soldiers with automatic weapons, it would not only put a great burden on Anna, but also waste those firearms processing equipment that had already been put into production.

In addition, if all soldiers were equipped with automatic weapons, the consumption of ammunition would undoubtedly be an astronomical figure. Roland didn't pay much attention to this at first, thinking that it could be solved by increasing the number of production personnel, but he soon discovered that once the new weapons formed a scale, they could easily swallow up all the output of the acid production plant.

As for the small problems such as frequent jams and misfires during test firing, they were not important.

After repeated weighing, he finally gave up the idea of ​​massively replacing automatic weapons. However, increasing the firepower output of the army was an urgent need, so he set his sights on another type of rapid-fire weapon.

That is the heavy machine gun.

Twenty to fifty people would be assigned a heavy machine gun. In this way, the number of weapons would be greatly reduced, and the two most difficult problems could be solved easily. It could also be automatically loaded by gas operation, the structure was similar to the prototype weapon that was tested, and it could be put into principle experiments after modification. Plus, it could be made larger, and the parts did not need to be designed so closely, which was equivalent to reducing the difficulty for him.

(。)