Chapter 310: Maxim M1884 Rifle
Although the armory named Qiaomengtuoya Machinery Manufacturing Plant failed in its design for the new rifle, this also brought good news to Carlo and the Ministry of Defense.
Even such a small arsenal produced a fairly decent rifle design, so what about other armories of the same scale? Would they also have designs that catch one’s eye?
And Spain’s largest Royal Arsenal, would it design a truly impressive new rifle?
Harboring such questions and expectations, Carlo waited for nearly two months and finally received the new rifle design from the Royal Arsenal.
Speaking of which, the invention of smokeless powder was also related to the Royal Arsenal.
The renowned father of automatic weapons, Maxim, served as the chief weapons design consultant for the Royal Arsenal.
Although Maxim was world-famous for his machine gun, he was actually a polymath. In history, he also researched and developed smokeless powder, manufactured an airplane powered by a steam engine, and obtained hundreds of invention patents including automatic sprinkler systems, automatic steam pumps, engine speed governors, gas engines, vacuum pumps, and mousetraps.
After Spain established a research and development project related to smokeless powder, Maxim actively applied and successfully joined the research team.
His interest in smokeless powder was actually due to its improvement for machine guns.
A machine gun is a firearm with an extremely high rate of fire, which made the heavy smoke problem of black powder even more severe on machine guns.
As soon as the machine gun fired, the area around the machine gunner was filled with smoke, making it impossible to see the enemy’s situation ahead.
Black powder severely limited the role of the machine gun, so Maxim eagerly wanted to develop a powder that produced no smoke.
Obviously, Maxim succeeded.
After the invention of smokeless powder, Maxim intended to continue investing in his machine gun research. At that time, the Defense Department issued a tender announcement for the new rifle to various armories.
Although the Royal Arsenal had gathered numerous weapons design experts, it lacked an expert capable of taking the lead.
As the chief weapons design consultant of the Royal Arsenal, Maxim had no choice but to step up and help the arsenal design a completely new rifle that met the requirements.
The design ideas for rifles and machine guns were different, but this difference could not stump Maxim, who was a polymath.
After more than two months of effort, plus the Royal Arsenal’s over ten years of exploration on the new rifle, they finally had a fairly perfect answer.
When the Royal Arsenal submitted several sample guns and related design data to the Ministry of Defense, Carlo also learned the news and excitedly came to the test field specifically used for weapon testing.
In fact, this test field belonged to the Guard.
In the vicinity of the capital Madrid, only the Guard’s camp had such a large-scale shooting range.
Conducting weapon tests in the Guard’s camp could also achieve high confidentiality, as soldiers consumed large amounts of bullets daily in training, so firing here would not attract attention.
The Guard soldiers were highly loyal to Carlo and the country, so naturally no one would leak secrets. Moreover, most ordinary soldiers did not know the actual content of the tests, and without knowing the specifics, there was even less concern about secrecy.
Carlo was the last to arrive at the shooting range. By the time Carlo arrived, the shooting range had already been set up in advance by personnel from the Ministry of Defense and the Royal Arsenal.
On a not-too-large display table, ten rifles were already placed. The five on the left were familiar to Carlo; they appeared to be Spain’s standard rifle, the Vitali M1872 rifle.
The rifles on the right showed traces of the Vitali rifle, but with significant changes in appearance; they should be the completely new rifle design from the Royal Arsenal.
Seeing Carlo arrive, the officials from the Ministry of Defense and the staff from the Royal Arsenal respectfully came forward to greet and salute Carlo.
After the simple formalities, Carlo eagerly walked to the ten rifles, smiled and said, “Let’s start quickly. I can’t wait to see the performance of the new rifle.”
Maxim respectfully nodded, stepped forward and introduced to Carlo and the generals from the Ministry of Defense: “Your Majesty the King, Your Excellency General, please look. This is the rifle we newly designed.
I believe you can tell from the appearance that we retained some advantages of the Vitali M1872 rifle, such as the magazine interrupter and safety lever.
The former allows our rifle to switch from magazine feeding to manual loading mode to cope with different battlefield environments.
The latter prevents the rifle’s spring from being under long-term pressure in standby state, extending the spring’s lifespan.
Due to the full adoption of box magazine feeding, the new rifle’s length is shortened by about 120 millimeters, and weight reduced by 450 grams, solving the shortcomings of the original Vitali rifle being long and heavy.
Although the gun body is shorter than the Vitali rifle, since the barrel is not shortened, the rifle’s effective range is not affected and can basically be maintained at around 600 meters.
To improve feeding efficiency and increase firing speed, we specifically adopted two magazines with different capacities. The short magazine holds six bullets, and the long magazine holds ten bullets, to cope with different battlefield situations.
When using the ten-bullet long magazine, the rifle’s theoretical maximum rate of fire can reach over 30 rounds per minute. As long as the soldiers are familiar with changing magazines and the shooting process, achieving this rate of fire is no problem at all.” Maxim introduced with a smile.
The design of short and long magazines was actually to cope with different logistics conditions.
When logistics are abundant, long magazines can be fully equipped to pour bullets onto the enemy freely.
When logistics are not abundant, switch to short magazines to reduce bullet consumption speed.
Don’t think that the few bullets saved per rifle amount to little; for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of rifles, the saved bullets could reach millions. Such a design is still very meaningful.
Carlo nodded quite satisfied with this design. The officers around him were also visibly satisfied, discussing softly with smiles.
“Have the soldiers try it. I can’t wait to see this rifle’s performance,” Carlo instructed.
With Carlo’s order, several soldiers came up, picked up the new rifles placed nearby, and began pre-test inspections and preparations.
These soldiers had already been exposed to this new rifle in advance and had learned how to operate it.
In fact, the operation process for bolt-action rifles of this era was quite similar. After all, weapon designs in European countries did not rely entirely on their own research and development; plagiarism was also an important method.
The most famous plagiarist was the German-produced Commission 1888 rifle.
At that time, to counter the French Lebel rifle launched in 1886, the Germans urgently produced a rifle comparable to France’s, the so-called Commission 1888 rifle.
This urgently produced rifle referenced technologies from multiple countries: the bolt and magazine from the Austrian Mannlicher rifle, the rifling design plagiarized from the French Lebel rifle, and the bullet directly adopted the Swiss-developed 92×57mm rimless smokeless powder bullet.
This was also why Carlo specifically required the Defense Department to issue confidentiality and no-sale orders to all armories participating in the tender.
Because now European countries’ armories would plagiarize designs without caring about registered patents.
Even if an international patent was registered, they wouldn’t care about infringement. The time needed to litigate a cross-national patent case was enough for the involved firearm design to become obsolete.
By the time the cross-national patent case was won, the plagiarized rifle would already be outdated, and they could just abandon the infringement, as outdated rifles were useless anyway.
As for compensation, countries’ weapon and equipment procurements were confidential, and no one would foolishly publicize the relevant procurement data.
Without procurement data, it was unknown how much money the infringer made from the plagiarism. Without knowing that, how could infringement compensation be claimed?
This was why countries blatantly imitated and plagiarized: in this era, patent infringement had become routine, and even international patents could not be protected across nations.
Of course, this applied when both countries were at the same level and no major economic loss was caused to the other party.
If a Dutch company dared to plagiarize a British company’s patent and cause the British company a huge loss, see if the British would retaliate against the Dutch.
Returning to the rifle experiment, after thorough preparations, the rifle testing officially began.
First was testing the new rifle’s various data, such as the rifle’s rate of fire, bullet speed, shooting distance, and shooting power, etc.
This round of testing was not complex, and the specific data was quickly obtained.
Carlo was the first to receive the test data, followed by the various generals from the Ministry of Defense.
Everyone looked at the test data in their hands; some were already beaming with joy.
This test data not only did not disappoint them but also thrilled the Army generals.
Just look at this test data.
The new rifle’s effective shooting distance not only reached the Ministry of Defense’s minimum requirement of 400 meters but even met the highest expectation of 600 meters.
Although accuracy would drop significantly beyond 200 meters, and beyond 400 meters it would rely on luck to hit the enemy.
But this performance was already quite excellent; after all, this was not a sniper rifle, with neither a scope nor barrel tuning, so having such accuracy was already very good.
This rifle performed excellently in shooting distance, and that was just one aspect.
In terms of bullet speed, based on preliminary estimates, the bullet speed could reach an exaggerated level of 700 meters per second; from a slight distance, the bullet would arrive before the gunshot was heard.
However, such a significant increase in bullet speed was not strange, as compared to the bullets used in the Vitali rifle, the new rifle’s bullets underwent major changes, with the bullet weight reduced by nearly half.
The original Vitali rifle used 7×47mm black powder rifle bullets, with a bullet weight of up to 3 grams, which had quite good power.
But precisely because of such a heavy bullet, the Vitali rifle had a short range; even with smokeless powder, the effective shooting distance was only over 400 meters.
The new rifle adopted a brand-new 55×52mm centerfire rifle bullet; due to the reduced caliber, the bullet weight was only about 5 grams.
Plus the boost from smokeless powder, the bullet speed was greatly increased, and with the extremely high speed, it compensated for the power loss from the reduced caliber.
The experiment also proved that the power of this small-caliber bullet was not insignificant.
A 1mm thick steel plate was placed 100 meters away, and soldiers successively fired 4mm black powder rifle bullets and 5mm smokeless powder rifle bullets. In the end, the 5mm rifle bullet fully penetrated the steel plate, while the larger caliber 4mm rifle bullet got stuck in the steel plate.
The next test further proved that the bullet power had not decreased.
To test the damage to the human body, the Royal Arsenal specially prepared two sheep to simulate the human body.
The 4mm black powder rifle bullet did create a larger wound, but only a not-very-large through-and-through wound.
In contrast, the smaller caliber 5mm smokeless powder rifle bullet, due to its high speed, tumbled rapidly after hitting the sheep’s body, causing damage effects unmatched by large-caliber bullets.
The conclusion was obvious: compared to large-caliber bullets using black powder, small-caliber bullets using smokeless powder were not inferior in power.
Although not as powerful as large-caliber bullets also using smokeless powder, the damage of this small-caliber bullet to the human body was already sufficient; there was no need to pursue overly large calibers.
After all, this era had no tanks protected by iron sheets and steel plates, and ordinary soldiers did not wear body armor; small-caliber bullets hitting a person were still huge damage.
By the time tanks appeared, it would already be time for Spain to update its rifles. It would not be too late to pursue large-caliber bullets then; no need to consider so much now.
Small-caliber bullets could also reduce logistics pressure; the same number of bullets would weigh less, take up less volume, and be easier to transport.
Of course, the manufacturing cost of small-caliber bullets would also be lower, which was absolutely good news for Spain.
After confirming that this rifle’s various data met the Ministry of Defense’s requirements, the next and most important test was the rifle’s stability.
Only during continuous uninterrupted firing could it test whether the rifle would jam, get damaged, or explode.
Only rifles with a low occurrence rate of such problems could be considered truly good rifles in the full sense. What the Spanish military needed was such qualified rifles, not products that looked good on paper but had issues with prolonged use.
To better demonstrate the rifle’s stability, the next test would use all ten new rifles, testing under uninterrupted firing whether problems would arise from prolonged use.
Considering the rifle’s rate of fire, this was destined to be a lengthy test.
The Ministry of Defense’s requirement for rifle stability testing was that it must fire at least 100 bullets continuously without issues to be considered a qualified product.
More bullets would not be realistic; after all, even Spain’s abundant logistics were not that abundant.
One rifle firing 100 bullets continuously meant 1 million bullets for 10,000 rifles, and 10 million for 100,000 rifles.
How long does it take to fire 100 bullets continuously? At this new rifle’s maximum firing speed, it would take less than four minutes.
In any war or any campaign, such a situation was impossible. After all, countries’ bullets were not blown by the wind; they were produced one by one with various resources.
The maximum bullets a soldier could use per day was no more than a hundred, and less could be only dozens or even a dozen.
Under such conditions, the Defense Department’s requirement of continuous firing of 100 bullets already met all battlefield conditions, so there was no need for harsher requirements.
After the ten rifles underwent a total of 1,000 bullets fired, the final test results were freshly available.
The Royal Arsenal lived up to being Spain’s largest armory; the quality of the designed and manufactured weapons was guaranteed.
In the continuous firing test of the ten rifles, only two rifles experienced jams, and none had severe damage or explosions.
Even the jams occurred only after firing dozens of bullets continuously. Due to the continuous firing, the rifle barrel became severely hot, causing internal deformation, which led to the jam.
This actually meant that, apart from this extreme condition of heat from uninterrupted firing causing internal parts to deform, under ordinary conditions, this new rifle would basically have no issues, and stability could be guaranteed.
Upon learning the final test results, the many military generals were overjoyed, and Carlo breathed a sigh of relief.
This brand-new rifle would greatly enhance the combat effectiveness of the Spanish Army, which held great significance for Spain.
Although re-equipping all armies with new rifles would require a large expenditure, compared to the combat effectiveness improvement brought by the rifles, this expenditure was obviously worthwhile.
Moreover, Spain’s economy was booming, with government fiscal revenue rising year after year, so there was no lack of this bit of money to replace weapons and equipment.
Even if the government couldn’t provide much money, the Defense Department alone, with its annual fiscal budget, could complete the re-equipment in the next few years.
Who made Carlo always value the army highly? Spain’s military expenses had always accounted for about one-third of government fiscal expenditure; even with significant growth in government fiscal revenue in recent years, military expenses had not fallen below one-fourth of total government fiscal expenditure.
With such ample military budget, the Defense Department faced only joy at the birth of the new rifle, with no worries about military expenses.
Since this rifle had passed the Ministry of Defense’s assessment, the next most important matter was to negotiate the procurement price of this rifle, and determine how many rifles and matching bullets the Defense Department would procure.
Because the cooperation between the Defense Department and the Royal Arsenal was very close, the negotiations went very smoothly, and the final negotiation results were quickly available.
Before the negotiations, the naming of this rifle had also caused much debate between the Defense Department and the Royal Arsenal.
In the end, Carlo directly decided, naming it after the rifle’s main developer, Maxim, plus the year.
This brand-new rifle, according to the naming rule, was called the Maxim M1884 rifle, abbreviated as the 84 rifle.
Because the military budget was quite ample, the Defense Department planned to order 300,000 Maxim M1884 rifles and 50 million matching bullets from the Royal Arsenal at once, fully re-equipping the Spanish Army with new rifles within the next two years.
The Royal Arsenal was ecstatic to receive this order, as it meant no lack of orders for the next two years, and the factory could work overtime to earn money.
But this was not without bad news. With the birth of the new rifle, the original Vitali M1872 rifle instantly lost value, so there was no need to produce it anymore.
If the Spanish Army fully re-equipped with the Maxim M1884 rifle, it could retire nearly 300,000 Vitali M1872 rifles.
Handling so many rifles and matching bullets would be a huge problem; they could only find opportunities to sell them to countries in America and Asia at lower prices to dispose of these weapons and equipment quickly.
The good news was that Spain’s colonial army of up to 138,000 people could delay equipping the new rifle.
This meant the Vitali M1872 rifles truly needing urgent handling were at most 150,000, not that difficult to process, especially under the current premise of countries accelerating colonialism, where the weapons market was still large.
Because smokeless powder had not yet popularized, both Vitali M1872 rifle bullets and black powder rifle bullets were still quite valuable in other countries.
If waiting until European countries gradually equipped smokeless powder rifle bullets, these old rifle designs and black powder bullets would see a sharp drop in value.
This meant Spain must seize the time difference and sell off the soon-to-be-replaced weapons and equipment as soon as possible.
For Carlo, there were not so many problems to worry about. Replacing the Royal Army’s weapons and equipment was the Defense Department’s responsibility; although the Guard’s weapons and equipment were handled by the Royal Family, Carlo certainly would not handle these personally.
Of course, regarding the purchase of weapons and equipment, Carlo was still willing to replace the Guard’s weapons and equipment as soon as possible.
After the Defense Department signed an order for 300,000 rifles and 50 million bullets with the Royal Arsenal, Carlo also had Butler Loren sign an order with the Royal Arsenal for 20,000 rifles and 2 million bullets for the Guard soldiers’ weapon replacement and daily training.
For the Guard, Carlo would not be stingy at all. The rifles and bullets spent now would convert into combat effectiveness, protecting the Royal Family and his own safety at critical moments.
For Carlo, the stronger the Guard’s combat effectiveness, the more secure the Royal Family’s safety and status.
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