Chapter 118 Vitali M1872 Rifle

Since 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 be at ease with 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 a British Empire with the best navy, which is frantically looking for trouble. Unless it wants to compete with Britain in an all-round way, it is better to give up developing the navy.

If you don't want to attract the attention of the British, the size of the navy must be kept below the level of the great powers, and the main battleships cannot threaten the British Royal Fleet.

In addition, due to the extreme cost of the navy, Carlo currently has no idea of ​​developing the navy. The Spanish fleet only has three or two small ironclad ships, which looks quite shabby.

Since the navy is not developed, the army has become the only hope for Spain to strengthen its military power. On this point, Carlo, Prime Minister Primo and Archduke Serrano all have a tacit understanding.

Military reform must also be accompanied by one thing, that is, the reform of weapons technology.

Spain's current standard rifles are relatively complex, with outdated muzzle-loading rifles and paper-wrapped bullets, as well as more advanced breech-loading rifles and metal-cased bullets.

Since the army is to undergo large-scale reforms, 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 it has two technologies from Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Spain only needs to integrate the two technologies with the help of Austro-Hungarian technical experts to improve the standard rifles belonging to Spain.

Under such circumstances, relying on the new generation of models improved from the Italian Vitali rifle, the Spanish Vitali M1872 rifle was also successfully born.

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

The caliber of this rifle is 10.35 mm, and it uniformly uses 10.35x47 mm black powder bullets.

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

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

The whole rifle weighs 4.6kg, the whole gun is 1350mm long, and the initial shooting speed can reach 415 meters per second.

Italy maintains the basic appearance of the Swiss Vitali rifle, but changes the loading method from a tubular magazine to a single-shot feeding.

The Spanish military factory has made improvements on this basis and added a magazine that can load four bullets.

The Spanish Vitali M1872 rifle and the Italian Vitali rifle use the same caliber, which is also convenient for logistics supply.

If the Spanish ammunition production capacity is insufficient in the future, it can also easily purchase bullets from Italy, anyway, the ammunition of the two is universal.

Similarly, if Italy lacks rifles or bullets, the bullets produced in Spain can also be loaded into Italian rifles, which is a huge help for the logistics 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 kind of rifle, they only need to transport and supply the same kind of bullets.

But if several rifles are used, especially those with different calibers, it will be a huge trouble for logistics supply.

The front line finally waited for a large number of supplies, but there was no bullet that was suitable for its own rifles, which meant that this batch of supplies was completely useless to the army.

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

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

Since the decision was made to reform the army, Carlo ordered the Royal Arsenal to test the Vitali M1872 rifle for the last time. As long as the military agreed, it could be mass-produced and equipped to the army at any time.

Hearing that Carlo had even prepared the standard rifle for the army, 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, it would basically be confirmed that the Spanish army would 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 the design of such a rifle, not to mention Spain, where military technology was not very developed.

If this rifle could be equipped on a large scale, the combat effectiveness of the Spanish army would definitely be improved. Coupled with the reform of the Spanish army, the combat effectiveness of the Spanish army will be greatly improved if the reform is successfully carried out in the future, 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 Wendel M1867 rifle of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Italian Vitali M1870 rifle.

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

Naturally, the Royal Arsenal also learned that Carlo, Prime Minister Primo, and Grand Duke Serrano were coming to observe the rifle experiment.

His Majesty the King and two big bosses from the government came in person, which naturally aroused the great attention of the Royal Arsenal. Before the public test, the Royal Ordnance Factory also carefully inspected and tested the M1872 rifle to ensure that there would be no problems during the public test.

However, the worries of the technical staff of the Royal Ordnance Factory were somewhat unnecessary. Originally, this Vitali M1872 rifle was improved on the basis of the Italian Vitali M1870 rifle. It cannot be made worse as it changes.

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

The only thing that really competes with the Vitali M1872 rifle is the Wendel M1867 rifle, the standard rifle of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Wendel M1818dl (Wendel)-Holub (Hulub) rifle was jointly developed by Wendel and Holub.

The reason why this breech-loading rifle was developed 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 Austria-Hungary. This period was an important period for the entire Europe to change from muzzle-loading guns to breech-loading guns, and also for the transformation of paper-wrapped bullets into metal bullets.

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

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 of the army, the navy will also see great progress. Ironclads will evolve into battleships, and battleships will evolve into dreadnoughts, and then to super-dreadnoughts, and so on.

Although it seems that it takes many generations to evolve, in fact, this period of time is only thirty or forty years.

This is also the reason why Carlo vigorously built a military factory. If Spain cannot catch up during this golden development stage of military technology, it will be far behind in military technology in the future.

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

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

However, cooperation in this area is relatively secretive, and the expansion of the Valencia Shipyard in Spain is basically confidential. As long as warships are not built with great fanfare, other countries will basically not notice the changes in the shipyards.

Let’s talk about rifle testing.

Under the witness of Carlo, Prime Minister Primo and Archduke Serrano, the Vitali M1872 rifle officially launched a competitive test with a series of rifles.

This test will be directly related to the future rifle equipment of the Spanish army. Which rifle can win the test will basically become the priority procurement target of the Spanish army.

As expected, the Vitali M1872 rifle won.

As mentioned before, in fact, the only one qualified to compete with this rifle is the Wendel M1867 rifle of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

But the Wendell M1867 rifle had two fatal shortcomings.

One is that the 11.15x42MM flange-type metal fixed-loading bullet used in this rifle has a warhead mass of less than 20 grams, and the bullet’s killing power is insufficient.

The second is the breech locking device. Although many breech-loading guns in this era adopted locking devices, the Wendell M1867 rifle also required a rotating locking device when loading, which greatly reduced the number of bullets that could be fired per minute.

Originally, the bullet was not powerful enough, and its rate of fire was not as fast as that of the Vitali M1872 rifle. This resulted in the performance of the Wendell M1867 rifle falling far behind the Vitali M1872 rifle in the test.

But it can be seen from the code names of the two rifles that there are actually five years of difference between the two rifles. Even compared with Italy's Vitali M1870 rifle, there is still a gap of three years.

In this era, three years of military technology has gone a long way. There was only three or four years between the Austro-Prussian War and the Franco-Prussian War (in this world), but the Prussian artillery went from being unable to defeat the Austrian artillery to being able to overwhelm the French artillery. You can see that three or four Years of changes in military technology.

Now that the Vitali M1872 rifle has won the final victory, there is naturally nothing to say about what happens next. Grand Duke Serrano said with a smile that he would use the military funds of the Ministry of National Defense to purchase a batch of Vitali M1872 rifles.

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

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

The Guards could have purchased Vitali rifle equipment from Italy. But Carlo considered that Spain was also developing breech-loading guns, so he did not equip Italy's Vitali rifles on a large scale.

Now that the Spanish breech-loading rifle technology has been developed, it is time for the Guards to equip 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.