After extremely sharp, hard, and wear-resistant chromium steel tools began to appear, namely the first axes, Kawei began to smelt deeply, and now he is finally no longer fighting alone. In Rurik's plan, the entire Iron Squirrel tribe should become professional blacksmiths. He ordered Kawei to teach these people the skills. Kawei supported this, and Mechasta and his tribe even more It's full cooperation.
In an instant, Kawei became a technical consultant, and Rurik's knowledge of smelting made him useful as a consultant.
Suddenly, a number of small clay stoves sprung up like bamboo shoots after a rain. They built on a river beach with easy access to water. In order to avoid being exposed to rain, all the stoves were hurriedly built with shelters to protect them from the wind and rain.
At the beginning, the craftsmanship of those Covin men was very crude and clumsy, but they knew that as long as they mastered advanced tools, their tribe might be as powerful as the Rus. They even have a "convert fanaticism" mentality, so-called showing their fighting spirit in order to gain Rurik's respect.
After all, Rurik provided them with a large amount of high-quality food indiscriminately. Rurik's behavior of paying for it out of his own pocket was naturally interpreted by them as positive feedback. In an instant, Kawei had no less than thirty adult students, and they at least created a few useful tools, such as very important shovels, chisels, drafts, axes, scrapers, meat cleavers, and a very small number of spearheads.
During production and processing, people have noticed that all chromium steel products have excellent hardness and rigidity, but almost no elasticity.
Rurik knew that the elasticity of chromium steel was very poor, so he gave up the idea of using it to make a steel-arm crossbow, but came up with the idea of making another chromium steel dagger. Rurik did not expect chromium steel to make a longer sword, or a weapon exclusive to Teutonic men like the "Doppler Sword". The reason was that chromium steel lacked toughness. Even after annealing, this terrible Resilience can’t save it either.
As metal tools and cold weapons, hardness is basically the most important thing. The steel-arm crossbow can be said to be an effective wonder in the war created by imagination here
.
For the Kewen people, of course they hope to have a sword to show their excellence to the villagers.
But that was too unrealistic. They settled for the next best thing and yearned for an excellent short spear of their own.
After all, they are Covin people, and this claim comes from the special short spear with a hook that they like to equip. Nowadays, obsidian and iron ore spearheads are no longer used, and they have begun to forge chromium steel spearheads on Rurik's orders.
Rurik knows that as far as weapons are concerned, nothing is more cost-effective than a short spear. I am afraid that the short spear is also the most critical weapon for the human species to rise from obscurity to domination of the Blue Star.
Considering his huge consumption of supplies during this period, Rurik began to consider making weapons and selling them.
Legalistically speaking, the entire steel industrySquirrel's surviving tribesmen are all his slaves, and Rurik has the right to ask for whatever he wants from them.
Rurik did not take things to such extremes. He first ensured the safety of these people's residence and food supply. As for their other labor value, of course, he had to take away all the value of their labor. How to measure their labor value surplus? That’s what chrome steel tools produce!
He decided to sell these tools in exchange for the fruits of other people's labor to supplement his own consumption, thereby achieving a stable positive cycle.
So, who are the buyers? !
It is a good idea that the wealth should not flow to outsiders. Of course Rurik knew that iron tools were a huge profit, and he also understood that forging iron requires one's own strength.
You must first meet the needs of your own tribe for tools and weapons, and wait until the limited domestic demand market is saturated before selling them externally.
What is the biggest problem right now?
Rurik saw that even if he controlled a super mine, due to his current limited technology and stretched labor force, if he wanted to quickly explore its wealth value, it would be a relatively difficult task. Difficult things.
Currently, the most consumed material in settlements is food.
Rurik is a little lucky. Since the residents of the settlement and even the population of a huge area are only between 10,000 and 20,000, the pure natural products in this area can basically feed everyone. people.
The premise is of course that the fishermen work hard! In order to get more fish to satisfy his hunger under limited production capacity, Rurik has been rapidly depleting his silver coin inventory. During this period, the daily consumption of fresh fish in the settlement exceeded one thousand pounds. Adding in other losses, Rurik calculated by himself that the daily financial expenses would be close to two hundred silver coins.
Of course Rurik can spend a long time in a high-consumption posture, but he does not fully expect Gould, a super dealer, to use past goods to make huge wealth for himself in the south. , thus making up for the losses in the north.
This expectation is obviously a pursuit of the past.
All the symptoms point to a very clear and extremely bad problem - my labor force is insufficient. Even if I whip them with a whip, they are not work monsters with three heads and six arms.
What to do? !
Mechanical!
After two weeks of construction, a miniature city made almost entirely of wood rose from the ground through the extensive use of wood. In fact, it only completed the construction of a single-layer wooden fence. If you look closely, the fence is still full of holes and needs more wooden strips to reinforce it.
The wooden city by the river has a large number of Novgorod-style wood carvings, but there are also some semi-buried wooden sheds that were quickly excavated and built by the Kovin people.
Eight warning watchtowers have also been built. Although these wooden towers make Rurik feel shaky, their appearance does allow the sentinels with good eyesight to see from the watchtowers.In very far places, such as the winding rivers in the north, there are even two white and squirming dots that suddenly appear in the distance, which are undoubtedly polar bears.
Every day, loggers return with prey, and it has even become an industry.
The emergence of the crossbow has given children terrifying hunting abilities!
However, young Coven hunters like Terravis are very good at using wooden bows. He proudly uses a large number of iron cluster arrows, which greatly improves the hunting efficiency. In comparison, his fellow Russians of the same age, such as Fisk, Kanuf and other children who were brought to the north by Rurik to see the world, found that their hands were so clumsy and they admired Terravis's superb skills. While practicing archery, the love of brotherhood also deepens.
Even children, they worship anyone of the same camp who is capable of fighting, even if it is a Covin person.
Rurik does not want to interfere with the hunting behavior of his men for the time being. They are a group of eaglets scattered out. It would be best if they can practice their martial arts through their own hunting. If there are casualties, then you can only ask for luck. Because this is the true Nordic survival law. In the boreal forest, either the hunter wins or the prey wins.
What’s the result? Rurik soon learned of these things.
Tailavis and his Ross friends used two crossbows in the forest to kill three brown bears and one white bear in just one day, and were killed by the sharp-eyed Tai. Lavis hunted down twenty wary snowshoe hares as they shed their summer coat.
Their growth is gratifying, but the slow growth in chromium steel tool production capacity makes Rurik sad.
Finally, he decided to make some changes.
A warm night, a bright bonfire.
At the end of the day, Kawei and the strong mercenaries gathered together to talk and laugh. Now Rurik is willing to pay more for the mercenaries who forge the iron. They have chromium steel axes and have become more and more cooperative in the past few days.
Now, they had just eaten a dinner that was almost all kinds of barbecued meats, and were waiting for Rurik's new decision.
In front of the moving flames, Rurik sat cross-legged on a soft bearskin. Fire danced in his eyes as everyone looked forward to his new ideas.
"Maybe...I am a little eager for quick success. Now we are facing a big dilemma, our chromium steel production is too low."
Kawei muttered in a low voice: "Then So what? We still lack blacksmiths. I also have a dilemma. Those people carry ore every day, and now the ore has piled up into a mountain, but my furnace cannot complete the processing well."
"This is the problem, so we must take countermeasures." Rurik straightened his back and emphasized.
"Countermeasures? What is your countermeasure? In my opinion, the strength of brothers is like this, and you can't force it on everyone."
Rurik felt stuck. What Wei said is linear thinking, which is notNot surprising.
He didn’t want to make any more twisty things, so he pointed his little hand directly at the river churning under the night sky not far away: "Just the power of water! Kawei, your dilemma is actually the lack of blacksmithing masters! Then, I will let Dahe be the new blacksmith!"
"What? Dahe is the blacksmith?" Kawei was stunned for a moment, and then laughed.
This unbridled laughter is not only Kawei’s distrust of absurd things, but also to use laughter to vent his fatigue during this period.
The ridiculous laughter soon caused all the mercenaries to laugh loudly and weirdly.
Infected by this laughter, Rurik’s stretched little mouth also smiled.
Rurik didn’t feel ridiculed at all. Indeed, even if it was a relatively simple hydraulic machine, this group of people who had almost no concept of machinery simply did so because they had never seen it before. It would feel ridiculous.
The smile was also a smile. When the happy atmosphere settled down, Kawei asked earnestly: "Rurik, are you really serious?"
"I lied to you. What to do?! I want you to do it for me tomorrow, and you!" After saying that, Rurik stood up, gesticulating with his hands and talking nonstop.
"I and you are digging a small waterway by the river, and I want to build a house beside the waterway. I want you to cut down a straight tree and let it stand in the middle of the house on the riverside, where it will be washed by the water. I want you to make some fixed hammers, so that the rotating wooden poles will drive the hammers to forge..."
It is difficult to explain to them with words alone, Liuli Ke saw that Kawei still seemed half-understood after he had exhausted all his efforts to explain it, so he didn't bother to waste any more words.
Reality is so real. Even for the experienced Kawei, his initial concept of machinery was limited to the "lever-type manual glass die-casting machine" in the Klavassen Blacksmith Shop.
Presumably for others, Kawei might be the first to make it clear.
This night, Rurik arranged the tasks of the mercenaries, and then got together with Kawei to draw simple pictures on the enemies with small wooden sticks. Rurik sent It is hoped that in this way, Kawei will have an abstract understanding of "waterwheel forging".
After Rurik’s unremitting efforts, Kawei finally got the idea!
"Ah! It's really yours!" Kawei, who finally understood a little bit about it, excitedly patted Rurik on the shoulder,
"Do you understand everything?!"
"I understand. It's like the wheels of my trolley! Alas, you should have talked about the wheels earlier. Let the water flow push the wheels to rotate. The shaft inside has a fixed raised plectrum. This projection rotates to the hammer. If the handle is long, the hammer will fall down when it moves away from the correct position!"
Hearing this, Rurik was so moved that he almost cried. His little face was already heated by the campfire, because after a lot of talking, he finally let his dear blacksmithAfter figuring out the situation, his face became even hotter because he was happy.
The next day, a new construction operation quietly began on the riverside.
Anyway, there are no buyers now. Of course, the new tools must first meet the labor needs of the builders. Those heavy chromium iron shovels and chromium iron drafts that were not carburized but only quenched and heat treated began to be put into excavation of the river channel.
Some Covin people cast curious glances. They really didn’t understand what Lord Rurik was going to do to the river. It seems that this strange action makes no sense. Some women speculated that perhaps Mr. Rurik wanted to make a trap to make reasonable fish spontaneously swim to the preset water hole. When the water inlet was quickly blocked, everyone desperately scooped out water, and all the fish in the pond were caught in one catch.
In the Oulu River Basin, the hometown of the Kovin people, various tribes know how to fish and cast nets to catch fish. They are also good at scooping water from cofferdams to catch fish.
What happened next was really unexpected.
A new straight small river appeared, which was dug for the mercenaries. It exceeds the depth of one stika. Due to the modification of the inherent river channel upstream, the water flow in the small river channel is more rapid.
In the next three days, a unique wooden ridge stood up next to the river, but this was by no means the most curious thing.
A straight but not very thick piece of pine wood was cut down. It is a carefully selected wood and is a good material for making a wooden shaft because it is almost a cylinder with a very small tolerance. exist.
Rurik actually found it difficult to accept a bearing that was not a pure cylinder. Due to this era, he could only tolerate this imperfection.
However, once the Ross tribe’s first practical waterwheel mechanism, which he participated in the design and supervision of the construction, is put into production, it will not only complete a technical gap for the tribe, but will also bring about a revolution! Because no matter how the wooden shaft rotates, it is a little crooked and has another center of rotation. This is enough.