Empire Rising: Spain

Although the Joe Montoya Mechanical Manufacturing Factory failed in the design of new rifles, it brought good news to Carlo and the Ministry of Defense.

If such a small military factory could produce a fairly decent rifle design, what about other military factories of the same scale? Would they also have eye-catching designs?

And the largest Royal Military Factory in Spain, could they design a truly impressive new rifle?

With these questions and expectations in mind, Carlo waited for nearly two months and finally got the new rifle design from the Royal Military Factory.

Speaking of which, the invention of smokeless powder is also related to the Royal Military Factory.

The chief weapon design consultant for the Royal Military Factory is none other than the renowned father of automatic weapons, Maxim.

Although Maxim is famous globally for his machine gun, in fact, Maxim is a polymath. Historically, he also developed smokeless powder, manufactured a steam-powered airplane, and obtained hundreds of invention patents, including automatic sprinkler systems, automatic steam pumps, engine governors, gas engines, vacuum pumps, and mousetraps.

After Spain established a research project related to smokeless powder, Maxim actively applied and successfully joined the research team.

The reason he was interested in smokeless powder was actually because smokeless powder improves machine guns.

The machine gun is a type of firearm with a very high firing rate, which made the issue of large amounts of black powder smoke even more severe on machine guns.

As soon as a machine gun fires, the area around the gunner is filled with smoke, making it impossible to see the enemy ahead clearly.

Black powder severely limited the effectiveness of machine guns, which also made Maxim eager to develop a powder that produces no smoke.

It’s clear Maxim succeeded.

After inventing smokeless powder, Maxim intended to continue his research into machine guns. At this moment, the Defense Department issued a tender announcement for new rifles to all military factories.

Although the Royal Military Factory gathered many weapon design experts, it did not have a chief expert to take the lead.

As the chief weapon design consultant of the Royal Military Factory, Maxim could only rise to the challenge and help the military factory design a brand-new rifle that meets the requirements.

The design processes for rifles and machine guns are different approaches, but these differences cannot stump the polymath Maxim.

After more than two months of effort, combined with the Royal Military Factory’s over ten years of exploration in new rifle design, they finally came up with a relatively perfect answer.

When the Royal Military Factory submitted several prototype rifles and relevant design data to the Ministry of Defense, Carlo also received the news and eagerly came to the test site dedicated to weapon testing.

In actuality, this test site belongs to the Guard Division.

Around the capital Madrid, only the camp of the Guard Division could have such a large-scale shooting range.

Testing weapons in the camp of the Guard Division also ensures high confidentiality. After all, soldiers consume a large number of bullets in daily training, so firing guns here attracts no attention at all.

The soldiers of the Guard Division are highly loyal to Carlo and the country, so there is naturally no concern of leakage. And most ordinary soldiers don’t know the actual content of the tests, so confidentiality isn’t a concern in unknown situations.

Carlo was the last to arrive at the shooting range. By the time Carlo arrived, the range had already been set up by personnel from the Ministry of Defense and the Royal Military Factory.

On a relatively small display table, ten rifles were already set out. The five on the left were more familiar to Carlo and seemed to be Spain’s standard-issue Vitali M1872 Rifles.

The rifles on the right showed a trace of the Vitali Rifle but had significant changes in appearance, likely the brand-new rifle design presented by the Royal Military Factory.

Upon Carlo’s arrival, the officials from the Ministry of Defense and the staff of the Royal Military Factory respectfully stepped forward to greet and salute Carlo.

After a brief process, Carlo couldn’t wait to walk up to the ten rifles and, with a smile, said, "Let’s start right away. I can’t wait to see the performance of the new rifles."

Maxim nodded respectfully, stepped forward, and introduced to Carlo and the generals of the Ministry of Defense, "Your Majesty the King, esteemed generals, please take a look. This is the newly designed rifle.

I believe you can see from the appearance that we retained some of the strengths of the Vitali M1872 Rifle, such as the magazine cutoff and the safety lever.

The former allows our rifle to switch from magazine-fed to manual loading mode, to cope with different battlefield environments.

The latter helps prevent the rifle’s spring from being under pressure for a long time while in standby mode, extending the spring’s service life.

Due to the full adoption of box magazine feeding, the new rifle’s length has been shortened by about 120 millimeters, and its weight reduced by 450 grams, resolving the previous shortcomings of the Vitali Rifle being long and heavy.

Although the rifle body is shorter than the Vitali Rifle, the effective range of the rifle is not affected due to the unchanged barrel length, basically maintaining around 600 meters.

To improve feed efficiency and speed up firing, we deliberately adopted two magazines with different capacities. The short magazine can hold six bullets, while the long magazine can hold ten bullets to adapt to different battlefield situations.