I Became a Witch and Started an Industrial Revolution Chapter 75

At this time in Ceres, Mitia had taken a special train to Astal City for an inspection.

However Mitia was not permitted to enter the laboratory and could only look at the finished product from outside...

As a former headquarters, this place still kept a considerable number of research departments that had not been moved, such as the more hazardous chemical departments.

And the reason she had come all the way today was that a world-changing technique had been cracked.

【Preparation of nitrated fiber】

That was the most important component of so-called smokeless powder; “smokeless” meant there was essentially no residue.

Black powder left a large amount of solid residue after burning, but smokeless powder produced only gases.

The reason Mitia had always looked down on black powder was that it was truly of little use.

She pinched her nose when using the Maxim because previously the metal bullet manufacturing precision had not been high; calibers were at least in the tens of millimeters, so black powder had to be used.

But only because the initial Maxim units in her hands had large enough calibers could they operate fully automatically; a rifle would still need to be stopped after firing a few rounds to clean the bore, otherwise a bursting of the chamber could easily occur.

Using black powder inevitably produced smoke; the dirty smoke reduced accuracy, the smoke residues absorbed water and became corrosive, damaging the bore and parts, its burn rate was low, and so on — it was problematic everywhere.

The composition of smokeless powder allowed it to burn more completely: the stronger the pressure it withstood, the faster it burned, and the more concentrated the energy release.

The most intuitive comparison was that if a black-powder bullet had a muzzle velocity of 400 meters per second, a smokeless-powder bullet would reach eight hundred.

With higher muzzle energy she could reduce projectile mass to obtain a flatter trajectory; smaller, lighter ammunition also meant soldiers could carry more rounds.

The gap with magic crystal powder was no longer as absurd as before; magic crystals could be used in other fields instead of being consumed as propellant.

Of course, preparing nitrated fiber was not that simple.

Only after blast-furnace steelmaking, coal refining, and petrochemical techniques had been developed did Ceres gain the ability to produce nitric and sulfuric acids.

And nitric acid plus sulfuric acid and cotton produced the most basic nitrated cotton — if reaching that stage were sufficient for use, Mitia would not have had to wait until now.

Nitrated cotton produced this way contained residual nitric acid in its nitrated fibers and could not be touched by hand; if the factories had started production with it as-is, exposure to heat or light would decompose it, releasing large amounts of nitrogen dioxide and heat.

If the heat could not be dissipated it would cause spontaneous combustion or explosion — what scene would a magazine full of powder exploding look like?

These drawbacks doomed it to remain in the laboratory for the time being, not on the battlefield.

The subsequent largest task of Ceres’s chemical research departments was to tame this explosive brat, and for that they spent nearly ten years.

After producing nitrated cotton, it still had to be soaked in water and repeatedly washed to remove the residual sulfuric or nitric acid on the nitrated fibers.

After washing it was necessary to use a steam engine to pulp the material, breaking the cotton fiber tubes to obtain clean and neat nitrated fiber.

But that was not enough — it remained too fluffy and would burn extremely rapidly, making it unusable as propellant, so it had to be gelatinized.

The ignition point of nitrated fiber was only 170 degrees; it could not be burned with fire, nor was water suitable because it was insoluble in water.

In the end alcohol and ether were used to dissolve the nitrated fiber into a colloid.

Then machines repeatedly kneaded, pressed, and stirred the colloid to remove gaps and bubbles in the fibers; during this process two kinds of fibers separated — soluble and insoluble.

Finally, seven parts insoluble nitrated fiber were mixed with three parts soluble nitrated fiber, using the soluble portion to fill the gaps and bubbles within the insoluble fibers.

This maximized compression of the nitrated fiber’s volume; it was no longer fluffy like a cotton wad, but that was still not the end.

There remained the problem of too-fast burn rate: paraffin wax was added to coat the fiber surfaces, and a little graphite powder was added.

Graphite was black and possessed good antistatic properties; only then did the nitrated fiber fully reach the quality required for military propellant.

And because the graphite-added nitrated fiber became black granular matter, many people mistook graphite-added smokeless powder for black powder — in fact they were things from different dimensions.

The benefits of being able to manufacture smokeless powder were enormous. First, all service rifles in Ceres could be completely phased out.

Because smokeless powder left no residue, magazine feeding could be used and firearm designs could be simplified into bolt-action locking mechanisms; new rifles no longer needed one-by-one manual loading.

In other words, magazines could be manufactured in specialized factories, workers could preload rounds into them in advance, then box them for storage and transport — the relief to logistics was visible to the naked eye.

For soldiers the advantages were also many: range nearly doubled compared to black powder, lethality increased, sustained fire improved, and survivability and firepower enhancements were obvious.

Moreover, smokeless powder’s high energy density and high muzzle velocity further reduced the volume and weight of bullets and shells, allowing artillery to be further miniaturized and lightened.

It also made Mitia’s previously imagined recoilless cannon possible.

The principle of a recoilless cannon was not actually difficult; its propulsion principle did not differ much from that of traditional artillery, but it cleverly used the propellant’s kinetic energy.

A recoilless cannon’s chamber was typically two calibers larger than the barrel itself because it needed to form a cavity around the chamber.

When the propellant was ignited, energy vented out through various holes; the shell was expelled from the barrel, and the momentum of the expelled propellant produced normal recoil.

But when the remaining propellant energy struck the cavity and was redirected to eject through gas ports reserved at the breech, it produced a forward reaction force that canceled the backward force from the shell’s ejection.

That was one of the principles by which a recoilless cannon eliminated recoil.

However, “simple” was relative: if black powder were used, the solid residues would easily clog the mesh holes, making such a perforated-nozzle design useless.

Actually black powder could be used to make a recoilless tube too, but that approach was disposable — they did not care whether the barrel was damaged, and what propellant was used was irrelevant.

But with that short thirty-meter attack range, both the barrel and the soldiers would have to be disposable...

The mesh-style design had another benefit: the caliber could be enlarged while keeping the principle essentially the same.

That meant existing armored vehicles could be fitted with such weapons, raising their firepower another notch.

Disposable recoilless tubes only became practical after developing rocket-assisted ranges, so they were not considered for now.

Anyway the mesh-style design could be made compact enough for infantry use — these were Mitia’s weapons against those mag-drive mechs.

With smokeless powder, rifles and machine guns could be upgraded.

Field guns, mortars, and fire support, tracked armored vehicles fitted with recoilless guns and machine guns cooperating with infantry advances — a mechanized force already had its prototype.