With the increasing speed of flintlock manufacturing, continuing to use spearman to protect the gunners seemed to be a waste of manpower, so the latter needed the ability to fight independently in melee combat.
There was a very easy solution to this problem, that was, adding a bayonet to the flintlock. Roland didn’t expect his own men to take the initiative and engage in close range combat, instead they should only have the ability to defend themselves in case the power of the gun wasn’t able to completely destroy the enemy’s courage and they started a desperate attack.
A weapon like a bayonet wasn’t so difficult to manufacture, describing it in easy to understand words, it was just a sharp cone, and in the case of further improving the killing effectiveness, he could also add a blood groove into it. The key part was the connection between the bayonet and the gun, the first bayonet was a blade which was connected to a thin wooden pole, which could be directly put into the barrel of the gun. The advantage of this construction was that it was quite simple, the disadvantage was also very obvious, if the bayonet was used the gun was unable to fire, and in addition, if it was used to stab someone, it could happen that the bayonet would become stuck in the enemy’s body.
So Roland intended to produce the improved second generation bayonet — the casing type bayonet. The bayonet had an iron casing added to the blade’s handle. The inner casing diameter was slightly larger than the grooved barrel.
One only needed to weld a piece of iron with a hole on top of the barrel. After plugging the bayonet on top of the barrel and inserting a filling into the hole, it would become fixed. The blade had a triangular form, with three sharp blades, if pierced into the body it wouldn’t fall off, and it would also leave a difficult to heal wound.
After the installation of the bayonet, the bayonet would be slightly longer than the barrel, and so also complicate the loading process, but compared to a folding bayonet, it was much simpler for mass production. As long as there was a sample, any blacksmith was able to reproduce it.
But to enable the bayonet to play an important part in a battle, it was important to train the soldiers in how to use it.
But Roland naturally didn’t know anything about it. Fortunately, he remembered that his Chief Knight had once boasted, that he was able to use any weapon. So he just had to find him and get him to teach the others how to fight with a bayonet.
The artillery production was also advancing steadily, the second round of production for the cannons had already entered the drilling phase, while the third round was still at the material collection phase.
If he is lucky, Roland could have a gorgeous lineup of four 12-pounders after a month. There was no doubt of his superiority in terms of firepower. But the question now was how could he turn this advantage into a winning situation, and Roland was still striving for an answer to this.
Before he’d crossed over he was just working as a mechanical dog, and just like for most of the other people in that world, his understanding of war had only come from history, movies and games. If it was just a battle with cold weapons, he could have handed over the command to Carter and Iron Axe. But this battle wasn’t the same as those two had previously fought, there was no one who would be able to understand these new hot weapons better than himself.
That being the case, he could only gather the knowledge they had and build his own plans on that foundation in additional to his knowledge from a later era.
In order to ensure his victory, Roland let Lightning travel every day between Border Town and Longsong Stronghold. On one hand to observe the road’s conditions, and on the other hand because he needed to accurately calculate the distance. Roland believed that the victory in war was built on a foundation of previous gathered information and calculations. Whether it was a tactical development, or the deduction of each stage of a battle, receiving victory in a battle was inseparably linked to these two points.
Roland once more took the one-meter long iron pipes and the one hundred meter long hemp ropes he’d made for determining the firing range of his cannons. Then he went to the artillery testing area west of Border Town and measured with them a distance of one kilometer. Then he let Lightning fly this distance so that she would always do it in the same amount of time.
When she had skillfully remembered exactly how much magic to use, Roland began to measure the distance between the Longsong Stronghold and Border town. Using a sundial to measure the time that was needed for a round-trip, he had calculated the distance between the two places was around fifty-five kilometers.
