Munitions Empire

Chapter 1042: 964 is another ordinary day beginning

Compared to the complicated international situation, the interior of the Great Tang Empire was a picture of serenity; let alone expanding the military and preparing for war, there was scarcely a sense of tension.

Aside from trains frequently passing along the east-west railroad, loaded with Dwarf or Goblin soldiers, it was hard to tell that the nation was right at the edge of a storm.

Qin Country and Shu Country were engaged in frenzied battle, and the military situation near Fengjiang was intensifying, yet many merchants of the Great Tang Empire were now focusing on the construction progress of the Hidden Sword Gorge Bridge.

Employing the latest technology, the Hidden Sword Gorge Bridge solved the issue of being unable to build piers due to the Gorge, making it possible to turn a once insurmountable barrier into a thoroughfare.

Once the bridge is completed, communication between Tang Country and the Fengjiang rebels can never be severed again.

For Tang Mo, the recent succession of good news was truly non-stop. Not to say that there weren’t bad news as well. On the whole, it could be said to be a mix of joy and worry.

The Gross Domestic Product within the Great Tang Empire was rising rapidly, and the number of large equipment export projects had increased, almost all of which were high value-added products.

In the face of international instability, various countries hoped to purchase production equipment quickly before the outbreak of war, positioning them within core regions considered relatively secure, in order to avoid the impact of war on their domestic equipment production.

However, countries were actually tightening their strategic materials exports. Exports of steel, copper, and other metals were sharply declining, indicating that everyone sensed danger and was trying to stockpile strategic materials in preparation for a major war.

Thus, the Great Tang Empire had to open several of its own sealed mines to compensate for the sharp reduction in imported metals.

Another piece of good news was that the Great Tang Empire’s grain production once again yielded a bumper harvest. Since the flooding issue in the upper reaches of Chu Country’s rivers had been effectively curbed, the overall irrigation environment for the Great Tang Empire had improved.

As a result, the agriculture of the Great Tang Empire had been enjoying a state of constant abundance these days, and with the total national grain production increased, the problem of hunger had been contained.

Even as it needed to feed hundreds of millions of people and tens of thousands of slaves, the Great Tang Empire felt no pressure whatsoever. Such a feat was impossible in the past; it could only be realized through a combination of industrial and agricultural development.

This required a series of technological supports such as improved irrigation efficiency, popularizing scientific cultivation, advancements in fertilizer technology, and development of new crop breeds—essentially a comprehensive leap supported by various scientific and technological projects.

For the office workers of the Great Tang Empire, it was just another ordinary day; this morning was as ordinary as ever.

A staff member picked up his freshly made hot tea and returned to his desk. He was a technician, currently working on developing a brand-new armor technology.

It might sound incredible, but his supervisor had actually received a research task on tank armor protection, which was to make explosives serve as armor for tanks.

It was definitely an impressive technology, which aimed to install something called Explosive Reactive Armor on the tank to boost its defense.

What it actually increased was not the overall protection but specifically the defense against armor-piercing shells.

The theoretical basis was that once the armor is penetrated, the explosive charge inside would detonate, and the energy formed would neutralize or disrupt the jet generated by the shell’s explosion, thereby reducing the shell’s penetrating power.

Generally, this type of armor, in conjunction with spaced armor, can effectively counter armor-piercing and armor-piercing rounds, significantly enhancing tank defense capabilities with only a slight increase in weight.

However, all of this was still theoretical and required repeated experiments to verify its effectiveness. In the Great Tang Empire, such verification was also a process of reverse-engineering and learning.

Within the Great Tang Empire, many cutting-edge technologies emerged from moments of inspiration by His Majesty The Emperor. Although in retrospect, The Emperor’s ideas were proven correct, they still required technicians to test their feasibility.

Conversely, having designs alone was far from sufficient. Technicians of the Great Tang needed to fully grasp these technologies themselves, enabling them to have their own ideas in more situations.

This reverse learning process was vital; in fact, the learning process was rather intricate, and the pace at which technicians of the Great Tang came into contact with new technologies was not much faster than their counterparts in other countries.

To put it plainly, technicians of the Great Tang could not rapidly master new technological developments; the overall direction of progress still needed Emperor of the Great Tang Empire to point out time and again.

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However, the technical staff of the Great Tang Empire had a clear advantage over those of other empires: they were the fastest to come into contact with new technologies and understand their directions.

Other empire’s engineers often only saw technologies that had been researched by the Great Tang Empire’s personnel for over two years, and they lacked systematic research and higher-intensity learning, making their foresight much weaker and their technologies less likely to come to the forefront.

“Do you really think this little gadget can block the new weapon that Sector 707 is working on? I heard that during tests with the Panther Tank, Sector 707’s new weapon even penetrated the upper armor of the tank,” he said, holding a cup of hot tea and looking at the blueprints and technical documents on his desk, asking his friend beside him.

The friend was eating a stuffed pie, which he had brought from home in the morning and was still warm enough to eat.

Hearing this, he finished his bite and replied, “I’ve heard about that. Sector 707 was pretty happy for a while, and then His Majesty sent over the data related to Explosive Reactive Armor to our sector.”

“If you had told me two months ago to use explosives for defense, I might have laughed and thrown the relevant technical data into the trash can,” said the technician, smiling as he held his cup of hot tea.

“Hahaha! Good thing you didn’t; who knows, that technology might’ve also come from His Majesty,” the pie-eating technician laughed and teased.

A few days ago, their sector had sent a design sample to the weapons testing range, and personnel from Sector 707 once again attacked a Panther Tank equipped with Explosive Reactive Armor with what was termed a man-portable anti-tank weapons system.

The result was surprising; the tank equipped with Explosive Reactive Armor easily withstood the jet of impact from the armor-piercing warhead, which once again placed tank defense a step above anti-tank weapons.

In fact, it proved that thicker armor wasn’t the only path to increasing a tank’s defensive capabilities — the Great Tang Empire had found a shortcut to tank lightweighting.

This also meant that the approach of other countries continually increasing tank armor thickness was completely wrong. Only by using technology to enhance a tank’s level of protection was truly the correct path!

However, with ingenuity comes an equal measure of intelligence. Sector 707 of the Great Tang Empire didn’t give up on their anti-tank weapons development, because apart from the Great Tang Empire, the world’s nations didn’t have anything called Explosive Reactive Armor.

And also, Sector 707 received technical guidance from the Emperor of the Great Tang Empire, immediately thinking of using tandem warheads to solve the problem.

All they needed was a small shape charge warhead to detonate the Explosive Reactive Armor prematurely, then using the main warhead to penetrate the tank’s primary armor.

In a sense, the competition between anti-tank weapons and armor — from the perspective of anti-tank weapons — isn’t this another form of intelligence triumphing?

What they didn’t know was that, in the world Tang Mo travelled from, anti-tank weapons had completely gained the upper hand, and before laser defense weapons technology had fully matured, before concepts like energy shields had emerged, tanks were already unable to withstand the onslaught of anti-tank weapons.

In that era, individual anti-tank weapons could intelligently use vertical strikes to bypass the tanks’ robust horizontal armor, focusing the attack on the tanks’ vulnerable top armor.

At the same time, precision-guided rocket artillery, cruise missiles, and even cheap kamikaze drones all became deadly threats to tanks.

Thus, the battlefield became a perilous place for tanks, and their crew no longer had the sense of safety they once did. In reality, although they had an extra layer of 30mm of top armor compared to the infantry, as targets, their size also increased tenfold.

Because of Tang Mo’s appearance, such anti-tank concepts also appeared earlier, and anti-tank missiles have now become a secret weapon of Tang Country. Facing such weapons are the first generation of post-war main battle tanks like the Type 59 tank.

Moreover, other countries didn’t even have advanced tanks like the Type 59; their tanks didn’t even have gun stabilizing systems, and their armor only just met the defense standard of 100 millimeters of homogeneous steel.

Therefore, their tanks were extremely vulnerable in front of the future weapons systems of the Great Tang Empire infantry, without any guarantee for safety even in normal combat range.

“Hurry up and organize the data. It’s said that there will be a trial, equipping one division first to inspect the effect,” the bell rang for work, and the technician who had finished his hot tea sat back down in his chair and started his day’s work.

The pie-eating technician who was just chatting stuffed the last of his pie in his mouth without time for words and spread out his documents.

Their busy yet fulfilling work began, feeling that their work was very meaningful. As long as they could help one more tank crew member from their country survive on the battlefield, their work was not done in vain.

Outside their office window was the parking lot of their unit, and in the middle of the parking lot stood a towering flagpole. On top of the flagpole fluttered the iron-blooded Dragon Banner, symbolizing the Great Tang Empire.

The work bell echoing in the corridors stopped after a while, marking the start of another ordinary day.

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