Diversion River Completed (Spring Festival Mass Update 25)
They found the problem, and immediately began developing an improved model. The main changes were lengthening the wheel hubs and being more careful when drilling the axle holes. The smaller the margin of error, the steadier the cart would be, preventing it from wobbling.
The other issue was increasing the number of spokes. It wasn't that Luo Chong refused to add more spokes; there simply wasn't a lathe yet. Making a few spokes required chopping and carving them with knives and axes, which was far too slow. It had become the slowest step in wheel production, and there was no way to guarantee that every spoke would be identical in quality.
Later, Luo Chong simply gave up on making spokes himself and used the spikes of the Man-eating Tree instead—in other words, he used arrow shafts as spokes.
Those things were rather thin, so they could only improve the wheel's support by increasing their number. He had gotten the inspiration from bicycle wheels. Bicycle spokes were even thinner, about the same as the iron skewers used for roasting meat, but a single bicycle wheel had at least several hundred of those fine spokes. Supporting two people was no problem.
Thus, the second cart was made much faster. Although the number of spokes had increased to thirty-two, they were all natural wooden rods. As long as they were cut to the same length, they could be installed.
Once the speed had improved, the supporting strength became insufficient again. The arrow shafts were only about one centimeter in diameter. They worked fine for an empty cart, but after heavy goods were loaded onto it, the wheel structure looked too flimsy and wasn't sturdy enough. Still, the second cart's wheel hub was a great success. It no longer wobbled at all.
By the time they made the third cart, the wheels had double-layered spokes. The number of spokes on each wheel went directly from thirty-two to sixty-four, arranged in two layers connecting the hub to the outer rim. The result was naturally better than it could possibly be.
The third cart was therefore designated as the mass-production model, and they began making it in batches. They would produce thirty in the first batch. There were definitely dozens of adult laborers now, counting both men and women. These ash carts were designed specifically for hauling earth, and they would surely be used in large numbers in the future, especially when ramming the city walls. Making a few extra now would ensure they were prepared, while also allowing them to accumulate experience for building larger carts.
The spikes of the Man-eating Tree could never be used up. All they had to do was hold a Straw Target and walk one circle beneath the tree, and a great many would fall down.
The carpentry team still consisted of only three people for the time being, but with the most troublesome step—the spokes—removed, their cart-making speed remained quite high. They were supplying the Engineering Team at a rate of three small carts every two days.
With the ash carts, Bronze Shovels, Giant Plows, and two adorable little boys who loved stomping through the mud, the first phase of the Diversion River project was also advancing at breakneck speed. The brickmaking work that had previously slowed progress had also sped up now that they had small carts.
It wasn't until the eighteenth day after work began that a long trench, seven hundred meters long and at least four meters deep, finally appeared before Luo Chong.
Luo Chong was naturally overjoyed. Even he hadn't expected the project to progress so quickly. The tribespeople, however, didn't understand why this long trench had to be dug. Most of them thought Luo Chong was digging up soil to obtain those mud bricks, and had no idea what his true purpose was.
After all, two meters of the Diversion River still remained before it connected with the Small River, and there was no water inside it yet. In most people's eyes, it was merely a deep ditch.
Although the Han Tribe was not short of food at present, the tribespeople still had plenty of complaints about Luo Chong's arrangement—rather than gathering food, they dug earth and made mud bricks every day. The former members of the Baldy Tribe complained the most. They didn't dare oppose him, but that couldn't stop them from gossiping in private.
The people of the Han Tribe naturally obeyed Luo Chong without question. They had long since grown accustomed to the strange things he often did, and no matter what Luo Chong did, it always ended up benefiting the tribe.
Luo Chong himself didn't care in the slightest. He believed that any explanation would be futile. If you told a group of primitive people about farming, could they understand? They only cared whether there was food. They wouldn't think about anything else. If it had nothing to do with food, then fine—conversation over.
That was indeed what had happened. Luo Chong had forcibly dragged this evolutionary process forward. Otherwise, if they had relied on developing agriculture themselves, who knew how many years it would have taken to reach the farming era.
The normal course of human development should have begun with learning how to control and use fire. Eating cooked food promoted brain development. Later, humans mastered stone weapons and learned to cooperate in hunting, causing wild animals to become extinct in great numbers. As edible things grew scarcer and scarcer, humans had no choice but to search for new sources of food.
During this period, humans learned to plant crops or raise animals, thereby obtaining a large and stable supply of food.
Those humans who never learned planting and animal husbandry were submerged in the long river of human evolution. They either starved to death and were eliminated by nature, or were swallowed up by farming tribes and nomadic tribes, becoming members of them in turn.
Luo Chong's tribe was still in an era without stone weapons and without cooperative hunting. When he had first arrived, the Hunting Team had still been chasing prey desperately with wooden clubs.
But that didn't mean the humans here were stupid or incapable of farming and animal husbandry. They had merely been missing an opportunity for reform—and Luo Chong was that opportunity. That was why, in the two-odd months since arriving here, he had directly accelerated their progress to the animal-raising stage. By next year, they would even be planting rice.
Although the tribespeople still didn't understand Luo Chong's methods, they couldn't be blamed. They would understand once they saw the results. By next year, they would all be dressed in rabbit-fur clothing, eating rice, fish, and rabbit meat every day, carrying Bronze Weapons in their hands, and riding donkey—no, antelope-drawn carts when they went out. By then, he refused to believe they would still say anything bad about Luo Chong.
The river-digging work came to a complete stop, and the tribespeople returned to their normal routines. The men continued chopping wood. There was no such thing as too much timber. Whether they built a city, made carts or boats, or put up houses in the future, they would need vast quantities of wood. Freshly cut wet wood couldn't be used immediately; it had to be dried first.
The women went gathering food again and even went fishing. There was nothing Luo Chong could do to stop them. They believed it was fine to have more food than they could finish, but they absolutely could not have too little.
Since they insisted on finding something to do, then let them. At worst, they could eat themselves silly in winter.
The thirty small carts had also been completed. Now Mutong and Wooden Porpoise were, under Luo Chong's guidance, trial-producing a larger cart—one that the antelopes could pull—to prepare for large-scale copper mining in the future.
The new horse cart adopted a European-style four-wheeled design. In both ancient China and the West, early horse carts had used two wheels, with two long shafts in front hanging from the horse's back. The carts were extremely bumpy when moving, and placed a tremendous burden on the livestock.
With a two-wheeled cart, the livestock had to bear not only the force of pulling forward but also the entire weight of the cart. A Four-wheeled Cart was different. Even without a horse, the cart itself could bear the load, while the horse pulling it only needed to provide forward force, directly reducing the burden by more than half.
Furthermore, because the new-style horse cart had to account for load capacity and service life, large quantities of bronze components would be installed in its critical parts.
Speaking of bronze, the ore Luo Chong had brought back this time had already been smelted. They now had more than four hundred jin of copper and tin in reserve, not counting the weight of items that had already been cast. All four hundred-plus jin consisted of copper plates and Silver Plates.
These days, Luo Chong was also making Bronze Alloy and attempting to build a plow for ordinary farmland.
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