Trial-Firing the Cannon (Please Vote and Subscribe)

This should have been Chapter 696. I got it wrong a few days ago -_-||, and none of you reminded me.

After finishing the equipment for aiming, the last thing needed was the equipment for firing.

A muzzle-loading smoothbore cannon required at least ten steps from aiming to firing, making the process quite complicated. This was even with a relatively advanced firing method, such as the paper-cartridge technique. If they were still using a little shovel to pour gunpowder into the barrel, being able to fire one shot in three minutes would have been quite an achievement.

Luo Chong naturally would not allow his artillery to be that inefficient. Thus, not only did the hardware of the cannons need to be completed, but the supporting equipment also had to keep up.

The carpenters had been summoned to make new field carriages with wheels. In addition, each cannon carriage had a set of loading and cleaning tools, as well as two water buckets—one with a lid for storing water and another small, open bucket for convenient use.

This was Luo Chong's first time operating the contraption in practice, so he was equally excited, even more so than the tribesmen who had no idea what it was actually useful for. This was a great weapon of mass destruction, after all.

On the eighth day of the eleventh month in the first year of the Han Tribe's Jianyuan era, it was early winter. The sky was somewhat overcast that day, but fortunately, the wind was not strong. Even so, the weather was damp and bitterly cold, and it felt as though a heavy snowfall would arrive before long.

At noon, Luo Chong personally led several thousand people out of the city to watch the cannon trial. Apart from several hundred craftsmen involved in