From the early bed crossbows to the heavy individual crossbows of today, Great Zhou could at least be considered experienced in the manufacture of crossbows.
Even so, only twenty-one people, with Zhuang Mengdie at the center, were capable of manufacturing the crossbow's core structure.
For this reason, Zhou Xu had specially arranged the twenty people besides Zhuang Mengdie into a separate group. Their daily work was to constantly polish and manufacture the core mechanisms required for making crossbows.
As for the other components that did not require such high precision, those were left to their apprentices.
Once the apprentices' skills improved enough for them to polish those delicate parts and assemble the core structures, they would officially become full-fledged workers.
After years of hard work, Great Zhou had basically produced enough Three-bow Ballistas and City Defense Crossbows. Their workload could gradually be reduced.
They had even thought this year's work would be a little easier.
Who could have expected that, in the blink of an eye, another Individual Crossbow would be thrown at them?
One had to understand that the smaller and more delicate the parts, the harder they were to polish.
The newly developed Heavy Individual Crossbow was currently the smallest crossbow Great Zhou had ever made. Its parts required even more labor to polish, something they had already felt clearly while watching their minister manufacture the test model.
Even more troublesome was the fact that, considering the nature of the Heavy Individual Crossbow, His Majesty wanted to establish a Crossbow Soldier Unit with an initial planned strength of five hundred men.
That meant they needed at least five hundred Heavy Individual Crossbows! And taking damaged weapons and replacements into account, they would have to make another two or three hundred as spares on top of those five hundred.