Finalized Design

Outside the base, the brutal battle continued without end.

Large quantities of complete suits of armor were produced, then continuously taken away by clones emerging from the dormitory buildings, only to be destroyed and discarded either around the base perimeter or along the railway line.

Clone after clone died, yet the clones who followed them onto the battlefield remained fearless, still charging forward without hesitation.

It had been roughly twenty days since the first battle broke out at No. 1 Copper Mine Base.

In those brief twenty days, three of the nine dormitory buildings, each capable of housing fifteen thousand people, had been completely emptied.

This meant that in such a short time, nearly fifty thousand clones had died on the battlefield.

They had not died in vain.

Through their sacrifices, none of the ten Mining Bases or the Main Base had fallen. Not only that, all eleven bases were still operating at full capacity.

At every moment, vast quantities of minerals and resources were transported from the Mining Bases to the Main Base, while equally vast quantities of supplies, equipment, and personnel were sent from the Main Base to the Mining Bases.

It was under these circumstances that the one hundred firearms testing teams finally made a breakthrough.

At that moment, the first finished firearm was held by a clone, aimed at a target roughly a hundred meters away.

He pulled the trigger. With a bang, a bullet flew forward at several hundred meters per second, reaching the vicinity of the target in the next instant.

But it did not hit. It missed the target.

A clear dent was left in the wall beside it.

"At this stage, accuracy isn't important. Power and rate of fire are what matter. Missed the target? That's fine."

Li Qingsong had no intention of playing precision sniping games with the monster birds.

What was his strength? Industrial Capacity! Coordinated cooperation!

Since that was the case, he should produce tens or even hundreds of thousands of guns as quickly as possible, manufacture hundreds of millions or billions of bullets, then unleash them all like a raging storm.

What was there to fear about poor accuracy? If hundreds of thousands of bullets were fired in a single volley, did accuracy even matter?

However...

To achieve that effect, the gun currently in his hands was still inadequate.

This firearm somewhat resembled the pistols Li Qingsong had seen in human films and television dramas. Its body was only a dozen-odd centimeters long, with a barrel, a grip, and a trigger in the middle.

After studying it for so long, the more than one thousand clones had finally discovered that there had indeed been a reason why the human world chose this shape for pistols.

Because this structure was the most reasonable one.

That was true in terms of the structure of human hands, ease of handling, firing rate, magazine capacity, firepower, and more.

However, the internal structure of the pistol Li Qingsong had produced was likely different from those made in the human world.

It did not use the firing mechanism of modern pistols, where a hammer struck the bullet. It was actually a Flintlock Gun.

A piece of flint had been specially installed inside. Pulling the trigger caused the flint to strike and produce sparks, igniting the primer and firing the bullet.

Its magazine held ten rounds. Each pull of the trigger fired only one bullet, and it could not fire automatically.

"My current industrial production capacity is limited. I can't waste precious productive capacity on this kind of firearm. No, it still needs improvement!

"Using flint to make sparks and ignite the primer is too inefficient. It can't fire automatically either, and its firing rate is too slow. How can it be improved?

"I vaguely remember hearing something about hammers and firing pins, but what exactly are hammers and firing pins? What kind of structures are they? How are they used?"

Not only did the ignition mechanism need improvement, but the bullets also needed further optimization.

The current bullets were far too weak. They probably could not inflict sufficient damage on the monster birds' hard bodies. He had to find a way to increase their power.

Automatic fire also had to be improved.

What use was firing one bullet every few seconds?

Magazine capacity needed to be increased as well. He was not asking to create the belt-fed machine guns he had seen in films and television, the kind that could fire dozens of bullets per second. He only wanted ten rounds per second. If ten was impossible, five would do. That was not too much to ask, was it?

Controlling the minds of those thousand-odd researcher clones, Li Qingsong sank into deep thought. As he thought, he began testing all kinds of optimized replacement designs based on the current flintlock pistol.

At that moment, though only a little over a thousand minds were working on the problem, what supported their thoughts was all the knowledge Li Qingsong had accumulated and developed over the past several decades while building a complete Industrial System from nothing—constructing Steel Factories, Chemical Factories, foundries, power plants, Planting Bases, dormitory buildings, massive factory structures, and more.

Even an ordinary clone tasked with twisting rebar would, over a long period of work, always develop a few techniques for twisting rebar and gain his own understanding of the material.

That understanding would likewise become part of Li Qingsong's knowledge reserves.

The combined knowledge reserves of countless clones formed an enormous, all-encompassing database.

The thoughts of those thousand-odd clones were now proceeding on the foundation of that database.

Under these circumstances, the firearms Li Qingsong produced grew longer and longer, their magazines larger and larger, while the bullets became rounder and rounder, increasingly resembling the bullets he had once seen in films and television dramas.

Of course, in the past, he had merely seen them and forgotten them. Now, however, Li Qingsong had thoroughly and completely understood why bullets had to take that shape and what characteristics bullets of that shape possessed.

Thus, after another two of the nine dormitory buildings had been emptied and roughly seventy thousand clones had died on the battlefield, the first firearm meeting Li Qingsong's requirements—high firing rate, large magazine capacity, and capable of automatic fire—was finally produced in the laboratory.

It had a huge magazine, twenty centimeters long and weighing around three kilograms, with a capacity of eighty bullets.

Including the magazine, the entire firearm weighed around ten kilograms.

With three spare magazines included, the total mass reached nineteen kilograms.

On Earth, a firearm this heavy might have no practical combat value. But this was not Earth. This was Luoshen Star, where gravity was only eight percent of Earth's!

A mass of nineteen kilograms here weighed only one and a half kilograms!

At that moment, the clone carried the enormous firearm to the shooting range.

He pulled the trigger. Bang bang bang bang bang! The muzzle immediately spat out bullets at a rate of four per second, emptying the entire magazine in just over twenty seconds.

He casually removed the magazine, inserted a new one, and pulled the trigger again. Another eighty bullets were fired.

"This is the one!"

Li Qingsong immediately made his decision. "Begin mass production at once!"