The difficulty of making guns lay mainly in two areas. First, the materials needed sufficient toughness to withstand a certain amount of pressure and heat. Second was the precision of the components—the machining of rifling, for example, and the gaps between parts—all of which affected a firearm's power and service life.
Wang Yan's operation had started out a little too small. If he wanted to make guns, he had to begin with the most fundamental task: producing steel. And to solve the problem of steelmaking, he first had to address a great many other issues—raising furnace temperatures, developing steel alloy formulas, improving the quality of personnel, and so on.
Because not enough time had passed to establish a complete firearms industry chain, and because the manufacturing techniques had yet to be resolved, they had only managed to hand-make fewer than two thousand qualified firearms over all this time.
This time, Wang Yan had made the famed Mosin-Nagant rifle, known as the Water Bead. There was no doubt that it was an excellent firearm design, and it was also an old friend of Wang Yan's—he had used one for a long time in the past.
Still, these thousand-odd rifles could only be considered preliminary products. Their performance could not compare to those produced on a proper industrial assembly line. After all, there were vast gaps in both materials and craftsmanship. They had all sorts of problems and were far from stable.
Even so, they were more than enough to deal with the Taiping Army.
Ultimately, it still came down to the same old question: cost versus benefit.
If the Heavenly Kingdom sent several hundred thousand troops against them, then even if Wang Yan were a divine being reborn, he would have no way to stop them. But for the Heavenly Kingdom,