Empire Rising: Spain

In theory, Spain’s eventual new rifle should be born in the Royal Military Factory or one of the three medium-sized military factories.

After all, whether it’s the various equipment or the reserve of technical personnel, larger military factories are much stronger than smaller ones.

Unless a smaller factory can produce a historically noteworthy weapons expert, they are unlikely to win this weapon bid.

The main focus of Spain’s Defense Department is also on the Royal Military Factory and the three medium-sized military factories, hoping they can develop a standard rifle that meets their requirements.

What Carlo and the Ministry of Defense did not expect was that the first rifle design submitted was not from the Royal Military Factory, but from a little-known medium-sized military factory.

Joe Montoya Mechanical Manufacturing Factory, the name almost made Carlo think it was a tractor factory.

After understanding that the other party was indeed a genuine military factory, Carlo said nothing more and instead focused on the weapon design submitted by the other side.

From the appearance, this rifle is highly similar to Spain’s existing Vitali M1872 rifle, one might even say the former is an improved product of the latter.

The actual testing proved to be like this because of improvements in the sights, the new rifle can indeed shoot more accurately at greater distances than the original Vitali M1872 rifle.

This small-scale factory has made certain internal improvements to the rifle, effectively achieving longer shooting distances and faster shooting speeds.

But the problem is, because it is a product improved by a small factory, the rifle specially manufactured for testing appeared to have a fatal issue of chamber explosion during testing.

The chamber explosion occurred during the testing of the rifle’s lifespan. Fortunately, it was a new gun test, and there was no manual operation at the test time, adopting the method of fixing the rifle and pulling the trigger with a rope to fire.

After firing hundreds of bullets in succession, the chamber explosion suddenly happened, and the rifle turned into a pile of parts of varying sizes along with the explosion.

In an instant, the originally smiling face of the Ministry of Defense officials changed, causing embarrassment to the experts of this small factory.

After this incident, let alone allowing the Defense Department to adopt their design, future cooperation would also be cautiously considered with their factory.

Weapon stability and safety are very important; this is also emphasized and required by the Defense Department during the bidding.

Clearly, no matter how well this factory’s rifle design performed in previous stages, as long as there are issues with stability and safety, the Ministry of Defense will not consider adopting their rifle design.

After all, it’s Spanish soldiers who will be using the rifles, and the Ministry of Defense must consider Spanish soldiers.

Compared to other data of the rifle, what the Defense Department values most is the stability and safety of the rifle.

Carlo also hopes that the rifles produced in Spain are meant to defeat the enemy, not harm Spain’s soldiers in such a bizarre way.

However, considering the small factory did not do this intentionally, Carlo did not blame them but instead asked them to go back and try to improve the rifle as much as possible to extend the lifespan.

If it cannot be improved, it would be better to abandon this rifle design as soon as possible.

After all, this rifle design utilizes the basic shape of the Vitali M1872 rifle, just making some modifications to the internal design, which might be one of the reasons for the chamber explosion.

For a small factory, achieving this step is already quite commendable. After all, step-by-step improvements to a rifle require a lot of cost, especially if everything from external appearance to internal design has to be redone, the research funding and costs required are immeasurable, which is also why Carlo and the Ministry of Defense doubt whether small military factories can manufacture rifles that meet the requirements of the Ministry of Defense.