Barbed Wire and the Gatling
Before Hwiyeom ever left the Dang Family, he had already taken for granted that on this trip to Beijing he would lay a card on the table for the Emperor—something called black powder.
Hadn’t black powder itself been conceived from the start as a kind of sleight of hand?
He could already produce smokeless powder and dynamite; given access to coking coal, he could develop TNT if he truly wanted to. Handing over something as modest as black powder cost him nothing.
But if he looked too willing to give everything away, the Emperor would grow suspicious. So Hwiyeom made a show of clinging obsessively to a monopoly on black-powder manufacture.
The Emperor would grant that monopoly only after calculating that even if the Dang Family kept the secret of powder-making to itself, the imperial armies could still crush them without difficulty.
Hwiyeom had no intention of tolerating a state of affairs in which the Emperor could erase the Dang Family whenever he chose.
In the worst case, he was even prepared to fortify the Bashu region—blessed with natural defenses and resources—and raise an independent kingdom free of the Gyeong Dynasty.
And for that, he needed powder weapons capable of holding a strongpoint against massed numbers.
Strongpoint defense weapons.
The first image that came to mind was the nightmare of the World Wars, that human ketchup-maker: coiled barbed wire paired with machine-gun nests. But for now, that combination was impossible to realize.
Paper cartridges simply did not lend themselves to magazine-fed automatic rifles.
No matter how thick and stiff the paper, no matter how thoroughly it was soaked in wax, paper was still paper. Loading single rounds into a breechloader was fine; stuff those same cartridges into a magazine and they crumpled, jammed, and choked the action.
Anyone who had ever served would know—ramming rounds into a magazine took more finger strength than people expected. A paper cartridge barely tougher than a cardboard tube was never going to survive that pressure.
Make the paper thicker and stronger, and you reduced the powder charge inside, and with it the power.
Wrestling with the problem, Hwiyeom dug through his vast store of weapons knowledge and found the answer.
The introduction of the Gatling gun.
Richard Jordan Gatling’s 1861 design—the first practical hand-cranked machine gun of the modern era. The earliest model poured out bullets when the gunner seized a handle and cranked it round and round.
A Gatling did not feed from a magazine of discrete cartridges. Instead, rounds linked on a belt were stacked in a feed box; when the gunner turned the crank, the belt was drawn in, each attached round chambered and fired in turn.
For strongpoint defense, it was perfect.
The drawback was that you could not sling it like a semiautomatic and carry it around—but at the present stage of development there were already mountains to climb just getting this far.
Above all, the design could be made to work with paper cartridges.
That was why, when Hwiyeom left for Beijing, he handed Dang Unhwa the concept and a rough set of plans and put him in charge of the project.
Dang Unhwa nearly leapt for joy at the long-awaited gift—then immediately realized that this spectacularly fiery toy was something he could never develop alone, and set about harassing the Metallurgy Department without delay.
“Chief! You and I are doing a job together!”
Subjected to Unhwa’s ardent courtship, the head of Metallurgy smiled with genuine warmth.
“Go eat a whole pile of dried shit,” he said, and cut him off cold.
“Why?! For what reason! This is new weapons development! Why refuse work this much fun!”
“Fun, my ass. People have to live like people for once!”
Even so, Han Cheol, chief of the Metallurgy Department, could not refuse Unhwa’s relentless advances forever.
After all, Dang Unhwa was the Family Head’s own uncle, and—whatever controversies clung to him—he was still the foremost authority in the Dang Family when it came to explosives and weapons development.
Metallurgy would keep needing Unhwa’s help on weapons, especially anything that used explosives (firearms and the like). Making an enemy of him was out of the question.
But—
“How the hell am I supposed to invent a lathe that mass-produces this damned coiled barbed wire!”
—Metallurgy’s homework did not stop there, and Han Cheol was on the verge of losing his mind.
To begin with, “wire” itself was harder to make than most people imagined.
Drawing thin, long, springy iron was already advanced technique; asking for a machine that could automatically spit out the kind of wire craftsmen hammered by hand felt like a bad joke.
But as always, Hwiyeom had simply flung a rough concept at them, laid down an approximate drawing, and said, There’s something like this—tinker with it and improve it, and left them the assignment.
And the truly infuriating part was that looking at those drawings, it did not seem entirely impossible.
“If you’re going to do it this way, just give us a proper set of plans from the start!”
Han Cheol already knew in his bones that Hwiyeom deliberately forced trial and error in order to raise the smiths’ level.
“Ugh… No choice. One step at a time.”
Using the drawings Hwiyeom had given him, he set about designing a machine that could produce wire automatically.
The principle was roughly this.
Molten iron was poured into a long oval mold. Once it had cooled just enough to become elastic, it was taken out of the mold. Two long steel rods were fitted into either side of a long loop and drawn hard left and right; the loop was then hooked over a thick central steel bar and half-turned, overlapping again and again.
The process used a steam engine whose know-how had been won while building locomotive engines. Instead of a cylinder being driven by steam pressure to turn an axle, the rotating shaft linked to the steel rods spun round and round.
Like a skilled cook pulling hand-made noodles, or spinning honey taffy dough around wooden chopsticks, the hot iron stretched thinner and longer until at last it became a wire coil wound onto the steel bar—a spool of steel thread.
Of course, the drawings let them infer the method of manufacture, but countless trials were still required.
Machines that refused to run properly after careful assembly were only one problem. The right temperature at which to begin forming the cooling metal; how far to draw it; how to keep the wire from snapping as it stretched—the issues piled up like mountains.
But in original history, people had eventually found the way. Knowing the general direction already, their trial and error could only shrink.
“This snaps less with wrought iron than with Flawless Steel, doesn’t it?”
“Won’t wrought iron be too weak?”
“So what? Bare hands still can’t break it, and if a martial artist hits it with a sword it snaps either way. Nobody asked us for an obstacle that never breaks.”
Naturally, the value of coiled barbed wire did not lie in “unbreakable toughness.” It lay in buying time—in making men and horses hesitate even for a moment before it.
Hwiyeom had stressed that point when he made the demand, so the craftsmen could focus on producing more disposable wire instead of chasing pointless durability.
What remained was turning those wire coils into spiked barbed strand, studded like a rose thicket with sharp points.
That part could not be automated by machine no matter what they tried.
Weaving short lengths of wire—cut sharp at both ends—into the main strand was simply too delicate a job for the crude early steam engines.
But, as always, Hwiyeom had an answer for that as well, and it was written in the instruction sheet.
Use people. Do it by hand.
Yes—when you spent every day trying to automate everything, it was easy to forget that this continent had always been the homeland of human-wave tactics.
Even in the modern age it solved most processes with sheer numbers of heads; there was no reason it could not crank out a little barbed wire.
Laborers sat on either side of the wire-coil lathes with cold-iron shears (chained to the lathes so they could not walk off) and baskets full of scrap wire left over from coil-making, chopped into short lengths. One by one they twisted the short pieces into the main wire until, at last, they had barbed strand.
The finished barbed wire was tied at the end to a core cut from a log and rolled up around it. Unroll it, and you had coiled barbed wire wound to the thickness of the log core.
Having finally cleared the coiled-barbed-wire assignment, the Metallurgy Department joined forces in earnest with the Innovation Hall to develop the Gatling gun.
One amusing side effect: in the course of developing the wire, Metallurgy’s skill at making springs improved by leaps and bounds.
From bolt return and recovery onward, automatic weapons used springs in quite a few places; once they could produce good elastic springs, development of the Gatling accelerated as well.
Compared with the wire-drawing machine, Hwiyeom knew the Gatling’s structure in greater detail, so the plans were more precise.
The problems were linking paper cartridges into the belt needed for automatic feed—and the fact that paper cartridges were far more vulnerable than metal ones to cook-off when chamber and barrel heated during sustained fire.
Once the chamber grew hot, the beeswax wrapping the paper cartridge melted; the round lost its shape, went soft and limp, and in the worst case the cartridge cooked off before the primer was even struck. Flame could flash back into the ammunition box and set off a catastrophic chain of explosions.
Hwiyeom had noted the problem on the drawings and dumped it on them with a cheerful I don’t have a clear fix for this part either—work it out on the ground, so Han Cheol and Dang Unhwa had to wrap their heads in cloth and research it themselves.
They could not stop the chamber from heating, so the only path left was improving the paper cartridge itself.
In the end, do we have no choice but to make metal cases?
Unhwa had stumbled onto the right answer without realizing it—but he did not trust that it was the answer.
Instead, with his characteristic zeal, he burned through countless nights until he collapsed from exhaustion.
Leaning against the window frame of an Innovation Hall laboratory, limp as laundry left out to dry, he was taking a blank-eyed rest when he happened to notice a toad in the blazing sun smearing mud all over its body.
“…Why is that thing plastering itself with filthy mud like that?”
He muttered it without thinking. A researcher of the direct line who was passing by answered.
“To regulate body temperature.”
“…Body temperature?”
“Yes.”
The man was Unhwa’s younger cousin, a direct-line Dang who had belonged to the Poison Hall before coming to the Innovation Hall.
“When I was still in the Poison Hall I researched poison toads, so I know. Toads are cold-blooded—their temperature isn’t constant the way a person’s is. That’s how they regulate it. Cover the body in mud and it seems to block the heat of the sun.”
“That’s it!”
Unhwa shot to his feet, seized the researcher’s hands, and shouted.
“Chang-u! You’re the best! Thank you! You’re incredible!”
Then he bolted back into the lab. The researcher stared blankly after him and sighed.
“It’s Chang-uk, not Chang-u. Can’t even remember his own cousin’s name, that Laughing Explosive Dragon.”
Inspired by his cousin Dang Chang-uk’s single remark, Unhwa tried thermal insulation by plastering a lime-and-mud compound over the beeswax on the outside of the paper cartridge, then coating it with beeswax again.
It proved extremely effective.
“We’ve got it! Even after a thousand rounds the ammo box doesn’t explode! Uwahahahahaha!! We did it! We really did it!”
And so, around the time the first Gatling gun in the martial world was completed, Hwiyeom at last finished every item of business in Beijing and returned to the Dang Family.
Of course, while Hwiyeom was on the road home, Dang Su-jeong also had the chance to finish field-testing a pepperbox revolver that used paper cartridges and springs.
—Tatatatang!!—
“Ghk—aaargh!!”
Across the vast Central Plains, traveling upstream by river was slow, so the return journey was made overland by carriage.
And wherever the land belonged to no sect and the yamen’s watch was thin, bandits inevitably appeared.
With nearly four hundred escorts from the Dokwadae and the Sama-se, ordinary bandit packs would not even dare approach—so at Dang Su-jeong’s demand, Hwiyeom deliberately ordered that escort force to follow slowly about ten li behind, and only after that careful baiting of the bandits could they finally gather live combat data.
The results were glowing.
“It’s so much more convenient!”
“Comparing it to the old Hagyeongchong, where you had to ram powder and light a fuse, is almost insulting—and even against a gun that fires on Pokdok, the power doesn’t lag far behind.”
“The problems are still the smoke and smell, and reloading, I suppose?”
“The smoke on ignition blocks your vision too much, and if you fire from inside the sleeve, the hot gas comes back up the cuff and feels like it’ll burn your forearm.”
“Compared with packing powder the old way, you just drop in a paper cartridge and you’re loaded, so it’s easy—but in the middle of a real fight you still have to pull the cylinder, stuff in rounds, and seat it again before you can shoot. Too much hassle.”
“Feels like I’ll need several preloaded Hagyeongchongs and cycle through them.”
As expected—unless you could swap magazines, it was a bit awkward as a martial artist’s weapon.
But—
“Still, if you think of it as a bow, you can’t exactly carry a quiver with hundreds of arrows, can you? Usually a dozen-odd, a few dozen at most. Carry several preloaded Hagyeongchongs and it doesn’t look shabby next to that. When the bullets run out, you switch to other hidden weapons.”
Dang Su-jeong was thoroughly satisfied.
Hwiyeom, however, could not be satisfied yet; he was already thinking about other kinds of firearms.
Once we’re back, finish smokeless powder, then look into producing metal cartridge cases. And the Gatling… keep it under the strictest secrecy for now.
It was a thought that, had Dang Unhwa heard it after wringing his brains dry to create a working paper-cartridge machine gun, might have led him to turn Hwiyeom into a beehive with his own invention—yet Hwiyeom entertained it with perfect calm.
Can’t be helped. The Gatling is a strongpoint weapon, but martial artists could sling it Rambo-style and hose people down. If only we used it, fine—but the moment it falls into the Emperor’s hands, we might be subordinate to him forever.
A contradiction, if you liked.
For the Sichuan Dang Family to stand tall even under the Emperor’s threat, it needed weapons that could suppress imperial armies—in other words, the deployment of mass-killing weapons and strongpoint defenses was essential.
But the instant such weapons passed into the Emperor’s hands, they would become a force that bound not only the Dang Family but the entire martial world.
Therefore—
At least until the Dang Family develops weapons that keep us several generations ahead… seal things like the Gatling, and instead…
Hwiyeom murmured.
“We’ll need a strongpoint weapon to show the Emperor—something fit to become the Emperor’s club. And, in total secrecy, a place to develop weapons that belong only to our family.”
It was the moment a new secret was conceived within the Sichuan Dang Family.