Lelouch’s first stop after returning home was Thuringia, to seek out the Bergmann Company. This was not a random choice.
Because he knew that, historically, this was the very company that had made enormous contributions to the German army’s project of converting heavy machine guns into light machine guns, and later achieved considerable success in the field of submachine guns.
Lelouch wanted to organize Storm Assault Troops, and light automatic firepower was a key point he absolutely could not avoid.
Moreover, among the several projects Lelouch intended to launch this time, these were also the most difficult and the slowest to show results, so naturally they had to be dealt with first.
“Captain Lelouch, Captain Immelmann, you two are truly young and promising. You’re both only in your early twenties, aren’t you? Yet you’re already captains. You’re bound to become generals in the future.”
The owner, Emil Bergmann, exchanged pleasantries with great courtesy, and invited the two of them to sit in the back seat of a Benz sedan, while he himself took the front passenger seat.
After getting into the car, Lelouch also came straight to the point, politely: “Mr. Bergmann, you really are most warm-hearted. No wonder His Grace the Duke told me that after returning home, my first stop should be to come to you.
“I’m afraid I’ll be troubling you over the next few days. The Sixth Army has certain needs in terms of armaments, and we’ll have to count on Bergmann Company’s strong support.
“But please rest assured—as long as you can produce what His Grace requires, future orders and profits will absolutely not be a problem.”
Bergmann said, “It is only right to serve the Empire. Shall I take you first to where you’ll be staying?”
Lelouch glanced at his watch. He had taken a six-hour flight early that morning, and it was only just past noon. “Captain Immelmann has flown for six hours; he needs rest. I slept enough on the plane. After lunch, let’s discuss proper business first.”
Bergmann could not help but admire Lelouch’s dedication. He made a temporary adjustment and arranged for the company’s key technical personnel to attend the welcome luncheon as well.
Demania was a culinary wasteland, and no one paid much attention to food and drink, so the luncheon was very simple and was held in the company cafeteria. They merely added a few dishes specially for the honored guests—things like oven-baked pork knuckle and steak tartare.
On such an occasion, the main point was still to take the opportunity to get to know people and discuss proper business.
Lelouch very heartily finished an entire baked pork knuckle by himself, and at the dining table he also became acquainted with two well-known designers.
“This is our company’s technical director, Louis Schmeisser. And this is the famous designer, Hugo Schmeisser.”
“A pleasure.” As Lelouch wiped his hands, he raised his glass and clinked glasses with the two of them in turn.
After brief contact, Lelouch could also see that this company had a very strong family-run atmosphere, with a typical authoritarian decision-making style.
The owner, Emil Bergmann, was the nephew of the first-generation founder, Theodor Bergmann.
Even in the technical field, the final say belonged to two designers both surnamed Schmeisser.
Historically, the elder Schmeisser—Louis Schmeisser—would be forced to retire in 1916 due to age and illness, after which his son Hugo Schmeisser would inherit his position, and then go on to create the MP18 submachine gun.
Even the person in charge of a technical post could “inherit” the role. In later generations of scientific research enterprises, this would be simply unimaginable, but in early-twentieth-century Demania, it was very common.
Mauser, Siemens, Porsche—many families had fathers and sons, even grandfathers and grandsons, who were all technical giants.
Lelouch had no time to slowly lay the groundwork, so after the toasts, he steered the topic toward automatic light weapons:
“I’ve heard that since the outbreak of the war, your company has been studying the issue of lightening our nation’s automatic weapons. May I ask what the latest progress has been?”
Because in this era, the new term “submachine gun” did not yet exist—the first submachine gun in history would only be produced by an Italian a year and a half later—Lelouch could only use other terms in discussion.
In terms of lightening automatic firepower, the Demanian army had indeed progressed rather slowly at the beginning.
Their MG08 heavy machine gun was an exceptionally fine and practical machine gun. Its range, accuracy, and reliability were all superior to Britannia’s Vickers heavy machine gun, and its rate of fire was comparable as well.
The only problem was that in terms of the weapon’s overall weight, it was simply far too heavy—the Vickers heavy machine gun weighed only about forty kilograms in total, while the MG08 could reach an astonishing sixty-five kilograms!
There was an eight-kilogram difference in the gun body, while the mount differed by more than twenty kilograms—the MG08 used a four-legged mount that weighed a full thirty-seven kilograms!
Of course, the performance of this four-legged mount was extremely good, giving the MG08 world-leading firing accuracy and stability at the time. No matter how it was fired in sweeping bursts, recoil could hardly be felt at all—but it was just too heavy. As a result, the thing could only be used for positional defense and had no way to be used in mobile offensives.
The German army’s characteristic of “low offense, high defense” could in small part be blamed on the inconvenient mobility of this heavy machine gun.
After the war began, Mauser, DWM’s parent company, DWM’s Karlsruhe subsidiary in the Grand Duchy of Baden, and even the Bergmann Company before him had all tried various lightening modification plans.
Among them, Bergmann Company could be considered the one furthest ahead.
However, it was, after all, only November 1914. Faced with Lelouch’s inquiry, the elder Schmeisser was still somewhat lacking in confidence.
He hurriedly explained, “We have already done our best. The Empire’s previous design philosophy for heavy machine guns was somewhat off course. It pursued absolute firepower during positional defense too much, sacrificing mobility. To reverse that all at once is not so easy.
“We have also considered imitating Denmark’s Madsen light machine gun and building a new light machine gun from scratch, but that would require overturning many things and starting over. It would take at least one or two years. If we only carry out a lightening modification on the MG08, then a few more months should be enough, but I cannot guarantee exactly how light it can become.”
Lelouch said, “There’s no rush. First tell me: in the four months since the war began, how much progress have you made? How far have you lightened the heavy machine gun at present?”
The elder Schmeisser could not recall these technical parameters all at once. After all, he was only two years from retirement, so he gave his son a look.
Hugo Schmeisser hurriedly took over. “Before modification, the MG08 weighs sixty-five kilograms in total, of which twenty-eight kilograms is the gun body and thirty-seven kilograms is the four-legged mount. To convert it into a light machine gun, the four-legged mount can be discarded directly. I have temporarily developed a bipod weighing only three kilograms, which reduces the weight by thirty-four kilograms.
“In addition, I have made some simplifications to the gun body structure that do not affect performance, which should reduce the weight by another three to five kilograms.
“At present I have two plans. One continues to use the water-cooled model as a light machine gun, with a total weight of twenty-seven kilograms.
“The other is an air-cooled model—that is, removing the water-cooling jacket and replacing it with a perforated metal shroud. The total weight can be reduced by another five kilograms, down to twenty-two kilograms. But the structure of the air-cooled ventilation shroud still needs to be tested and optimized slowly. At present we cannot yet guarantee heat-dissipation efficiency—because the Empire has never tried air-cooled machine guns before, everything must be accumulated from scratch, borrowing from foreign products.”
Lelouch stroked his small mustache and pondered carefully for a while.
He knew that, historically, Bergmann Company had indeed helped improve the MG08 heavy machine gun into the MG08/15 light machine gun. But if no one intervened and gave it a push, that thing would still take more than half a year to pass trials, and another year before it could enter production.
A twenty-two-kilogram light machine gun, though two-thirds lighter than a sixty-eight-kilogram one, would still be too exhausting to carry into battle.
Moreover, a machine gunner also had to carry at least one ammunition belt on him. In this era, full-power rifle cartridges were used. The Mauser 7.92 bullet alone weighed fifteen grams, and with the cartridge case and propellant added, the total weight exceeded twenty grams. A belt of two hundred rounds would weigh five kilograms as well.
After thinking for a while, Lelouch proposed two plans: “The matter of further optimizing the barrel heat-dissipation structure can proceed slowly. I have here a set of light-machine-gun development materials previously captured from the Lewis Company in Belgin. You can use them as reference. Perhaps they will help you avoid some detours.”
As soon as Lelouch said this, Hugo Schmeisser’s eyes lit up. Clearly, he also knew of Lewis, his fellow professional in the field.
With his materials, by using them for mutual reference, they should be able to fill in gaps, absorb some of others’ strengths, and improve the speed and quality of their own research and development.
And he did not know that, in the original history, before Belgin fell, the Lewis Company had followed the king and cabinet out of the German encirclement, then gone to Britannia, and in 1915 helped Britannia finalize the Lewis light machine gun.
In this life, as a butterfly effect caused by Lelouch, the German army had ultimately annihilated Belgin’s remaining forces at Ostend and had not allowed the Belgins to break out successfully on any large scale.
Although a high-end weapons designer like Lewis would certainly have had very high priority and had escaped the encirclement together with the king and cabinet aboard an Arethusa-class light cruiser,
in that chaotic wartime environment, many of Lewis’s assistants and peripheral technical personnel would certainly not have been able to secure tickets to flee. Many related technical documents were later captured by the German army as well.
Previously, when Colonel List’s 16th Infantry Regiment fought into Ostend and accepted the Belgin army’s surrender, the other officers had all been busy collecting valuables. Only Lelouch had thought to first sort through whether the Belgins had any military-industrial materials worth seizing, and in the end he really had managed to pick up some overlooked personnel and drawings.
Of course, these things had later all been reported to his superiors. This time, too, it was with His Grace the Duke’s nod of permission that he had brought them here to help Bergmann Company accelerate its research and development. Conveniently, it would also help Lelouch personally earn a few favors and connections.
The feeling was rather like when Liu Bang entered Xianyang: everyone else was busy “helping themselves to wealth and goods, taking women to their beds,” while only Lelouch learned from Xiao He and first went looking for maps, registers, and archives.
As Lelouch spoke, he took several sets of drawings from the documents he carried with him and pushed them in front of Hugo Schmeisser.
Hugo Schmeisser unfolded them and looked them over for a little while, and joy immediately appeared on his face. He then gave Lelouch his feedback: “With these things, the development and production schedule of the MG08/15 can be accelerated by about another half year. It can be finalized at the beginning of next year, and mass-produced in the first half! Moreover, I estimate that compared with a design completed solely by myself, it can be lightened by another two or three kilograms.”
“Finalized at the beginning of next year… that means within two or three months? For a mature weapon, that cycle is acceptable. However, right now I need a small batch of samples that can be obtained within one month and put into actual combat testing. Can that be done?”
Hugo Schmeisser immediately felt troubled. “One month? If we directly use machine tools for machining and do not open stamping dies to reduce the cost, it can be done. But the cost will be relatively high. As R&D samples, that is acceptable.”
Lelouch waved his hand broadly. “You can make it even simpler—I see that the barrel shroud of this air-cooled machine gun in your design still uses a perforated round-tube shape. This sort of thing is too difficult to machine. You might as well make it directly into a bent square tube!
“This is the gun shroud, not the barrel itself. Does it matter whether it’s round or square? As long as it can dissipate heat, isn’t that enough? And as test samples, the heat-dissipation holes punched into the square tube don’t need to be so dense and fine. The holes can be a little larger, and fewer in number.
“You need to ensure that, in complicated combat environments, if mud, sand, or clods of earth get lodged in the heat-dissipation holes, the soldiers can directly stick their fingers in and dig them clean. If you punch the holes so densely that they’re thinner than a finger, they won’t be able to perform simple maintenance on the battlefield.”
Lelouch casually pointed out several improvement points, all aimed at lowering costs, easing production, and increasing battlefield maintainability.
And in fact, these improvement points were not difficult to think of—as a military enthusiast, most people knew that the later MG34 general-purpose machine gun was actually more refined than the MG42, but it was costly, difficult to produce, and difficult to maintain. The MG34 used a precise round-tube air-cooled heat-dissipation barrel shroud, while the MG42 changed it to a square tube that could be made directly by rolling and stamping thin steel plate, greatly reducing production costs.
Historically, the air-cooled barrel shroud of the MG08/15 had originally also been intended as a round tube, but with Lelouch here, there was no need to take these “pursuit of perfection” detours.
Once on the battlefield, there was almost no difference in heat-dissipation efficiency between a square tube and a round tube, while production cost and battlefield maintenance were greatly improved. Wasn’t that wonderful?
After hearing his suggestions, Hugo Schmeisser felt both pleased and worried.
Of course he could see that Captain Lelouch’s method could reduce costs and improve reliability, maintainability, and ease of production…
But for a military-industrial enterprise of the mighty Demanian Empire to no longer strive for ever-greater refinement, and instead pursue cost reduction and efficiency… Hugo Schmeisser still found it somewhat difficult to adjust his thinking.
As for Hugo’s father, the elder Schmeisser, he was even more unable to understand it at all. He immediately retorted, “Captain Lelouch! Bergmann Company has always produced fine goods. How can we make crude and shoddy things just to save money?”