How Difficult It is to Forge Artillery Barrels? Liu Shiyang and Zhan Qiankun's artillery achieved remarkable military success during the two World Wars, earning the reputation of "God of War". The ability of artillery to "seal the gods" depends on the barrel. How important is the barrel? The performance parameters of artillery, such as range, accuracy, and service life, are closely related to the quality of the barrel. The forging process of artillery barrel is complex and technically challenging, making it the "ceiling" in the related industrial manufacturing field. At present, only a few countries in the world have the ability to independently forge artillery barrels. Usually, forging a qualified artillery barrel requires going through three levels. One is material selection. The gun barrel not only needs to withstand high-temperature erosion above 3000 ℃ and high-pressure impact of 500-700Mpa, but also meets the needs of continuous and rapid firing on the battlefield, which puts forward high requirements for gun barrel materials. Modern artillery barrel materials generally use special alloy steel, mainly carbon nickel chromium platinum alloy steel, which has good high-temperature resistance, toughness, and strength. Usually, a gun barrel requires several hundred kilograms of alloy steel, and the raw materials for smelting these alloy steels require dozens of tons. After these raw materials are stamped and forged into steel ingots, they are also "pounded" tens of thousands of times by a 30000 ton forging machine to be processed into cylindrical "large iron bars". Next, the non-metallic impurities such as phosphorus and sulfur in the steel can be removed by Electro-slag remelting technology, and finally a thick billet with high density can be made. The second is the process level. After the steel is refined, the next step is to drill holes in the rough billet. The deep hole processing technology used for drilling is a fine art. Improper drilling can affect the accuracy of artillery firing. In order to improve the strength of the gun barrel, self tightening technology is also essential. It can cause plastic deformation of the barrel from the inside out, increasing the pressure bearing capacity of the barrel. After the self tightening process is completed, the inner chamber needs to be precision machined next. For example, when drawing rifling for a rifled gun, the broach advances in a direction parallel to the axis of the barrel, while the barrel rotates around the axis, thus pulling out a rotating rifling. This operation process is completely invisible, and once the rifling deviates by a few micrometers, the entire barrel must be scrapped. The third is to pass the experiment. After the barrel is forged, rigorous large and small live fire tests are also required. The small-scale live fire test mainly tests the basic quality. Although some processing quality problems of the gun barrel can be found, the quantity of ammunition fired during the test is relatively small, making it difficult to identify potential problems; The large-scale live fire test requires the launch of all matched ammunition types, and a comprehensive "physical examination" of gun barrel accuracy, strength, reliability, and other aspects to discover deep-seated processing quality problems. After passing the test level, the barrel can only be assembled and used on the artillery. So, what is the lifespan of a barrel? The lifespan of a gun barrel is actually very short, and the term 'lifespan' here refers to the time the shell stays in the barrel from launch to exit. For example, a shell with a firing rate of 1500 meters per second can "fly" out of a 5-meter long barrel in just 0.003 seconds. If a barrel has a lifespan of only 3 seconds, it can fire at least 1000 shells during its lifetime. From the perspective of the number of shells fired, although the lifespan of this barrel is short, it has been very substantial. So, how to make