Extreme Cold Era: Shelter Don't Keep Waste

While Perfikot was busy developing the Godslaying Armor, the two teams of Steam Knights she dispatched had already taken the train, arriving at the New Continent colony alongside two accompanying infantry battalions.

Due to Kallen strictly following Perfikot's instructions, the range affected by the rebellion was quite extensive, impacting numerous cities.

However, overall, in this operation, Kallen and her group still lacked sufficient meticulousness and organization.

In the cities she could influence, everything operated according to the methods Perfikot taught her, using this strike and uprising to train a truly armed force as much as possible.

Simultaneously, Kallen also used this opportunity to purify her ranks, removing those with unstable wills and opportunists from her team.

As for the struggle with the colonial authorities, Kallen tried to follow the strategies Perfikot devised for her, avoiding direct combat as much as possible, while frequently employing ambushes behind enemy lines, disrupting supplies, etc., preserving her own forces while striking at the enemy.

For this reason, the area Kallen could effectively control saw rapid growth.

Moreover, before the uprising, Kallen openly revealed her identity to her brother and successfully invited him to assist her, allowing her team to quickly shed the state of being scattered soldiers.

Although their activities still mainly resembled guerrilla operations, the team itself had gradually been honed to resemble a proper army.

Although Kallen's brother felt angry and helpless about his sister achieving such a remarkable feat without a word, he couldn't resist her plea to join the Workers' Federation and helped Kallen train these workers.

As one of the few genuinely skilled military talents within the Workers' Federation, the booklet Perfikot gave to Kallen naturally reached her brother's hands.

This booklet contained not much content, mainly about how to cultivate discipline in a team, and how to conduct asymmetric warfare in a situation where the enemy is strong and we are weak.

Even though the content Perfikot mentioned in the booklet wasn't much, it was enough to astonish Kallen's brother, whose understanding still lingered in the era of lineup shooting tactics, with its military thought.

As a legit officer, he knew the Imperial army had now rearmed with new weapons.

Compared to the original flintlock and matchlock guns, the new rifles using cartridge bullets and copper-cased bullets had much faster firing and reloading speeds, not to mention the rapidly improved accuracy and range due to rifling.

Lineup shooting was gradually becoming unsuitable for armies now equipped with new weapons.

However, the military had not yet formed new tactical thoughts, as the new rifles had appeared too recently and had already iterated twice.

One should know, before Perfikot introduced the new rifles, the Empire's main weapons were still front-loading flintlock and matchlock guns, requiring gunpowder to be poured into the muzzle, followed by inserting the projectile, and ignited by a match or flint.

Even though the development of Imperial industry had led to widespread rearming with flintlock guns, the front-loading method still determined the low firing efficiency of these muskets.

Even skilled veterans in the army, firing three shots in a minute was already a very fast speed.

However, the cartridge ammunition and needle-fired breechloader presented by Perfikot immediately increased the rifle's firing speed several folds.

The cartridge ammunition had a fixed charge, with the whole bullet completely wrapped; using it only required pulling back the bolt to insert the bullet, closing the bolt, pulling the trigger, and the firing pin piercing through the paper shell to ignite the primer and propellant, and the bullet would be fired.

Compared to the traditional loading method of pouring gunpowder into the barrel and ramming it before inserting the bullet, this was undoubtedly much faster.

So, with a skilled veteran, the firing speed of the new needle-fired breechloader could even reach a dozen shots per minute, boosting firing speed by three to five times!

And most crucially, the breechloader only required pulling back the bolt to insert the bullet into the chamber, completely skipping the need to stand the gun upright as with front-loaded guns! This made prone or crouched shooting possible!

One should know, while front-loading to avoid spilling gunpowder among other reasons, it was impossible to load prone, and front-loaded guns couldn't be loaded horizontally.

Thus, the battlefield lineup shooting, which seems quite silly to later generations, originated from weapon constraints.

In fact, because of limited weaponry, military commanders of that era could only adopt such foolish tactics, ordering soldiers to line up and advance under enemy fire to unleash precise volleys from a close enough distance.

But the breech-loaded needle-fired rifle had none of these flaws! Furthermore, it had a line-rifled needle and conically-shaped bullets provided more stable trajectories and accurate hits, enabling soldiers to fire quite precisely from a prone position.

This naturally laid a foundation for guerrilla and ambush warfare, allowing Kallen's team to launch attacks from unimaginable places.

Rather than standing face to face in open fields lining up for volley fire.

As for where those breech-loaded needle-fired rifles in Kallen's team came from?

This invention was by Perfikot, who even had machine guns capable of firing copper-cased bullets. Was it hard for Kallen to get the design schematics for breech-loaded needle guns from her?

Moreover, the Pignes Castle where Kallen was based had a munitions factory capable of producing firearms and other weapons, making it relatively easy for gunsmiths to assemble a batch of breech-loaded needle rifles.

Initially, it might have been slow, producing rifles one by one, but as they gained some armament and seized control of the city through worker uprisings, they could rapidly ramp up production to source more weapons.

Previously, without orders and due to backward production techniques and processes, Pignes Castle's munitions factory didn't have much business.

But now, working towards their future, the factory workers exhibited great enthusiasm, voluntarily working overtime late into the night almost every day!

All in hopes of producing an additional rifle to arm more comrades against the armies of the capitalists and nobles.

Under such circumstances, Kallen's team swelled into a major threat that caused immense headaches to the colonial authorities in the New Continent.

For this reason, when the two teams of Steam Knights dispatched by Perfikot arrived at the New Continent colony, the Governor immediately mobilized an infantry division to coordinate with them in launching an offensive towards Pignes Castle where Kallen was located.