There had been a period when Shen Cong's vision for Vajra 2.0 included automated remote weapon stations for perimeter defense. That idea was gone now.

As evolved beasts kept evolving, conventional firearms had lost most of their practical value.

During the Violent Ape King assault, the Provincial Garrison had fired artillery and incendiary rounds continuously — and still couldn't kill it. In the end it had taken Shen Cong's hands. Activity had upended a lot of assumptions about physical force.

Firearms delivered more kinetic energy than crossbows, on paper. But a crossbow loaded with bone-gold arrows outperformed a rifle firing standard ammunition every time.

Bone-gold had become the definitive weapons material.

What firearms desperately needed now was bone-gold ammunition. Without it, their stopping power against anything serious was limited. Anhui Province was inland — its garrison had always been reserve and second-line forces, never well-resourced in research and development. The apocalypse had made that worse. The Research Institute currently being assembled could only realistically develop bone-gold rounds for handguns, rifles, and machine guns.

So when it came to vehicle-mounted weapons, what Shen Cong wanted most was a rotary cannon.

A Gatling-principle rotary cannon fed with bone-gold rounds would be a devastating platform. The problem was that it wasn't viable yet — a rotary cannon burned through thousands of rounds per minute, and even with every person in camp manufacturing ammunition full time, it would run dry in minutes.

Still: one howitzer, two rotary cannons. That was what he wanted mounted. Even if they sat empty for now, once the ammunition stockpile was deep enough, they'd become exactly what he needed them to be.

For the remaining vehicle-mounted weaponry, the answer was ballistae — large-format bolt throwers.

At nine-bull strength, drawing a ton of force was nothing. He could manage a heavy bow or crossbow rated at twenty to thirty dan without straining. A twenty-dan heavy crossbow mounted on the roof would hit with impact comparable to a howitzer shell — and with bone-gold bolts loaded, it would be an instant-kill platform against anything short of a Super-heavyweight.

With Vajra growing…