Building a pilot plant just for the purposes of testing whether or not the Joule-Thomson effect will be useful for bulk air liquefaction seemed like a little bit of a waste. After all, for projects this size, I end up needing to borrow construction crews to actually get the project done in reasonable time. What I opted to do instead was take a little extra time at the start and plan the facility out to be more modular and reusable. For example, the facility is planned to use the same boiler and steam engine power source that our ships use, but with a small change to allow the boiler heat plates to be removed more easily and moved underground for storage.
In essence, the power source can be turned on or off, and whatever facility is being tested can be built nearby in a large framework building. Initially, that had been what I planned to use the original research facility for, but I hadn't properly planned just how much vertical space I might need for some of these projects. Further, the space has been steadily filled with dozens of Tiberius's various tests and projects. At some point, someone will need to go sort through all of them, if only to make room for more future experiments. That whole building has started to become his own private lab space, but it's to our benefit so I don't plan on changing it any time soon.
The new facility is planned to be built just a bit downhill from the existing military research facility, but outside it's walls because of issues with size. Since it's downhill, it will be built with its own reservoir of fresh water that is fed by the excess freshwater from the other installation. The ship's boiler and steam system is built as a closed loop, so it doesn't actually consume that much freshwater at any given time. As long as the reservoir is big enough, it shouldn't run out of water.
With those plans in place, I left initial setup of the floors and spaces to Zeb, to which I was informed it'd be two months before he could send anyone to work on it. We aren't hard pressed to handle this currently, so it's not a big deal. We have adequate supplies of mana crystal to last us at least that long.
In the five days that I planned out the pilot plant facility, we got more info on the clams. All the nearby clams had moved to fill in the space left by the dead clam. According to one observer, a few grayish masses came out of one clam's opening and dragged it along the seabed. For a few hours after it dragged, they could spot trenches left on the floor where it had moved, but they rapidly filled in with sediment from tidal motion.
The pattern that the nearby clams followed was quite interesting. Deeper clams moved more than shallower clams. Some clams further than just the nearest neighbors also moved. When I compared a before and after map we made, the result looked almost like an elastic web. We removed one clam, and the others proportionately adjusted to fill the remaining space. How exactly the clams knew to move so soon after the explosion is still unknown, but it is fairly obvious that they must be fairly sensitive to something to adjust so quickly. If it was food, I'd actually have expected them to move away since the blast likely wiped out a large amount of plankton in the area. Since they instead moved closer so soon after, it must be something else. My current hypothesis is that the same sensitivity to mana that led them here in the first place is responsible.
That does lead us to one of the better outcome possibilities for us, however. This means that we should be able to just keep blasting clams in the same area, over and over, and form a clam graveyard. I'm not certain on the stability long term of doing so, as the weight from so many leviathans might trigger additional underwater landslides, but after a few landslides, I'd expect the terrain to settle into a more stable configuration. Having most of the clams dead in one area should also make future recovery of their shells more viable as well.
After dealing with that, I headed back to the fluorite mine to continue extraction. Considering the pilot plant is going to use a half of a ship's entire power supply, and that there is the potential that we'll need even more fluorite depending on the next set of results from Tiberius, I have a renewed drive to attempt to extract enough fluorite that regular mining can resume without my assistance.
Two months, two more clams, and another series of mining blasts later, and the time has come for me to return to work on the pilot plant for air liquefaction. The exact time spent was actually 72 days, and I've extracted quite a few tons of fluorite. Unfortunately, we're still no where near cool enough for anyone else to work in there. At the very least, I'm glad that the clam detonations have been going well. They seem to be dying immediately and yielding some experience for individuals on the boat, so they've been filling the boat up with hundreds of individuals to take advantage of the free levels.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
In my downtime, I continued writing out various bits of knowledge as I remembered them, while occasionally taking breaks to improve the design for the pilot plant when inspiration would strike me. I've started to run into a bit of an issue when it comes to copying down knowledge that I remember as well, which has resulted in further reorganization of my list system.
The issue that I've run into is that I'll occasionally remember something from a previously crossed off item. What that has meant in practice is that the whole endeavor is getting too complicated for the record keeping demons to properly handle. In any given batch of new sheets that I bring in, a handful are meant to be placed with old sheets. Further, I'm the only one who can really insert them where they should belong within the internal organization of the older sheets.
Since I was already making paper copies, I at least had a set of the originals on hand to work with. While I still have my original two lists, I now keep a third set of papers which acts as a ledger. Each sheet has it's own topic, and each topic has a ledger where I can mark a date with a count of new pages and a brief description. The copies of sheets that I have each have a ledger with them to indicate the date that changes were added. At some point, I'd like to go in and rewrite the works to make them flow better, and the ledger should make it easier to do so. This increases the work load on the record keepers, as they have to copy the ledger as well. If push comes to shove, I'll hire someone to do this full time.
While I had initially planned to work on the pilot plant, I'd completely forgotten about the facility which produces the stone disks for the new artillery ammo. That facility was the reason for the delay on construction for the pilot plant, so I've been working on finishing out that whole system for 47 days now. We've had another round trip of salt delivery to the mainland in that time. The situation seems to be not great, which is all the more reason to get the electrical firing systems working for ship artillery.
When I say that the situation is not great on the dwarven continent, what I mean is that they're still stuck in their stalemate. More troops arrive from the human continent, but at the same time, more demons are arriving along the front they're fighting on. At the same time, more small boats are setting off from the dwarven continent full of demons, and the elves are dedicating themselves to keeping their own continent from being overrun.
Shasta voiced some amount of concern to our ship's captain about the long term prospects if the tide doesn't shift soon. Demons just reproduce and are combat ready much faster than humanoids. The longer the meat grinder goes on, the worse the chances of success are. Further, if it goes on for too long, there exists the risk of a second demon invasion occurring on another continent, and then all hope would be lost.
There is concern whether or not the humans will be able to build enough ships quickly enough to properly patrol the coasts so that the elves can join in the fight. In theory, just one of our ships would be far more effective than a human ship at the same task. With the higher top speed and better observation tools, it could likely patrol fairly effectively. Our two ships are somewhat spoken for right now, however. One needs to be present so we can use it for clam blasting, and the other needs downtime periodically to refuel and repair.
While having one ship participating periodically might stop some demons from making it to the elven continent, it won't be able to stop them continuously due to being out for repairs. If it's not a continuous patrol, the only benefit it would provide is making the lives easier for the elves, while not being secure enough to actually get them to participate. Since the elves are really my least favorite of the humanoids, I really see no reason to waste our resources on that.
If we had a third ship though, two of them could form a continuous patrol with alternating periods of downtime for refueling and repairs. We've slowed down in our production of a third ship, however, because of the steel depth charges we've been constructing. I'd expect the next ship to launch about 10 months from now. In theory we could shorten our timetables by expanding our basalt to steel production chain as well as our roller facility. That would require additional personnel and months of construction to make happen.
For the right price, however, it'd be possible. If we stopped bombing the clams, we'd be able to finish the next ship in about 7 months I'd estimate. During the next salt run, I'll go to discuss the potential with Kao. I'd guess that Shasta wasn't talking to the captain of the ship about this just because she felt like it. It was more likely that Kao has deemed it necessary that we contribute more, even if some of the other groups haven't come around to the idea.
