I was a little nervous about the teams of dwarves who manually unloaded the artillery pieces using ropes to hoist and lower them onto the dock. The docks creaked quite a lot as each cannon was moved to shore, but it held out. The tests went well, and after five days we set back out towards our isnd, this time minus any dwarves. We ended up seeing an eagle fly past a distant ridge line on one of the days, which was something of a relief. I was a little worried about the current situation with the eagles on the mainnd, so seeing one took a little of that worry away.
The trip back to our isnd was a bit rougher than the trip in, rgely due to uncooperative currents. They actually slowed our travel considerably, enough that the whole trip back took six days despite having almost no cargo. It's somewhat interesting how time seems to move at a different pace depending on what you're doing. We took about 5 days to get in and situated, then 7 days on negotiations and cargo handling, and now another 6 days back to the isnd, meaning our round trip was only 18 days. Those 18 days were so packed full of social interactions and high impact decision making that it feels like we've been gone for months. Perhaps I'm just such an introvert that it felt like it dragged on and on.
In any case, I'm actually gd to be able to work on projects again for a little while. The main thing I'd like to try to make right now is the electrically fired artillery. If that is accomplished, then I'd like to start working on drastically increasing the firing rate out of the artillery, converting it from a slow artillery to a rge autocannon. I'll also need to scope out where we'd want to install mana-powered salt boilers. While they aren't that complicated, they do use a lot of local mana, so we can't just line a bunch of them up. We have to be strategic about their locations and handling. Which brings me to the next problem that I'll need to work on, harvesting from our fluorite deposit.
It's far too hot for anyone else to go in there and harvest due to the increased mana on the isnd now. That leaves me with two options, go in there and mine a little myself using a combination of my thermal regution skill and cryogenic air to mine a little each day, or potentially try to overwhelm the pocket of fluorite, and let it partially melt itself by opening it up to even more of the atmosphere to make it easier to harvest.
I think the second option should probably be saved as a st resort, as I don't even know if it will work. It also has the potential to backfire and make it even harder to harvest the crystals. There is the potential that if I manage to clean the deposit up enough in it's current state that the temperature will come down somewhat.
The first order of business was to meet with Zeb and Zaka to discuss how things went, and what we're doing moving forward. After all the work we went through to make the new artillery shell production line, it was quite disappointing that we really don't need nearly as much production as we have. That said, it's not like we can't redirect it to other uses.
Zeb was honestly the star of the meeting. He had good idea after good idea, making me really wonder what I've been doing until now other than inventing new technology and implementing it poorly. For the most part, Zaka and myself took a back seat at the meeting considering the discussion rgely focused on Zeb's area of expertise.
Zeb first suggested that we use a rge amount of the cryogenic fluid to cool the fluorite mine down just long enough to transport in a rge amount of the smokeless powder and detonate it. The thought process being that it'll break a bunch of the crystals into smaller pieces, reducing their efficiency. It would still be hot in the area, but I'd be able to go in for much shorter periods of time to simply gather up the rubble. We'd then leave it up to others to sort out the fluorite from the broken rock and dirt. While a cave-in or premature detonation might be possible, it's honestly a good option to give it a try.
When we transitioned to discussions about salt, he had another good idea. I'd been thinking that we'd simply build more of the systems we were using at the lightstone facility, somewhere along a coast where the waste brine could be flushed back to the ocean easily and the mana consumption wouldn't be as much of a concern. He suggested instead that we build the facility uphill from the city, and capture the freshwater produced as a byproduct.
Initially, I was skeptical. It is, after all, significantly more work to recapture the steam, and it requires quite a bit more maintenance to handle all of it. He pointed out that, with very little modification, we can already use the boilers at the lightstone facility to just vent the steam to atmosphere to allow those boilers to produce more salt without the tail end of the process being used. That can make up for the extra time it would take to build a rger freshwater capture system.
It isn't a trivial amount of freshwater that would be produced either, considering we talked about making 10 tons of salt a day. That'd be just shy of a gallon per second of water. Considering the lengths we've gone to in the past to increase our freshwater supply, it's quite possibly worth the effort to do that here again. If we're smart about the design, we can even make it retively easy to expand in the future if we want to either produce more salt or fresh water.
Zeb even pointed out that the design at the lightstone facility isn't actually that good for what we want to do, based on the desalination system we have on the ship. I didn't think he'd had much experience with it, but considering he works with the mechanics team, I shouldn't be surprised that he's up to date on it.
Instead, he proposed a three stage process to minimize the amount of fluorite heat crystals necessary while recapturing most of the waste heat. The idea also utilizes some of the useful design features that the basalt to iron production facility uses, taking advantage of the fact we'd be building on a slope. A rge ocean water tank would be built at the top of the facility. There, salt water can flow down through a counterflow heat exchanger to condense the steam being produced by the facility to recover a rge amount of the heat and condense the steam outputs down to freshwater.
That heated ocean water then flows to a temporary holding tank with the same volume as one of two rge boilers meant to concentrate the ocean water down to a brine. That holding tank will have a small fluorite heating element simply meant to keep the charged water a fairly warm temperature. The two rge boilers will be designed to share fluorite heat crystals, that can be moved on rails to be applied to either boiler. That lets either boiler be cleaned occasionally without leaving the heat on.
After being concentrated down to about 1/6th of the original volume, that water will then be flooded down to finisher boilers where the remaining water is boiled off, and salt will be collected. The lightstone facility simply lowers the heat source away from boilers, but these ones will be pnned to share their fluorite between boilers to reduce overall mana consumption. The remaining freshwater will again be condensed and stored to be released over time into the stream supplying the city.
In many ways, it's simir to the lightstone facility, but it utilizes a lot of the design philosophy that was used for the ship. That comes with some downsides, because the more complicated process means more maintenance, but it also reduces overall waste of both materials and mana. By building it closer to the city, it also reduces the amount of fluorite necessary to power it, since the mana concentration is so much higher. There is a somewhat expensive additional cost to this process in the form of building a pipeline that climbs hundreds of feet from the ocean. To do so will require periodic instaltion of pumping stations. While I've made quite a bit of progress on pumps, they aren't that effective yet, so we'll need quite a few to climb that far up the mountain.
Everything considered, Zeb is going to dedicate a few construction teams to work on the facility, and I'll take some time to figure out how many pumping stations we'll actually need. After that, I'll focus on bsting the fluorite mine, then if things go well, I'll move on to electrifying our artillery.
