Startup of the desalination plant took 20 days to get working at a satisfactory level. It's a fairly simple system, but there were problem points related to how the mechanics team designed the overall layout in places. It was mostly things I wouldn't have thought to describe why I do them differently, but become evident after they're done wrong. For instance, they had put right angles in pipes that were gravity fed from above, which when the first full batch of water was flushed out through the pipe, the momentum of that water blew the pipe out when it hit the right angle.
The pipe blowing out was probably the biggest problem, just because of the amount of concentrated brine that ended up on the ground. I'm sure that'll have some environmental impacts on the nearby soils where it soaked in. I suppose it's a good thing that the facility was planned to be expanded in the future, because I doubt plants will be growing here any time soon. In either case, after twenty days it seemed to be running sufficiently with a few batches completed.
That's a good thing too, because we need about 15 days worth of the salt production from here before we set out with the ship. Our contract for this year is for 650 tons of salt, with the 500 we'll have from storage, the lightstone facility, the salt evaporation greenhouses, and the 150 from here we'll make it. By then, there will only be 35 days left in the year, so we were cutting it a little close, but in actuality, every year is going to be cutting it about that close. That's just the nature of the promised amount of salt.
While I wait for everything to be loaded onto the ship and the journey to begin, I have a task to do. The mining team inside the mountain has breached the surface on their second tunnel. As such, I have a huge amount of tunnel to use tectonic sense down. I've started talking with Zeb about incorporating the mining teams into his leadership as well. The reason being that the mining teams actually get better returns from low level demons with stoneshaping. Essentially, the only place we still have mobile crystal units are in the mines.
While certain other tasks can be useful too, utilizing them for mining until they've reached a certain threshold could be wise, specifically while they're in their lower levels. Specifically, a rare goblin has 3 times the mana capacity at level 100 as they do at level 0. Higher prestiges and evolutions have less of a gap, though it's still noticeable. So I proposed that, while mining team leads would still need to be skilled individuals, the rest can be a rotation of workers from construction teams.
As new low level individuals come about, they can replace the higher level ones working in the mines. Only when they reach a certain amount of specialty or promise in one particular field over another should they then be exempt from the rotation. I myself am unsure exactly where I want the mines to go from here. These side tunnels don't particularly exit in places of value, so building more of them in a similar manner would probably be a waste. I'll think on it some while I'm recovering from tectonic sense checks and see if I can come up with anything.
It took me eleven days to check the tunnel thoroughly with tectonic sense. I can scan a 50 foot radius using tectonic sense by using my whole mana pool each time. While it hurts quite a bit due to the mental strain that much information puts on me, it also means we're less likely to miss any potential resource pockets. By the sixth day, the headaches had reduced to only minor pain during each check, so I was finally able to focus and think a bit while I worked, which I spent thinking about how to expand mining practices.
We found five points of interest along the tunnel that will need to be explored while I'm gone. Depending on the results of that exploration, we might have plenty of work available for hundreds of miners for a few years excavating ore, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that. What I've started to plan out in the case that we don't have results of that quality are three new expansions to the functionality of the tunnels.
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First, two secondary sets of wide tunnels to run along the first pair for the tram system I mentioned previously. This would facilitate travel and good transport through the mountain at a scale well beyond the current levels. Considering how many dozens of carts are going through the tunnels daily to transport salt to the docks, this seems like the most obvious expansion to do. Because the previous two tunnels were offset by a reasonably large margin, these two tunnels would be lined up such that there is only a slight incline and decline with minimal turning.
Second, the central area will be further expanded with a secondary ring around the first area. There will be a handful of connections between the two areas, but they'll be divided by a thick stone wall. The ring itself will also have plenty of supports just to ensure minimal risk of failures. The outer ring is simply meant to further expand the total work area in the center of the mountain. Trams will likely end up needing to travel directly through the central area, which means I'd probably like a station there for both crossing and loading rocks mined from the mountain.
Third, and this is more of a long term project for when there are more workers than available workplaces, I'd like to have a set of stairs spiraling upwards from the central area. By doing that, we could add more vertical stations if we want. In the long term, we could potentially have access to the top of the mountain via an elevator system. While the top of the mountain doesn't have that many uses for us right now, scientifically it provides a lot of opportunities because it sits higher than many of the cloud levels with less atmosphere in the way of viewing space. Plus, periodic stations along the way would open up potential access to mineral deposits higher up should we need them.
I'll pitch these ideas to Zeb before I leave on the salt transport trip, and we'll see what he thinks. I expect a lot of it will be contingent on whether one of those points of interest has mana crystals or not. If we suddenly went from one mining team of 20 individuals to about 100 individuals, we'd need a lot more crystal trays to keep them all working at capacity.
As I sort of expected, while he's amicable to having more individuals doing mining as long as they're the lower level demons, he's skeptical of the idea of trying to expand vertically. As he put it, and rightly so, it'd be better to only worry about making the vertical sections once the lower area is really exhausted. In other words, he'd rather have the miners dig out four more spokes to check for deposits that are likely to benefit us in the near term, rather than aim for a lofty goal of having a path up to the top of the mountain from the inside.
Considering the vertical addition was already the lowest priority, I didn't give any pushback on it. Though I did discuss best practices when the time does come to move vertically. Even at low level after I prestige next, I should be able to get close to 50 feet radius during tectonic sense checks. So, from the top of the previous tunnel to the bottom of a higher up tunnel, there would 100 feet of gap. Realistically though, deposits of value that we've found span a minimum of 20 vertical feet, and usually span quite a bit more because they're at an angle. So practically speaking, any vertical station should be about 150 feet above the previous one to get effective coverage without wasting too much of my time doing tectonic sense checks.
We ended up taking two of the remaining four days before I left discussing tram designs for the tunnel. Rightly, Zeb wanted to make sure the tunnels we dig were large enough for the trams, but not overly large, and the biggest part of that was actually getting the tram design finalized. Compared to the cableways, the tram system should be pretty easy. For starters, the trams will rest on wheels that run along a rail system, so the only weight that the cable will need to handle is the tension of pulling the trams. There are some considerations for the fact that trams on one cable will both be getting pulled up the slight incline to the central area and also declining down away from it on the other side, but the slope is very gentle, and maintaining proper tension on that should be significantly easier than the hanging cable lines.
Ultimately, I decided on a basic tram frame that could be used to build out a carriage for either passengers or goods. It's something like a railcar, though there aren't any coupling devices to holding multiple cars together. The size is a little smaller than a railcar as well, but not by that much. After I finalized the design with Zeb, I made my way over and began doing final checks on the ship before we set out to make our first salt delivery.
