I took eleven days getting the designs laid out for the lightstone and salt production facility for the construction teams to work on. Unlike the basalt processing facility, a lot of the constructs for this facility are assembling simple components. There are a few notable exceptions, like the mechanism to lower the crystal heating plates away from the boilers, but most of the construction is made of stone, so I have a lot less work I need to do to actually make everything.
As that facility started production, I took three days to also oversee how the large opening hole was coming along for the mana crystals. They''d already completed a couple of the floors, but hadn''t actually tested that the floors could open yet, to allow removing the crystal. So, we tried to open the top layer, and it failed to work. Needless to say, steel and stone weigh a lot, and that hadn''t really be considered to the degree it should have been in the initial design. I''d only really come up with a general idea for how it should work, and the construction team had done it''s best with that idea.
So, I''ve given them a much more detailed plan that should allow this to be opened up more successfully, while also making the whole design somewhat more stable. Rather than two half-moon plates that pull outward, we''ll be going with 16 slices that do the same thing. Additionally each of the slices will have a support beam at the end, which rides along the floor below it. The lowest level floor will then also have the option to remove those support beams after the floor is opened, allowing the crystal to be lifted out. It''ll take the construction team some time to try to implement the new design I gave them, but I expect this one should work.
As both of the previous projects marched forward, I then took a few days to see what solutions Tiberius has come up with for our optimization for lead fluorite rounds. While it seems like he initially started out on the original path we''d worked together on, he seems to have quickly switched over to a tangential research idea.
We had been trying to condense the quartz shielding and the lead fluorite all into one singular shell. Rather than continuing to optimize those shells, Tiberius switched over to a new idea. Rather than waste valuable weight on the shells, he wondered if it would be possible to get the firing area to be devoid of mana, similar to the underground labs.
In practice, however, he''d run into quite a few roadblocks. To make a facility like that, he''d need a lot of different things. Quartz shielding around the bunker to minimize the amount of mana getting into the bunker itself, and a second layer of quartz shielding around the artillery piece to further reduce mana leakage into the chamber. Then, you need a lot of fluorite crystals consuming mana inside and outside the bunker to continually remove all the mana that leaks into the area. Right now, the option for fluorite crystals to consume that mana in a non-detrimental way is limited to lead fluorite itself.
If you make a bunker in that manner, and you fire the shell out from the bunker, it''ll gain mass as it escapes the low mana zone, making more of the overall mass of the projectile useful. Overall, it''d let even smaller sized shells be useful, with the only downside being that you''d need a fairly stationary defensive position, and that the position would be somewhat weaker to enemy attack than a normal bunker, since the bunker itself forms the mana insulation. If a wall were to be punctured by an enemy cannon or artillery, the lead fluorite shells would become worse than regular lead shells.
If we are clever with the design for both shells they could be interchangeable in the artillery piece, so even after the bunker is damaged they could switch to standard shells. It is worth considering as a functional upgrade to our existing defensive bunkers, though retrofitting them would take a considerable amount of time and effort. The main consideration is how much payoff this could potentially provide. With our current quartz shortage, neither the bunker nor shell design is possible. There is an argument to be made about quartz savings over time with a permanent defensive structure. In practice though, I think I''d prefer both options. The portable shells are obviously useful in any sort of mobile unit, whether that be pulled artillery, ship, or a tank.The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Rather than just retrofitting our old bunkers though, I think there is something to be said about building a special artillery firing base a few thousand feet up, which is specially designed with exceptionally large artillery. There, you could easily spot ships further in the distance, and take advantage of the exceptional range you could get from these shells. If we could make the shells large enough, they could also pack explosive material inside while maintaining their mass, allowing for exceptional damage at range, especially when compared to regular cannons or even regular artillery.
After some brief discussions about safety and risk assessment, I left Tiberius to continue working on whatever he wanted. I''m starting to really feel like a manager with how many different projects I''m juggling all at once right now. I have a few ideas of things that I''d like to be looking into, but I don''t know how much I''ll be able to actually do so while I''m managing both the moving floor project and the lightstone facility.
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Every night, I found myself with time to work on my own project. What I''ve started working on for the past month is a large pressure chamber. We''ve essentially produced all the necessary components to try to use the Haber process to produce ammonia, so I''d like to try my hand at that. We have a ready supply of liquid nitrogen, hydrogen gas, heat, and finely ground magnetite. With stone shaping, it''s relatively easy to make a very thick walled chamber that I can reinforce with iron rings to handle the necessary pressures for the process.
In a normal situation, compression of gas to reach the pressures necessary to drive the Haber process would be difficult to achieve without good sealants, but with access to liquid nitrogen, we can actually use the liquid nitrogen as a reservoir of pressure in a chamber that we heat to maintain a set pressure throughout the system until the liquid nitrogen has boiled away, essentially keeping the system at pressure equilibrium.
The process layout requires more than just one chamber, since we''re handling liquid nitrogen as well. There are a lot of details that I''ll have to work out once I''ve got the general system laid out, but I think I can probably get it close enough that I can try to fine tune it over the course of a few months to a year to actually produce a meaningful amount of ammonia.
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In two months time, I''m pretty confident I''m ready to try out a first test of some portions of the process. The component I''ve tinkered with over the past few months has been a system for maintaining relatively constant pressure though the system. The Haber process turns high pressure gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen into liquid ammonia, resulting in a pressure drop with the assistance of a catalyst. High temperatures and pressures must be maintained for the process to proceed, so I needed a way to maintain both nitrogen and hydrogen gas at pressure to the system.
What I''ve settled on is a bit of a complicated process. Hydrogen gas is being produced by copper fluorite, then dried, similar to the other hydrogen production facility. This time, however, it goes into a much larger chamber, designed to be kept at very high pressures. Nitrogen is provided as a liquid, and is used as the pressure regulator for the system. A pressure triggered valve drips liquid nitrogen into a boiler chamber whenever the pressure drops below about 200 atmospheres of pressure, thus keeping pressure at a controlled value. The hydrogen has a similar system of a few valves designed to regulate pressure in the reaction chambers.
Right now, I''m operating everything as small as I possibly can, which isn''t that small at all given I still had to make all the valves. However, the manometers I made to read the pressure in the various chambers indicate that pressure is holding about where I want it to, meaning I can try to move on to the next stage, making the catalyst and attempting to actually react everything.