After 26 days of testing, I've settled on a general design for the ocean water pump system to get water up to where Zeb has already started work on the desalination facility. The pumps we used on the ship, while effective at what they do, don't need to move water that far vertically. In practice here, that would have meant dozens of pumping facilities. Instead, I'm using a plunger pump to push the water. While I think it'd be possible to do it all in one step, that'd put a lot of stress on the individual pumps and pipes. Instead, we're going to take it two steps to get it to the necessary height.
I tinkered with the design until I got the pumps to the point where they had the necessary flow rates, which thankfully was able to be powered by a single mana engine for each. I've decided to go with a flow rate a little higher than the 1 gallon per second target with the idea being that the pumps can be de-powered for periods of time depending on how full the storage tank is at the facility. In any case, I've given the design specs over to Zeb and the mechanics team to start handling the construction of the full sized pumps and pipes.
We're slowly building up the cryogenic fluid necessary to cool down the fluorite mine for long enough to move bsting materials in. It'll end up taking quite a while at our current production speed. While I'd love to have rger cryogenic air production, we still ck some supplies and processes to use something like the Joule-Thomson effect to produce it in bulk. Not that we haven't made some progress on that front. We've developed fairly effective rudimentary counter-flow heat exchangers, and we've slowly been increasing in the effective compression pressures we can make using gas compressors, but we're not quite there yet. I think it'd be possible to do currently, but we'd be losing out on a lot of the efficiency that the bulk process provides due to the inadequate quality of the devices involved.
As much as I hate the idea when I know better methods exist, I'd rather have the mechanics team build a second copy of the existing cryogenics facility when they're free, rather than commit more of my own time to designing a new facility. I have bigger fish to fry in the form of making the electrified artillery pieces. Before that though, Tiberius has been nagging me non-stop while I was trying to develop the pumps to help him design out the methanol fueled fluorite crystal grower for handling rger fluorite crystals. That process shouldn't actually take too long. The bigger problem for it is actually the need to have a very rge stockpile of methanol to fuel the melting chamber for the amount of time necessary to grow a truly massive fluorite crystal.
For even rger fluorite crystals, just having a better fuel source isn't enough. It would let us grow slightly rger crystals, possibly up to four feet rather than three feet in size, but beyond that, the temperature gradient would still be too great inside the crucible, unless we were to insute the entire process more thoroughly. That, while possible, would be a huge engineering task. Instead, we can scale up the process simir to how we're staging out mana crystals. We can utilize an already rge crystal as a seed to grow the rger crystal. In doing so, we can essentially keep adding more volume to the crystal. There is an upper limit to this process as well, but honestly, a fluorite crystal that rge would likely have already reached it's upper limit in efficiency of processing mana.
I took ten days designing out a burner and fuel system that Tiberius could utilize for designing the rest of the crystal apparatus, all the while expining how the crystal growth process works. Before the crystal is lowered into the vat, it's surface will need to be thoroughly cleaned to facilitate proper growth, and he'll likely need to fine-tune parameters of the design to get it working right. For now, he'll focus on a six foot fluorite crystal as his goal, and it'll likely take months to get it designed, and months again to grow, so he'll be busy for a long while. I didn't mention it to him, but in theory, using seed fluorite could allow interesting hybridized crystals if we ever find two types that might work well in such a configuration.
I've started the process of designing the electrified artillery pieces. In the twenty days I've spent on initial research considerations and design, I've realized that the only way to really make sure that the process works every time is to redesign the casing from the bottom up. It can't be one continuous piece of brass with a small hole for ignition. The base pte of the casing needs to be fairly electrically insutive to prevent it from interfering in the process.
The way the process needs to work is that a rge, sudden jolt of electricity is sent through a thin fiment to vaporize it and detonate the nearby material. If the base pte of the casing is too conductive, it allows the electrical discharge through without detonating the smokeless powder. If we had rubber or pstics, it'd be easy to just use the brass casing with some holes drilled to fit an insuted wire through to make the system work, but since we do not, we'll have to rely on other methods to achieve a functional system.
We've got three options as far as I can tell. The first option is to make the whole bottom of the casing from stone, and install the conductive portion into it with the help of stone shaping. The second option is to use the brass casings we've been using, drill two holes, and use stone shaping to form two insutive plugs around the wire and on the inside of a portion of the casing that might cause problems. The third option is to leave a central portion of the casing bottom out, and only repce the portion that would house the wire with stone.
Each has it's own merits. The first option would require the most work to achieve, but would, in theory, be the most stable and functional. The second option is the least stable option, since there are more failure points during manufacturing, but also allows us to easily modify existing casings to achieve. The third option is a happy medium between stability and using existing ammo.
Considering these are weapons of war, where reliability really should come before anything else, I'm going to go with option 1. That means I'll need to come up with a process to speed up manufacturing. Some amount of stoneshaping will be necessary, but if we can at least get ptes of stone made that are roughly correct, then the amount of stoneshaping that would be necessary should be minimal.
Of course, to even cut through stone, that would mean using more of the hardened steel made from the material from mana crystals. I pn on initially making the test casings by hand using stone shaping, then once the casings work with an electric ignition system, moving on the manufacturing process for the components.
Over the course of 56 days I worked on various designs for ignition systems and casings. The main problem that I was trying to solve was making the contacts reliable while also allowing easy loading. I had big dreams of making an automatic system, but actually, that's a bit complicated, especially for something of this size. Instead, just making it capable of electrically firing, and having the spent casings being ejected easily is enough of an improvement for the time being. The forces involved are just a bit too big to handle for a fully automatic system without doing a complete overhaul of the entire process.
In the future, I'd love to set someone on that with a general direction of where to start research. I just can't justify spending that much time myself on it when the degree of technological separation between a semi-automatic rifled artillery piece on a steel ship with rangefinding and wooden ships using round cannonballs is so rge already. The electric firing system itself is already overkill, but it makes the ship more reliable overall, so it should be worth it.
As for the necessary other components for the process, stoneshaping has made making capacitors a breeze. Copper pte can be rolled to a fairly thin size, and then I can simply stoneshape lightstone between the ptes forming a good insutive separator inside the capacitor. The rest of the components were pretty straightforward to make, so I've been fine tuning the size and shape of the wire inside the casing and working on the mechanical loading and unloading. Since both happen at the same time, having one mechanical process that does both is convenient, but it also means there is actually quite a bit of mechanical work that has to be done to move the rge casings about, which has been the bulk of my design work.
We already had the turrets fed from bellow the deck on the ship, so I've been working on the design to try to allow it to continue to work within the confines of the existing turret structure. At the rate I'm going, I expect I'll have a functional prototype in a month or so, and then I can start the design process for producing the new ammo and artillery.
