The last two barges launched without any issue, one resulted in a kill of a large bony jawed leviathan, and the other injured a crab severely. A few days after the crab was injured, more parts of its shell drifted ashore, so I'm assuming some other leviathan finished it off. In the meantime, I've pretty much finalized the design for the paper machine.

Pulp is mixed and distributed onto the wire mesh, where it traverses multiple suction boxes that pull a large amount of the water out, while also somewhat compacting the pulp due to the suction force. Next, the pulp is pressed tightly between two rollers where it adheres to a felt belt, which presses it twice before going up to it's own suction box and set of heat fluorite to dry the felt before looping back down. At this point, the pulp closely resembles the sort of paper we would manually stack at the old facility, except it's in a long stretch.

The paper rolls past another large felt line, being pressed a second time before being handed off to pass through a weave of multiple heated drums that help press and dry the paper further. Occasionally in the weave, I've thrown in a few more felt belts, in case some of the heat or pressure drives out any residual water.

At the end, the paper passes a few more straight shot pairs of drums which eventually lead to a rack where the paper is rolled around a central roller. Overall, these last stages went past two barge launches, and I'm nearly at the next barge launch after a total of 133 days. I expect that getting the whole facility organized and constructed as a single unit will end up taking another 100 days at least. Most of the machines are currently at the lab area, and I plan on having the facility built near our tree farming area, so everything will need transported, and a few mana engines to power it will also need to be assembled.

The next barge resulted in another partial failure, with a crab leviathan being maimed but not killed. This time, we didn't notice any parts drifting ashore, so it may have survived the incident. I'm personally overseeing and helping with construction of the paper mill now. I've put in requests for various items to be made back in town. The idea I had for potentially getting closer to the leviathan killshots is by utilizing a hot air balloon tethered to both the barge and land. It can be kept at a fixed distance from the barge, and then towed back to land after the line is cut.

There are some concerns about eagles potentially becoming disturbed by the balloon either before or after the detonation, but that's just another problem to solve. If we can get them used to the balloon before we launch, then it should be fine. All of our current eagles have gotten used to eating at the feeding area, and we haven't received any new ones in a few months, so we might be able to introduce them slowly to the balloon there.

There are a few other issues that need solved with a hot air balloon beyond dealing with the eagles. Our balloon will need to stay airborne for at least a few hours, and we'll need to come up with a bunch of metal parts to handle whatever fuel source we choose to use. I really don't want to use hydrogen, nor do I want to use a lighter than air balloon here, since we're already working near explosives. That leaves me with three fuel sources that we could realistically use.

The first option is syngas, which is essentially just non-combusted off gas from cooking organic matter. It'd be easy to make, and we already have plans to make it by cooking wood in an airtight container and collecting the gas. The issue with syngas is that it's pretty energy poor, and I'd have to come up with all the components to support a gas burner and storage system for the balloon.

The second option is methanol, which was the reason we wanted the syngas. We need methanol as part of the bleaching process for paper, so making it now could save us a lot of work down the road. It's also a liquid, which would simplify the design process quite a bit. The downside is that it's still quite energy poor. It'd be easier to use than syngas in the balloon, but it'd still require a lot of fuel.

The third option is to try to refine that flammable resin material that I'd gotten from the chemical pulping process. It seems to be quite energy dense, but it currently burns with a lot of smoke and char, meaning it'd foul up any burner I try to use. It's also far too viscous currently to utilize without a secondary heater to keep it hot enough that would flow easily. I'd guess that it's probably the densest energy source we have, but it'd require a lot of experimenting to get right.

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I think I'll start with methanol as my target, since it has a secondary use for us. If I tack on that methanol is a pretty decent precursor for other chemical productions, then it's all the more reason to try to utilize it for hot air balloon fuel.

The attempt at a large wicker basket made from tree saplings for the balloon gondola wasn't successful. Perhaps it's because the wood here is so soft that it just doesn't quite have the strength to hold up. So we're going to use a metal frame that will then have a wicker basket woven through it. That should give it the support it needs, albeit at the cost of a significant amount of extra weight.

A second issue arose as well. Making a balloon is actually quite hard. I had requested a much smaller sample balloon first, and the results were disappointing. Trying to fill the balloon with hot air from a wood fire managed to melt the waterproofing materials we planned to use. I had the bright idea of using pitch to try to seal the balloon, as it's quite useful for waterproofing. Unfortunately, with the flexibility of the balloon and the increased temperature, the pitch slowly dripped away, and we were stuck again. Even what little of the dwarven waterproofing material melted away all the same.

Based on those observations, however, I'm assuming that the dwarf waterproofing material is either pitch from a tree we don't have here on the island, or it's treated in some way first. In either case, coming up with a material to make the balloon airtight is going to be a huge problem. It needs to be light, flexible, and have a melting point high enough that it doesn't cause issues in a hot air balloon. Rubber comes to mind, but that'd end up being it's own whole ordeal, and I can't even say for certain that any plants would produce enough of the right kind of natural latex to utilize for that. Never mind trying to synthesize rubber, or for that matter plastic, without oil.

Instead, we're probably going to have to make metal foil do the job, which means even more weight. While still probably doable, we're going to have a very minimal capacity for riders. It's quite the endeavor to work on. So, my plan now is to put the balloon portion on hold, get the gondola made, and see how well we can manufacture steel foil. If we can make the foil thin enough, then we should be able to utilize it as an internal coating in a balloon. Then we can calculate the total mass of the system, and do some tests on methanol flame temperatures to determine what temperature the balloon can operate at, and measure air density at different temperatures to calculate the volume that the balloon would need to have to lift itself when running. After the next barge launch, that's what I'll turn my attention to.

The last four months were quite hectic. There were multiple small adjustments that were done on the new paper mill to make sure everything would work smoothly and safely together, one of the three leviathan barges resulted in a leviathan going berserk near to the shore for a few hours before another one came up and killed it while the other two worked as intended, and I started working on a roller mill to make steel foil near the city. If we had the means and materials, I'd obviously have preferred aluminum foil to steel foil, but steel will have to do.

The new paper mill has begun to start up, and as per usual, there are dozens of small problems that I need to solve before it actually runs as intended. Thankfully that doesn't really slow down the steel foil mill, since I've worked with the blacksmiths before on the process of making sheets of metal. I'm having them work with the mechanics team to layout and power the facility. I've decided that it probably shouldn't just be a steel foil mill, however, and we should have it produce other sheet steel which is then rolled further into foil. Sheet steel has all sorts of other useful purposes, and we've now had a few years to build up our iron stockpile thanks to the basalt processing facility so coming up with good uses for iron will benefit us.

I expect we'll start turning out product paper in a few months from the new facility, and we'll probably have steel sheet before then. The foil, on the other hand, might take some time afterwards before we get it down. If it weren't for the additional use case for a hot air balloon to conduct research and reconnaissance at a higher altitude than even the top of our mountain peak, I'd probably call off the construction project. At this point, we'll probably have killed off most of the leviathans before we ever launch a single balloon.

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