It's unfortunate how much more complicated each project I go to work on becomes. It was only a few decades ago that the most complicated part of any project was simply finding the manpower to haul away the stone or to construct the buildings necessary. Nowadays I'm stuck troubleshooting for months at a time related to the very real and intricate problems of machinery and chemistry. It's helpful that I have the mechanics team to help with some of the problems, but their help is mostly related to repair and installation of simple machines or mana engines. When something is moving, but isn't working right, they're not able to help much.

Which is all the more reason I'd like to get the research academy designed and built. A place where others can build up their knowledge and mastery of a particular subject so they can be the ones doing the troubleshooting in my place. There always seems to be a more pressing problem that needs solved that's preventing me from actually committing to it. I had initially intended for the lab space to become something like that, but it quickly turned into a military institution for state secrets, which was, and is, necessary.

I think I've almost solved all the problems with the paper plant now, after 75 days of troubleshooting. I've solved problems ranging from pipes being too long to needing additional power in order to drive stirring rods in tanks that are at full capacity. We also had multiple problems due to the viscous and sticky nature of the black sludge. The steel roller mill has managed to exceed my expectations in that time, and they've produced some pretty thin foils to use for testing. I wish we had aluminum to use, but that'd be an incredibly difficult task to try to produce even a small amount.

We launched another three barges in that time, two of which killed a leviathan. The one that didn't kill a leviathan hit a particularly large wave at a bad angle, and detonated on its own. It's a good thing the paper mill will start producing paper soon, as we've almost depleted our stockpile of paper. Thankfully, an automatic cutting machine is pretty straightforward to make, so we should have custom sized sheets of paper for dynamite production within a few weeks of the paper mill being online, since I doubt they'd appreciate using extra-large rolls of paper for dynamite.

The last 40 days have been quite fruitful and busy. The paper mill finally started to produce paper, and it only took 12 days to get a high-speed cutting machine made to both cut and roll the smaller paper pieces into dynamite portions. The number of eagles has been slowly increasing, and we had to drug and transport one again. This one also seemed to recover fairly well from the surgery and transport, so if we end up needing to drug another one, I'll have someone else start to take the reigns on it while I watch.

I haven't been paying that close of attention to the eagles, but according to the demons I've put in charge of it, we now have 27 of them living at various points on the mountain. They have distributed themselves fairly evenly around the upper portions. Though for the most part, the last 1500 feet or so of the top has been left alone. If the eagles keep settling here and we want to use the peak, we might need to dig an underground path in order to bypass eagle territory.

Tiberius has also finished up a whole new set of data for the embedded crystals. The data he's collected indicates a multiplicative effect between the outer fluorite and inner mana crystal. The larger either crystal is, the better they play off of each other. Though I'd guess that the multiplicative effectiveness will reduce beyond a size where a mana crystal can survive at the surface. Right now, the data is somewhat obscured by the fact that when either crystal increases in size, the total system can also take measurements closer to the surface, and as such the ambient mana values where measurements are happening are more scarce.

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Trends right now seem to show nearly exponential effectiveness with increasing ambient mana levels, while also showing a logarithmic limit related to the thickness of the fluorite shell relative to the mana crystal size. If previous measurements of mana crystals are anything to go from, however, there is a non-linear relationship between mana crystal volume and it's ability to act as a magnet for mana. All that to say, we need to test with even larger mana crystals, and potentially larger fluorite crystals. Growing larger fluorite would require an even larger apparatus to grow a crystal in, or the use of less effective plates in larger numbers to do it.

I settled on growing a 2-foot crystal for Tiberius to test with, though he's to use it initially for all the data collecting that worked at previous levels without breaking the crystal. Only after all that data is collected can he get my permission to move it higher towards the surface where the crystal may end up breaking. I've also given him permission to study the existing fluorite growth chambers, and he can attempt to design a larger chamber if he wants.

I've started to attempt the process of turning syngas into methanol in the last 50 days. Working in the lab area lets me keep a close eye on Tiberius's research and development of a larger fluorite crystal growth chamber. I didn't even bother going to watch any of the leviathan barges this time. There is a chance I could gain a few levels, but practically speaking, the odds are quite low.

I always need to temper expectations and plans for Tiberius, as he immediately just wanted to jump to growing 8-feet fluorite crystals, not considering the amount of difficulty that would go into such a device. The 3-foot chamber took a lot of fine tuning to work using charcoal pellets as a fire source, and upscaling probably won't go very well with it.

In short, charcoal, even pelletized charcoal, is too variable in quality and causes heating to occur unevenly to a degree. The larger the total apparatus size, the worse the heating problem becomes as the fluorite crystal tapers off in the final stages of growth. So I've told him that he can either try to make a 4-foot chamber work while solving all the problems that come from that, or he can wait a bit to try and use a liquid fuel source, which can vastly improve the uniformity of heat.

Tiberius, always wanting to move forward at a breakneck pace on his own work, decided he'd wait for me to make it easy with a liquid fuel, rather than trying to design a system that would handle solid fuel. That's easier said than done though. My first attempt at making syngas from wood went alright at first glance. All I had to do was heat wood in a low, but not zero, oxygen environment. After doing some basic analysis by cooling the gas and bubbling it through water, it was clear that I'd either need to try different sources for the syngas, or there would be a lot of cleaning that would need to be done to the gas before it would be useful.

The wood based product was absolutely full of impurities ranging from tar to hydrogen sulfide. Thankfully, I did have a secondary option to try in the form of pelletized charcoal. The syngas produced from the charcoal ended up being significantly more pure on the first try. Charcoal is obviously more intensive to make, especially the higher grade charcoal we have been using to make pellets, but the difference in initial syngas quality will affect the quality and maintenance necessary for methanol production.

While ethanol could be used for both the fuel for a hot air balloon and fuel for fluorite growth, we'd need a lot more crops capable of being fermented alongside pressure based separations to pass the ethanol-water azeotrope to make it into a fuel source. Add on the extra farmland necessary to grow it as a fuel, and I'd rather utilize our natural wood supply for methanol which we can use for other things. Methanol from syngas has the added benefit of being able to be made from all sorts of biological matter, which means things like algae could be used in the future, utilizing more of our ocean and less of our limited land.

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