Since I'd done most of the design work previously, after another 18 days, I'd adjusted the remainder of the facilities to produce the new artillery ammo. The first test firings worked well, so we plan on retrofitting our ships with new turrets to handle the new ammo. The plan is to replace to the two bow turrets with the automatic type, keeping one old turret on each ship. We still have a lot of the older ammo sitting around, and we aren't entirely sure how durable the new turrets will be long term. There is a chance that they might be prone to more mechanical failures, which we won't know about until after they'd experienced wear and tear.

Since I plan on being on the next trip to the mainland to discuss the potential need for us to participate in naval patrols, I'll take that opportunity to test the new turrets on the way there and back. It'll still be a few months until that point, which gives us time to properly do the retrofitting. I'm hoping that in that time I can also get the pilot plant working to produce liquefied air, and prove out the benefits and expected power needs for a larger facility.

We manufactured and retrofitted the turrets one ship at a time. Each ship took a total of 18 days to install both turrets, including the removal of the previous turret. However, making one of the new turret systems took 20 days itself, meaning that I had a lot of downtime while fabrication took place. Overall, we just barely made the deadline before the next shipment of salt was to go out, with the total retrofit time taking 86 days.

The good news is that the next ship will just have these new style of cannons, rather than needing extra time to retrofit. Further, we plan on upgrading our coastal defensive guns to the new system as well. Due to the increased complexity of the artillery rounds however, we're only producing 20 a day. Scaling up would require an increased number of stoneshaping demons, as that is the bottleneck. If we needed to for defense purposes, I'm sure that Zeb would be fine with it, but as of right now, that seems unlikely.

In the downtime that I had during the retrofitting, I did manage to get the pilot facility to produce liquefied air, though there are some complicated design issues that I'm going to have to resolve to scale up further. The main problem is that we don't have quality insulative materials. I've been working around this by utilizing vacuum layers between objects, which is a fantastic insulator. The problem with that, however, is that the larger the object I want to pull a vacuum around, the harder it is to safely do so.

The pilot facility was just small enough that I could utilize the same vacuum seals we'd used previously. A future facility will be too large for this. So, we'll either need to figure out how to make materials like mineral wool, or come up with a different method. With enough time and energy, we could manually produce a vacuum pulled honeycomb structure, but I'd rather not resort to highly labor intensive processes that utilize stoneshaping demons for a single facility, when things like mineral wool can work.

In theory, we already have a pretty good material for making mineral wool, the waste dust from our basalt to iron production line. In practice, the result would actually be closer to a fiberglass, and we'll need fluxes to make it work. Flux material is something that we've had trouble with because of the leviathans. The whole process is looking like it's going to require quite a few intermediates to properly produce what I want. I'll think on the idea while we travel.

After 11 days, we made it Ostark. We took a few days loading all our cargo up before we set out. All in all, we exceeded the minimum salt requirement for the year by 20%. As we traveled, I took the opportunity to test fire the new turrets as we passed the other islands. Things seemed to be working well for now, we'll see if there is any performance degradation on the return trip.

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What I hadn't expected was that when we started nearing the pass that we'd end up utilizing the turrets for actual combat. A few small dinghies with a few dozen demons each were attempting to make their way along the coast. The coast was well guarded with new watchtowers positioned along the way, but they didn't have the range to do anything about the dinghies. The fields were still present further in, but it's a stark change from the way things looked when I first passed the area.

We took the opportunity to sink the ships before continuing on our way. If the exterior coast has this issue too, then we might need to really reconsider the situation. The last thing I want is more demons taking over the other islands again. If I'm that concerned about it, I should probably petition for us to start a garrison on the other islands, but that would also spread our defenses thinner for our main island, which is by far the most important.

When we arrived at Ostark itself, it became clear to me what the situation was like. The city was even more packed than previously with even more ships in the harbor. They've even built out another pier for unloading, though it's too small for our ship. While I had wanted to talk with Kao as soon as possible, Shasta informed me it would have to wait until we return with the goods we'll pick up from the next location. Basically, the line for unloading ships is quite long, and our cargo is destined for somewhere else currently. With no heads up in advance from us, making time to meet with Kao would end up slowing the harbor down and potentially disrupt other strategic meetings.

While we were on our way to our next destination, Bivaboro, I had a chance to discuss the current situation with Shasta. The consensus is that the majority of the continent has fully capitulated, and that the majority of the demon army has turned it's sights towards Ostark and the situation isn't looking good. There is some hope in that the fighting for the center of the continent likely resulted in many of the stronger demons dying, so their forces likely aren't comprised of many veterans. The bad news is that with so much land, they can easily repopulate and send low level demons perpetually into a meat grinder. Even if it takes hundreds of goblins to kill one dwarven veteran, that favors the demons.

It felt weird talking in that manner, consider myself and all the crew on the ship are also demons, but it is what it is. Bivaboro was a few days travel along the inland sea's inner coast, situated in what was formerly part of Rathland. According to Shasta, the faction that controls this portion is one of the groups who were originally oppositional to King Besmond, so we shouldn't need to worry about any kind of direct hostility.

I took the opportunity to talk about my proposed discussion with Kao about our participation in patrols. Based on her facial reaction, I'm going to assume that it's probably not a workable situation, at least not publicly. After a bit of discussion, it seems to be an optics problem. Relying on demons to keep the demon invasion from spreading, especially after the decade of propaganda, will likely be very bad for morale publicly.

However, it seems as though there might be a work around. If, publicly, all we were doing is transporting goods between the dwarven continent and the elven continent, but we happened to sink demon ships as we traveled, then it could work out. It'd require some amount of finesse to keep information from leaking, but it might be doable. Payment would also have to be less public, so we'll probably have to do quite a bit of negotiating.

I'll have to be cautious about how I broach the subject when we get back to Ostark. I'm glad I didn't have the meeting right away now, if I did, there is a good chance that we'd have ended up making the offer in front of advisors who would be opposed, and we wouldn't be able to keep it secret.

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