Having instituted that small social change, I turned my attention back to the numerous projects that I had set out to complete. First, rather than pursue mineral wool, I took four days determining the insulative properties of different designs to go around the Joule-Thomson air liquefaction components. What I settled on was a repeating pattern of large, vacuum-pulled hexagons in four layers around the large components.

In essence, each layer is fairly insulative, losing heat mostly through the physical walls of the hexagon. A fine layer of lightstone is used to coat the inside and form the in between layers. Then, the next set of hexagons is offset, and the cycle repeats. As long as all four layers are offset correctly, then there is very little conductive heat loss due to the heat path being very long. The downside is that this is going to end up taking construction teams a long time to produce, since pulling a vacuum is a bit of a slow and mana intensive process.

I took another two days drafting design documents for everything that would be necessary for the full sized facility, and left them with Zeb to deal with the details when he gets the chance. I've also put in a request for the expansion of the basalt to iron refinery to double it's capacity. Both of these projects might take a few years to be completed, but it's best to start them now.

I've taken just over 15 days working with Zaka and a handful of military personnel to determine exactly how much steel is necessary to protect from different magical attacks. The good news is that Zaka's fireballs really don't do much to inanimate objects, so that's a plus. If enough were to hit the same part over and over, then they might get hot. Meteor shot, on the other hand, was capable of penetrating a lot of steel if the right projectile was chosen.

Which led me to remembering that ceramic armors were used on modern tanks. So, I repeated experiments using lightstone plates overtop a thinner steel lining. This not only provided better heat resistance, but also allowed the armor to withstand more types of meteor shot attacks. It's as I've said many times in the past, however. Magic really is quite powerful, so I understand why no one can make the jump to modern technology despite the societal ages. There isn't a practical intermediary that is useful.

If a particularly strong individual uses meteor shot with a very large projectile, they can do some real damage. The main flaw is that they have to aim that projectile, which after a few hundred feet, becomes unreliable. In essence, any tank we make is going to need to be quite heavy and large. In practice it might be able to take one or two hits from a very powerful enemy before being completely disabled. If they hit the barrel, then the tank would need to retreat.

However, if it out ranges most enemies, and can fire back on anyone who gets close enough to harm it, then it might be fine. It wouldn't be used for dealing with the strongest enemies, instead being useful for dealing with medium strength enemies. Without a machine gun, it's not going to be very cost effective to use it against weaker troops either, which is another problem that needs to be solved for any sort of tank to be useful.

I don't know where to even start for primer explosives, and electrical firing mechanisms could easily jam with any meaningful rate of fire at that size. Hypothetically, we could used compressed gas cylinders as the main firing mechanism, similar to how a pellet gun would normally operate, though the practicality of using that as a rapid fire mechanism seems pretty low. As gruesome as it sounds, the tank's best method of dealing with low level troops might actually just be to run them over. I'll think on the problem for a little while and see if I can come up with a better solution, because that really doesn't sound practical.

I had a realization after three days that I was thinking about the problem too lazily. Yes, I'm envisioning a modern tank, but there isn't a reason I need to conform to the idea of a rapid fire weapon as the anti-personnel weapon of choice. There are plenty of other options. While I'm not comfortable with the idea of using a flamethrower, I've used grapeshot in the past and it'd be easy to modify our existing weapons platform to utilize it.

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Rather than trying to make the main cannon utilize grapeshot, which would seriously damage it's accuracy after a single shot, I'd rather equip two shorter barrel grapeshot guns on either side of the main turret with their own swivel. They won't use automatic fire, instead relying on manual reload, but they should be effective enough.

I'll need to do some testing to determine exactly what design I'll need to use for them, but considering it's a smooth bore system, I don't think it'll be too much trouble to figure out. After that, I think I have almost all the information I'd need to start an earnest design for a tank.

I tested a few different designs over 20 days for barrels and grapeshot before I settled on something that is a bit of an improvement over the old steam cannon design. In practice, we don't need most of the barrel length for these rounds. While they might not accelerate to full speed with a much shorter barrel, they're still incredibly lethal at moderate ranges of 500 feet, which exceeds the ranges I'm worried about. They're essentially loaded up with dozens of one-inch lead balls with paper wadding and two iron plates keeping the whole thing in one piece until it leaves the barrel.

While I can't say that they'll always hit their target, if there is a group, it will do a good job of hitting a few of them. In any practical use case for these tanks, I expect there will be a supporting infantry force. In which case the tank will have culled a portion of the enemy's numbers before combat begins, and the main barrel can be used for either dealing with powerful enemies, or as part of sieges.

Further, if it seems like the tank is going to fall into enemy hands, it should be easy to sabotage it from the inside so it's useless as a recovered tool. Without intimate understanding of electronics and our mana engine design, repair and reverse engineering would be nearly impossible on the timescale of a single war.

The real question that I need answered now is how Tiberius's research on hybridized crystals is going. If it isn't going that well, I may need to motivate him by dangling the idea that this machine can only be powered by a new crystal hybrid engine, which I fully believe to be the case. We can't fit a full ship's steam engine within the space of a tank. We need the energy source to be more compact.

Tiberius's findings were interesting, though they didn't quite go in the direction I'd hoped for. As always, he's far more interested in direct mana weapons, rather than integrated systems. So, once it seemed like it couldn't easily be utilized in that way, he'd started different research. In a return to old form, he'd started collecting blood from fishes again and was collecting compounds for testing. Though this time he was trying to see if this new hybrid crystal system could be utilized in an interesting way, though he hasn't seen any results.

In essence, he's keeping a partially hollow pocket at the center of the fluorite around the mana crystal and filling the pocket with infused liquids from various different sources. Unfortunately for him, we don't have any real fluorite types that utilize this effectively. I can hypothetically see how this could be useful, so I'm not going to halt his research, but I did give a cautionary notice to all the fluorite crystal growing demons to not make any extra large crystals out of anything but iron doped fluorite, no matter what Tiberius says or does. If he tries to do it himself, they're to sabotage the growth apparatus. I don't want a Chernobyl situation.

His notes on the hybrid crystals from before he stopped were good enough for me to proceed, however. I think if we utilize a mana crystal slightly larger than the minimum size, and the largest possible heat fluorite crystal, I can modify the crystal with heat sinks without risking the overall integrity of the system. That'll function as a central boiler which will go through pistons, and we'll have fan cooled radiators on the back of the tank to operate as condensers to recapture the water to continue the cycle. Unlike the ship's boilers, which take a significant amount of space, but are also more generally stable, this system will be far more compact, at the cost of some amount of stability.

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