I've continued working on parts of the tank while I'm waiting for another large fluorite crystal to grow. Tiberius has gotten a little upset that I'm hogging all the fluorite growth capabilities we have, so I've given him permission to have the production capacity doubled moving forward. It'll probably take over a year for that to actually get realized, but it got him off my back. Further, if we start making tanks using the methods we have available, then we'll need that extra capacity anyway.

Once again, unlike the ship, which has plenty of space, the tank is much smaller and doesn't have access to water to act as a condenser for steam. Since we don't want to just be billowing steam out everywhere and then running out of water, we need a way to regenerate at least some of the steam back into water.

After 36 days of testing, what I'm thinking we might have to do is essentially turn the entire back portion of the tank into an engine with a large radiator with forced airflow to keep everything running smoothly. Due to the nature of wanting to have water be regenerated in the system, I think it's going to end up even bigger than my previous expectations. As long as it fits in the cargo bay of our ships for transport, and is capable of actually navigating out of a city where it would be unloaded, then that should be fine.

As a result, I'll definitely need to talk to Kao about the whole thing before we actually start trying to bring tanks over. There is no way their docks could support a tank currently, and I'm not sure there is a good path out of the city for something this size either. All of this heavily depends on our ability to present ourselves as a viable contributor to the war effort in such a way as to reduce the demands that the humans and elves put on the dwarves.

After another 16 days, the next test crystal was ready, and I spent 3 more days doing tests before it failed. This time, I started at the intermediate depth, and slowly added more holes with heat sink copper rods installed in them. I realized while I was doing the testing that I actually have another set of tests I'll need to run before I can attempt multivariate analysis to try to come up with an empirical equation to describe the behavior of the hybrid crystals with heat sinks. The next test I'll need to run has to do with the thickness of the rods themselves that are inserted into the crystal.

If I take the experiment to the extreme, it's obvious why this would matter. A single very thick rod is not going to effectively remove heat as well as an equivalent volume of small rods distributed across the entire surface of the crystal. However, too small of copper rods also has the issue of not having enough surface area to leech the heat out quickly enough on each individual rod, and more holes means a more brittle structure overall.

Technically, there are other tests that can be done related to the pattern of the rods, whether they should be uniform in depth or thickness or not, and other similar asymmetric tests. However, there are certain assumptions I'm making based on best practices that triangular patterned holes are probably the least disruptive to mechanical stability, and that staggered depth rods probably have a minimal effect on efficiency compared to standard depth.

I'm getting dangerously close to prestiging now, as I hit level 99 a few days ago. The next ship should be launched in about a month, with another few weeks before it's ready to set out after that. I'm going to go talk to Zaka tomorrow about expelling Elora from the island for national security reasons.

I've come up with an additional diplomatic excuse to provide while we do so, "The elves have seemed content to sit on their own continent while both the humans and dwarves fight a bloody war. We've heard how powerful elves can be in combat, and while their continent is under some threat of the demons expanding into their territory, ours is not. As such, we're proposing that, at least until the war is over, a non-elf representative be sent to our island to fulfill the role that Elora held, freeing her talents up to the more pressing cause."

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While I doubt the elves will look kindly upon it, it should frame the situation in the minds of the human and dwarf diplomats such that they'd potentially make a fuss over the situation if the elves demand she stay on our island, at least during this war which has become increasingly desperate.

Zaka, himself had some concerns with Elora remaining present on the island, though his concern was more minor than my own. Perhaps he doesn't see her as as much of a personal threat, or he simply lacks the broader context of the rest of the world. In either case, I didn't push to find out because he'd agreed to the plan I'd laid out.

He's going to start gathering military personnel to finalize everything, and he has requested that Zeb and myself hide ourselves until the situation resolves. Just in case she were to attempt anything in the few weeks she'd have to do so. Of course, that does mean that both of us will not be doing anything majorly productive over the coming weeks, which will probably include the time when I prestige.

Zaka has said he doesn't want me to even say where I'm going to hide, just that I should take Zeb with me. Considering we're still a few months away from winter, I have a decent idea of where we could go. I'll take a day gathering up some supplies that I want to bring with me, before we head out. In essence, I'm going to gather the things I'd normally take with me to go to the fluorite mine, since I can at least work on things on paper if I was going there. That should do little to arouse suspicion up until I leave with Zeb.

I grabbed Zeb and we headed out with what would normally be the food and supplies I'd only take for myself for about ten days of work at the fluorite mine. Our destination, however, was up in the abandoned station at the top of the cableway that has been neglected for years. While the old cave would have been my first choice, pretty much everyone knows that both Zeb and I had lived there for a long time in the past.

The cableway station, however, has been abandoned for enough years now that the dirt path between the two locations is completely gone. It's been a number of years since I've lived up here, but there should be plenty of food that we can scavenge to survive for the handful of weeks we need to do so. The distance between the old cave and the station is just far enough that I doubt it'll be a problem, though for good measure, we plan on digging out a secret room to hide in, just in case. In some regards, it feels just like the olden days, even though we've only been here for a day so far.

The first six days were pretty uneventful, we worked on excavating a secret room for us to sleep in while being careful to hide any evidence we've been living here. While I technically don't need sleep, I will need a safe place to prestige at, so it's definitely helpful for me as well. For those first few days, Zeb and I didn't talk much, which was somewhat disappointing. He had a bunch of work he wanted to do for construction design on paper, and I busied myself with my on work on paper.

After six days though, I think he found himself getting bored, and we needed to go out to scavenge food anyway, so we headed out together to do just that. We slowly started to discuss all the things we'd been working on while we were out gathering spuds and lionroot like the old days. That came to an abrupt halt when Zeb brought up something I'd neglected to think about. "How are we planning on cooking the lionroot and spuds without a fire giving away our position?"

While I initially thought that perhaps I could use Thermal Hands to do so, I don't think I can actually keep the temperature difference up for long enough to do so. So, that broke into a brief debate. Should we try to make a contraption to capture the smoke from burning wood? Should we just rough it and eat raw spuds for months?

Ultimately, while it comes with some risk, we decided to follow the abandoned cableway line all the way down to the military research facility to take a fluorite plate for a magic oven to utilize for cooking. The plan is to set out tomorrow morning to do that. While we're there, we'll see if we can gather some information on if anything out of the ordinary has happened in the meantime.

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