This initial version of our tank weighs in at just about 95 tons. Truly a monster. It does slowly leak water out of the steam engine, and needs to be refreshed with about 10 gallons of distilled water every day. It can operate for about 10 days without refueling though. So, while the construction of the facilities for manufacturing tanks has been underway for the last 28 days, I've spent some of my downtime developing a basic water boiler and condenser system based on the ship's water purification system.

The whole thing is designed to be hauled in a wagon, utilizing a heat fluorite crystal to purify water. This system is designed to work on freshwater, so the recovery rate is much higher. Since the system is batch operated, it'll also be able to be cleaned more frequently, so there are a lot of optimizations that allow it to be much smaller in total size.

The idea is that a set of wagons can haul both distilled water and the purification system, and when a new freshwater source is found, you restock on the distilled water that is necessary for operating the tanks. The purification system, as I've designed it, can distill about 10 gallons an hour in normal mana conditions, so if you have a few tanks that need a large refill, you might have to camp for a day or two while you operate it. I'd like if it could do more, but with it being empty some of the time, I have concerns about it potentially melting down if left without water as a coolant for too long.

In high mana conditions, like our island, it does need a continuous supply of water to keep from overheating. For shipping though, we have a different solution that is possible. With all the extra mining that has been happening, we've uncovered a few more quartz pockets, so we've been able to make some mana insulation crates that we can pack fluorite crystals in for shipping, so there will be some assembly necessary on arrival, but it beats having to actively cool crystals until we make it off the island.

My plan is to ship one of these purifier systems for about every 3 tanks. When I crunched the numbers on the efficiency of the system, I had to remind myself that water wasn't fuel, it was the medium of energy conversion. The real source of power is the fluorite crystal converting mana into heat. Hypothetically, the water losses could be brought to close to zero with enough precision engineering.

In any case, the engine is only one part of the tank. The main turret functions like a scaled down version of the ship turret. With the auto-loader removed, the overall size was able to be shrunk down considerably. Due to some design constraints, it can only rotate a total of 180 degrees, covering the full forward direction. Towards the front of the tank are two smaller rotating platforms with the grapeshot turrets. The grapeshot turrets, with their shorter barrels, are able to be manually rotated, saving more complexity from the system.

Each grapeshot turret also has it's own hatch to get into the tank. The whole thing takes a crew of 5 to operate. With a dedicated driver, an operator for each grapeshot turret, someone to reload and fire the main turret, and a second operator to aim the main turret. As far as ammo is concerned, the tank can hold 25 main gun shells, and a total of 30 grapeshot rounds.

We've been training some of the smaller soldiers on the prototype. We'll probably have to have a few tank crews go along to help operate the tanks while we also train dwarves on how to do it. Long term, I'd prefer that the dwarves operate their own tanks, while we merely work in an advisory role.

After another 24 days, the first tank has come of the line, and gone through performance checks. Unlike the ships' components, the tanks are largely already assembled on the far side of the island, making loading them up much easier. It'll take some time to optimize the tank's production line, so we probably won't be making one tank every ten days for a few months. Though with that manufacturing line up and running, we're free to focus on building out more industry to support further production.

With all the excess stone the dwarves are mining out in large bricks, there are huge brickyards at either end of the tunnel with huge amounts of stone piled up. That isn't even counting the bricks piled up at production facilities that are useful stone types for refining. My understanding of the situation is that normally, those stone blocks would be used for making roads, since there is an extreme excess of them. For us though, we don't really have a need for that, so they just pile up.

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They are very useful for our construction crews though, since it is quite easy to use stoneshaping to merge them together into a coherent building. Normally, our excavated stone has a small amount of variance in size, so the dwarf produced standard blocks really do speed things up. Even considering future housing construction, there are still far more blocks than we'll need for decades, with more coming out every day.

I decided to talk with Zeb about the idea of building out a large brickyard closer to Kembora City, given his position as minister of development. We could also hire out a bunch of unskilled laborers on the island to begin hauling blocks to the new brickyard, front loading some of the construction burden. I've also asked him to think about places where he might want blocks for construction in the future, and we can build out more brickyards in those places as well.

As for immediate production expansion, if we plan on increasing our capacity for tanks and ships, we'd need to expand more production lines than last time. We'd need more ammo production, which means more of everything that goes into nitrocellulose, and more stoneshapers making the bottom caps on ammo. We're already making spare nitroglycerin that we're using for killing clams, so we could reduce the rate we're blasting clams to produce more ammo at least. We'll also need more capacity for fluorite and mana crystals, and another expansion on iron production. Overall, a second increase will be far harder to implement than the initial scale up for just the tanks. There are, however, plenty of dwarves with construction skills who are now idle, so we may as well start expanding those production lines while there is the excess labor to do so.

I'll be heading out soon alongside the shipment of the first tank to the mainland. Since I know the tank better than anyone else, it's best that I go along to answer questions and give the explanation on how it works. I do have some concerns about my own potential safety while there. I've been along on a few of the clam blasting missions to try to gain some extra levels, but I don't know how much influence it actually had. Ultimately, I hope I'm just being paranoid about any potential elf assassination attempts.

<UNCOMMON LAVA DEMON> Level: 6 HP: 4619/4619 MP: 2497/2497 TC: 2500/2500 Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep, Thermal Capacitance Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize, Thermal Regulation

I shipped out with the tank and after five days we made it to Ostark. They had completed a large dock supported by stone pillars that I expect will be capable of handling the weight of a tank. Unfortunately, we did end up having to spend another four days building out a crane system for them so they could actually unload the tank from the ship. I kept my guard up the whole time because Elora was among the leaders in Ostark observing the situation.

When we finally unloaded the tank and drove it down the dock to the city, the comment I heard most was how unsettling it was. I suppose in a situation where all transport has been either man or beast powered, a constant rumble of a steam engine would be unsettling. Our ship is also powered in that way, but it's so large that it has a far different impact than something driving through your streets. I also had to apologize to Kao, because the tank ended up damaging the road that it used to navigate out of the city. In practice though, it's going to be broken every time a tank comes through, so they'll probably need to get used to it until the war is done.

I'm far to large to fit inside the tank, but the dwarves were able to get in it easily. We began showcasing the capabilities while I explained various aspects of how it worked. We demonstrated it's capabilities both offensively and defensively for them, along with various maintenance and repair procedures that would be necessary to maintain it.

One of the dwarves brought up a good question about the amount of supporting troops necessary to effectively use the tank. After all, between the various spare components, the water purifier, and spare distilled water, that is a lot of logistical support necessary. This led to a discussion about how they would need to change the way they think about logistics. Expanded logistics to support a tank means fewer losses over time. The complexity of maintaining everything goes up, but your losses go down, meaning the advantage that the demons have in prolonged warfare gets flipped on its head. That is, as long as you can continue to supply the tank with all of its necessary components. You are essentially converting what would have been casualties into material losses, as long as you can protect the logistics lines, that should remain true.

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