The good news about trying to make azide compounds is that I can at least use stoichiometry alongside recognition of what forms cations and anions to get a reasonable approximation for potential pathways to produce it. Since an azide, or triple nitrogen, has a -1 charge in total, but locally has a +1 on the central nitrogen and a -1 on each flank, I would expect that sodium metal should stabilize it quite well.

The downside is that I have a few potential pathways to reach that point that are going to be tricky to make in their own right. I'd expect that many of the intermediates are also explosive, so I'm probably going to be exploding some lab equipment before all is said and done. The production of sodium metal is also going to be something of a chore to make. In fact, I've been working on it for 10 days now. The problem is that we have to electrolyze in an environment where there aren't any other species to react. Which means we either need molten salt or molten sodium hydroxide.

I've been tinkering with both, but haven't come up with a good pathway to the final product yet. The problem I keep running into is that the sodium metal wants to diffuse into the molten mix, making it impossible to recover. If it weren't for the fact that most of the pathways I've devised for making azides use sodium metal in one stage or another, I'd probably just give up on it for now. While any alkali metal would probably do, the heavier ones are likely so stable that further chemistry to convert them to other metal azides would be more dangerous. I'll have to continue experimenting by changing parameters or adding in other components to cause the sodium metal to be recoverable. It's hard to say how long that will take.

Another twenty days have passed, and I think I've finally had a breakthrough on the sodium hydroxide front. The lab is now filled with a few dozen different setups that have been testing different parameter changes in setups one at a time. Its the most that I can keep track of myself. One subset of setups were testing different operating temperatures for molten sodium hydroxide, and there seems to be a quite narrow sweet spot where the molten sodium metal doesn't diffuse into the molten sodium hydroxide.

The bad news is, after not too long, the process starts to poison itself with diffused water created at the anode, meaning the process slows over time, but does seem to produce some sodium metal. I plan on doing some work to optimize the setup some to see if I can at least reduce the self-poisoning to a degree, which would allow a larger amount of metal to be produced in each batch. I had a real hard time actually getting to this point, since glass doesn't hold up very well to molten sodium hydroxide, nor does acid washed lightstone.

Instead, what did seem to work well enough was carbon steel, though it too slowly broke down. I'll have to be cautious with the overall process to see what works and doesn't for handling the material longer term. If I can't come up with any more durable material, the process is going to basically require we sacrifice iron to make sodium. That said, the amount of sodium metal we'll probably need over time is quite small, so it may not be that much of a sacrifice.

Over the course of another month, I refined the process somewhat, though I am still quite disappointed in the overall result. I really couldn't come up with anything we have available to us that could hold up to the caustic nature of molten sodium hydroxide over time. While I had initially figured we'd try to make a continuous process, instead we're going to have to go with batch productions, with the whole apparatus needing replaced about once every five days before it fails. The carbon steel just breaks down over time being the main issue.

Some of the things I tested held up slightly better, but they were so much more expensive, and weren't a permanent solution, so it's just cheaper to replace the whole thing with steel again over time. Thanks to some of the automatic temperature control systems I developed in the past, I've at least been able to regulate the overall system fairly well. I've also started pulling a slight vacuum on the anode production side to encourage more of the water to evaporate out rather than dissolve back into the bath.

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For the small scale setup I'm using currently, I'm making about a tenth of a pound of sodium an hour, though because of poisoning, that rate drops over time, and if I continue using the same setup, by the third hour, we're down only one twenty-fifth of a pound produced. I have to store it in fish oil to prevent it from deteriorating in the air as well. For my current experiments, this will be enough for me to move forward, but if we need more produced in the future for production purposes, I'll have to scale everything up, which will require additional research.

The rate of tank production has increased to a new tank every 18 days as more of the production line has been optimized. I attended a meeting where a representative of the navy and army ministers gave us an update on the first joint offensive, which seemed to be a bit of a mixed result. While the ships and tanks did help with reclaiming some coastal territory, it seems like there are quite a few problems with the functionality of the tanks that need to be addressed.

I knew there would be some problems with the first version, so it was somewhat expected. The main problem is that the tanks run very hot inside. So hot, in fact, that on more than one occasion, during combat, a member of the tank crew passed out from heat stroke. Being in the closed tank for more than an hour seems to be a real occupational hazard. So while the tank itself has been performing well, when battles drag on, the tank becomes useless.

There were plenty of other problems related to the position of things and operational difficulties that came in as well. I had specifically asked that any and every complaint, no matter how minor, be recorded and sent back to me. As a consequence, I think it's probably time to start working on the next tank version to address many of these issues. It'll slow the production down again when it's introduced, but overall it should result in a vast improvement for the military. While I work on developing the new design, I can monitor the production of sodium metal for my experiments, so it shouldn't slow down my development of azides by that much.

Every change to the tank's design is a tradeoff, generally speaking. For example, adding a set of fans and vents to circulate air inside the tank results in it being more vulnerable and also reduces its max speed, since some amount of power from the engine has to be diverted to forcing air through the tank itself. That also complicates the mechanics of the overall system, making it even bulkier than before.

However, some of the items on the list also identified locations of inefficiencies, if only indirectly. The changes to those locations will require a sharper eye during assembly to fix, in addition to some changes to the components involved, but they should result in less power losses, which would in turn shrink the bulk of the tank. What I've tried to do to save overall time and prevent us from needing to redesign every single component into an entirely new tank is making design changes in sets that roughly counteract each other on the bulk and engine demand front. They usually result in higher manufacturing costs and time, but at least the entire production chain won't need rebuilt.

I've worked on these design changes for 25 days, and I think I'm ready to go spend some time seeing to the changes to the necessary components. I estimate that the additional manufacturing time per tank will increase by a few days due to the increased complexity and attention to detail that will be required, but it should handle a lot of the major complaints and quite a few minor ones. The list of complaints is no where near completely resolved, but some of the complaints are ones that really are minor inconveniences that soldiers will just have to deal with. Some are ones I would never even both fixing, since the cost to fix them isn't actually worth the payoff in overall design. Others really would require an entire redesign from the ground up, which would take many months to solve. I'd rather wait for many more months to accumulate even more design changes before I consider doing something like that.

In that time though, I've stockpiled quite a bit of sodium metal, about 20 pounds in total. It's both a lot and a little, depending on how you look at it. For lab research, it's plenty. For military application, its a paltry sum.

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