After another month of testing and fine tuning, I think I've settled on the final design we'll be producing for the high explosive shells. They utilize the same blasting jelly that we are utilizing for killing clams. A few dozen lead balls are then held in place surrounding a central column of explosives in the shell, with an outer casing providing the rigidity necessary for firing. The manufacturing process for these is going to be a bit more complicated than it was for solid shells, but it should be able to be almost entirely handled by machines.

The blasting caps, however, are going to require some amount of manual labor to safely assemble. Basically, the lead azide can't be stored in large quantities or kept too close together. As such, you'll need lots of small storage pockets holding small amounts. Those small amounts can be used in an assembly process, but they'll have to be hand moved from storage to the assembler. Pretty much all the stages of lead azide production are going to have to proceed in a similar manner, due to the hazards that the components themselves have. If we had precision machines and computer aided assembly, it could all be handled automatically, but without that, the stages are each going to have to be supervised and handled by operators.

We've probably got another three months ahead of us for all the necessary machines and buildings to be built. Since even a few pounds of lead azide makes hundreds of shells, it does mean that we can work backwards on building out the manufacturing capabilities and start making shells well before the whole assembly process is complete. In about a month, I'd expect us to be able to start making shells. The reason I want to start assembling more lead azide is so that we can attempt to make repeating rifles.

Anything short of automatic rifles simply loses out to magic. However, a rifle with a bunch of rounds shooting quickly can level the playing field for low level individuals. Wounds are far less fatal thanks to healing magic, so you really do need to ensure that you have enough ammo to kill high level individuals, and can use all of it before they kill you. It's not even like one person with one gun is enough either. I was in the fight against King Besmond before, and I can say that he'd probably have won against a dozen goblins with automatic rifles, unless one managed to land a headshot. He'd end up pretty hurt, but if a healer got to him before he died, then he would live. Never-the-less, he's a very high level individual. Make it a few hundred goblins with rifles, and the average soldiers in an army would have to retreat and leave their wounded to die. Plus, the tanks are supposed to be the supplement for dealing with higher level individuals anyway.

After another month, we've finally started production of explosive shells. There is also a fairly easy retrofit that can be applied for the tanks to carry explosive shells, since they come in two parts. Unfortunately, modifying the ships is a different story. The autofire mechanism used in the ship turrets is a little too rough currently, which could cause the fuzes to go off early, resulting in the shell acting like a dud, and not exploding on impact.

I'm currently working on this problem to try to resolve it, since utilizing explosive shells from the ships, especially at a rapid fire rate, would allow far more impact than they currently have. At the very least, however, we plan on starting production of standalone artillery pieces again, based on the current model used by the tanks. These will be able to be utilized in defensive positions, allowing far better defense in a large area.

The regular eclipses result in lower ambient mana. Not so low that our ships can't operate, except perhaps if they were in the already low mana zone around our island during an eclipse, nor low enough to be a concern on the tanks, which also have their internal mana crystal as a battery. On our island, the large mana crystal concentrates the mana so much that the eclipse, while noticeable, is negligible. I had, however, planned on not including the mana crystal for the standalone artillery, instead I planned on simply running the firing mechanism for multiple artillery pieces off a single mana engine to generate the necessary power.

During an eclipse, that could be a problem. If the capacitors are already charged, you'd get one shot out of each artillery piece, and then they'd be duds for the hours until the eclipse ends. There are a few options that could be considered to cover this. First is option is to bite the bullet and install a mana crystal into the defense systems. The second option is to create a rechargeable battery that can be used. The third, and honestly the cheapest and probably best option is to make a manual switchboard of capacitors that should be charged up before the eclipse. It'd only fire enough rounds as there are capacitors, but the capacitors themselves are very cheap to make compared to a lot of our other items.

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The third option has the downside of allowing operator error, since the capacitors could either be forgotten, and not charged, or accidentally all discharged at once. The second option would also slowly fail over time, and would still need to be periodically charged. The first option has the lowest failure rate, but is very expensive. For our island's defenses, I'd prefer we build out the mana crystal backups, but for others, I think option three is what we'll go with. Our island technically doesn't need any of the options, since the large mana crystal provides enough, but if it were to be broken during a battle or attack, I'd like the rest of our defenses to work.

Most of the design work for making the standalone artillery was already done, so it only took me four days to finalize the design, then another six to design out the basics of the manufacturing process to make them. They are much simpler than the tanks are, so they should get produced much faster. Since they'll be used in a lot of locations, it's good that they'll be readily available.

I now need to loop back to optimizing some of the design processes for the sodium metal and lead azide. It isn't strictly necessary, since we can already produce everything we need in my lab space, I'd rather have that lab for further experiments, and have two factories for making sodium and lead azide, so that I can work on developing guns.

The sodium manufacturing is going to require it's own production line for cast steel containers, since the sodium hydroxide eats through it over time. As such, I need to consider simplicity of components to allow easy production. It's probably better that the parts are simple and wear out twice as fast, rather than being complicated.

As for the lead azide, I'll probably go with a similar idea as the nitroglycerin, where small batches are made on multiple lines, to prevent any one accident from resulting in many deaths. They'll need to be designed to handle fumes and acids, and it'll need a different type of storage for handling everything as well.

The first results came back before the full manufacturing came up after another month's time. I'd finished the design for the improved sodium metal production and the lead azide, and was finalizing designs for the automatic fire mode for the ship turrets to handle explosive shells when the news came back. The explosive shells were apparently allowing the forces to advance easily along roads through valleys. The demons they were fighting against really weren't sure how to handle the situation.

Due to the nature of being in valleys, it forces you to either fight grouped up, or fight in difficult terrain. The dwarven army was able to remain grouped up, while any large groups of demons would have to scatter and try to fight along the mountainsides instead, since the HE rounds from the tanks were easily wiping out large groups.

I heard plenty of feedback as well that there were some nervous murmurings among the soldiers about the implications about how wars would end up having to be fought as a result of this. On one hand, they seem to think, probably rightfully, that this is the last demon invasion that will ever be a problem. From here on out, the demons that invade will probably be too decimated before they can ever capture a city. On the other hand, they're terrified of what will happen if a war breaks out between nations using these weapons.

I can understand that as well. After all, these sorts of weapons were exactly what was used during the first world war on earth. Even with magic, these weapons are just on a different scale. I mentioned it before, but it would take a few people with these weapons to match a high level individual with combat skill. However, there are only a handful of individuals in any one country who meet that criteria. Essentially, one high level individual is worth about a month of manufacturing power of our small island nation.

Over time, that amount of time that its traded for goes down further and further, eventually, the weapons simply outpace the entire leveling rate of entire continents. On earth, the time gap for that was about 30 years, from world war one to nuclear weapons. Hypothetically, the same principal applies here, though I'd wager 30 years is too short of a time to accomplish it in here. The amount of the world that needs to be industrialized is different. Even if I know the rough path to get there, the breadth of complicated processes that I'd need to completely rediscover is different.

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