I ended up spending 62 days working on the designs for rails, rail cars, and the manufacturing machines necessary to produce the components that would eventually be assembled into them. I borrowed the concept of transferable storage containers to be utilized for solids that would be transferred to and from trains. That took up a few days worth of my time, since I ended up designing standardized cranes and loading bays to coincide with these standard containers.

Railways are quite the interesting system overall. Unfortunately, I'd be a bit nervous about trying to load one of our tanks onto a train car, as they are exceptionally large. If they were slightly smaller, I think it'd be doable, so it might be something for me to look into for future models. In any case, I've laid out a design for railway loading and unloading for ships that we should utilize in the new city when we begin earnest construction on the matter.

In all the time I've been working on this, the mood of the dwarves on our island has been steadily increasing, and they've been churning out a new tank about every 15 days, and new ships are launching about every 4 months. They really can hollow a mountain out quite quickly as well. There are now 5 floors inside the mountain, as per my initial design ideas. Two are situated above ground level, and two below, each about 100 feet apart from each other with 8 spokes angled out from the center. A few of the dwarves have their version of tectonic sense, and have been finding and labelling deposits.

The floors themselves have led to an even larger increase in water flow out of the mountain through the two main pathways, but it has also led to a few natural springs running dry, according to our demons in charge of forest management. All the tunnels open out to the outside, but have grated doors put over them. I had initially thought it would be useful for us to have the mountain function as a defensive base, but the dwarves have brought up that natural airflow is necessary throughout the area, or else you'll end up with a buildup of 'bad air'.

I think this is something we can remedy in the future to make the mountain more defensive, by utilizing powered fan systems with small tubes to provide the air to keep things more hidden. Even then, however, all it takes is an enemy military to have a few people capable of digging a tunnel and a few weeks time for them to make it into the tunnels. So, in practice, magic makes this sort of subterranean bunker less useful. It's still a good place to hold out if we were to get bombed or shelled, just not as useful for an invasion on foot.

The dwarves have been outpacing our consumption by a considerable amount still, and large brickyards have turned up all over the island. It's taking a significant amount of Zeb's time just planning out areas where the blocks can go to be useful. It's gotten to the point where sea walls are planned for construction in all of the craggy valleys, with some already being partially completed. He's planned out some small villages in places around the island as well, meant to be farming villages built near to a manufacturing feature to reduce travel times for workers.

Tiberius has been free to work on his research again for a while, with extra fluorite manufacturing and mining being available again. The production chain was upgraded to be more robust, which happened at a pretty good time. He's put on some years since he first moved here, which has made him a bit more mellow, but not by much. He'd started to get pretty irate there for a while when he was pretty much prevented from doing anything because we needed all the resources we had for the war effort.

He's been working on some very odd research as of late, utilizing quartz crystals as part of his designs now. According to him, he's essentially working on the same sort of project he worked on a long time ago, except instead of using a submerged mana crystal underground as a mana source, he's using an embedded crystal with fluorite as the energy source, and using quartz to try to create isolated channels where certain reactions occur. It could yield results at some point, so I've left him to it.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

I debated telling him to try to make sodium doped fluorite crystals, but decided we should wait until after the war to do so. We've already seen what radioactive crystals can do, and the lab space was already damaged and scavenged for parts in different tests, so it would need to be rebuilt before it could be utilized. So I'd rather wait until there would be less problems if the whole fluorite area got shut down due to unforeseen circumstances, which would completely halt the production of tanks and ships.

After 12 days, we'd gotten word from the mainland that the entire coastal area was secured, and that much of it has been reinforced with upgraded defenses. They've also made good progress into some of the major valleys. The capitol city, where Par-Tor sits, is heavily defended with a lot of powerful enemies, and has managed to repel any advances. The capitol is pretty well situated defensively, sitting at the back of a valley that has tunnel openings into a few central valleys beyond it inside the mountain range. That's led to the demons being able to repeatedly reinforce their numbers from the interior, repelling attacks that would otherwise eventually lead to them running out of numbers. Add in the increased mana regen from Par-Tor, and it's not great.

As long as they keep making progress on the other fronts, however, they'll eventually be able to overwhelm the capitol and retake it, though it'll likely be near the end of the war before they reach that point, and that's likely to be at least a year or two away still. With the turning point being passed now, however, we've decided to send some of our construction teams along with a decent number of dwarves to where we plan on building our port city to begin some of the construction there. We're still expanding some production on our island, especially around manufacturing more explosive shells, since the more tanks that there are deployed, the fast they use ammo.

As for building out the new mainland city, I've been taking the time to explain to Zeb how carefully rails need to be built to ensure proper slope and long turn radii to prevent accidents as well. We have permission from Kao to quarry some of the nearby hills for construction materials, so the plan is to ship components to the mainland to start that process. While we can ship the rails, we can't actually ship an entirely completed train engine, as they're simply too large to fit anywhere individually on a ship, nor do we have a way to get them to land yet.

The first plans are to expand out the stream area for our ships to be able to dock and unload effectively, then to build out the city around that. I found the whole prospect kind of funny, considering decades ago it was Kao who had built a small fort on one of the islands here, and now we're the ones building a city on the dwarven mainland instead.

I'm going to return to working on the design for rifles and ammo for said rifles for the time being. Even if this war is getting passed its tipping point, it'd be good for us to be trained up on using firearms before the next conflict, rather than during it. There is a non-zero chance that the elves, and possibly the humans, will step in and attempt to ignite conflict against us before the war ends. It'd be the best time to do so, before the dwarves can fully build back up and provide any military assistance to us. At least, if my goal was to wipe us out, we'd be nearing the best window to do so.

I think that, even if it might sour political relations with some nations, we should probably make an active declaration that we are not allowing ships that haven't been pre-approved on the mainland to visit our islands, and we will sink them before they arrive. This might be enough to head of the idea of any sneaky attacks that anyone might consider utilizing. It's an obviously hostile statement to make, but we can paint it in the idea of self-defense, and at least some individuals will understand. We've built up a decent amount of defenses on our island, but they're pointless if we just allow a ship that is secretly full of high level elves to dock in our port and invade the island.

This does highlight why it is probably important to establish ourselves on multiple islands for the purposes of checking ships. Radio communications between the islands would further improve those defensive capabilities. If we manage to reach that point, I think we're probably going to be secure against any threats for quite a few decades until the rest of the world catches up in technology.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.