A condenser microphone is somewhat of misnomer, being named as such because capacitors used to be called condensers. Rather than trying to immediately develop a microphone to radio and speaker combo, I first worked on simply making a decent microphone and speaker combination circuit. That didn't take too long, at only 14 days of tinkering before I was comfortable with the quality. Much like with almost every project I've worked on, I've focused on making a functional system, rather than a well refined one. Once the academy is up and running, I'm hoping that I'll be able to direct research into improving many of the different things I've developed.

There are numerous improvements to all the things I'm doing with radio, tanks, engines, and just about every machine we have that would benefit from having dedicated research put into them. The only reason I'm not focusing on it is that the benefits are marginal compared to recreating other technologies. Those marginal improvements take quite a bit of testing and data collection to make, but I'm really the only one who can bring earth technologies into existence. If I summed up all the marginal improvements though, it'd improve our economic output many times over, but the number of man hours is astronomical.

I'm going to begin the process of integrating the microphone and speaker into a radio circuit next. Since it seems like it'll probably be months, if not years, before the internal path to the top of the mountain from the inside is completed, I'm probably going to have to consider an external route through eagle territory. We're getting closer to winter, so I won't really be able to go up from the outside until spring, so it'll be months regardless. We've had a few eagles leave the island over the last few months, with them likely returning to the dwarven capital. Considering winter was when they would migrate here most frequently in the past, it will be interesting to see if they migrate again at winter.

I suspect that they might. Data collection from our island over the past few years has shown a subtle but measurable drop in the amount of ambient mana during winter, with the opposite being true in summer. Considering the seasons seem to be roughly the same on the dwarven continent, I think it's possible that the lower mana and amount of competition might fuel an instinct to migrate in the eagles. We've only really taken mana measurements at ground level, so it's possible that higher up in the atmosphere, they have a better sense of where high mana concentrations are, and can find them. The low mana area around the island is likely just a two dimensional projection on the surface of a gradient mana flow like a magnetic field. It's reasonably possible that this is the case at least.

I've come to realize over the last 44 days that I actually do have a bit of a problem with the development of a full scale radio station on the top of the mountain, in addition to the issue of getting everything up there. All the circuits that I've been running in the lab, including my newly functional complete radio transmission circuit, require a fairly stable electrical source. The circuit will also need a lot of power, far more than what my lab is producing, meaning that smoothing the system out with a form of battery would be prohibitively expensive, even if it would be more efficient.

I'm considering some new designs for steam engines that reject excess heat via a pressure relief valve into radiators in order to self-regulate power output. I planned on building the power source up on the mountain by the radio station previously, but it might be worth me doing a re-evaluation, and considering diverting to building an electrical power plant somewhere on the island where the excess heat that would normally be rejected could be utilized for other projects. For example, depending on the size of the power plant, the excess heat could easily be used as part of water purification and salt production.

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On the other hand, centralized power based on mana has quite a few flaws related to how ambient mana is a localized phenomenon. There is only so much power that can be produced from a single area. Even if you install a central mana crystal engine inside it, that only goes so far. That's largely why I've been building everything to be decentralized, to take advantage of as much ambient mana as possible.

I'll think on it more before I make a decision. Transporting water up to the top of the mountain would be mechanically expensive, and no closed loop is perfect. The atmosphere is a bit thin up there as well, so even stirling engines would lose some effectiveness. It's a more complicated problem than I had initially thought.

After taking six days to evaluate different options, I've decided on trying something a bit different to try to regulate the power and build on top of the mountain, in the form of a thermal battery. I plan on using stirling engines as the main power drivers. I want to cut a large cube from the ground, which should largely be made of basalt, while keeping it lifted via columns underneath that we keep in place as we cut. I then want to put some conductor lines into the cube from the sides, and attach heat crystals on most of the sides. Then I'll cover it in the same vacuum hexagonal pattern that we used around the new liquefaction facility. One final side will have either multiple stirling engines attached to it or one large one.

The thermal mass of the large basalt cube should level out the different amounts of heat produced throughout the different parts of the day, levelling things out. If the cube is large enough, it should even level out mana from the eclipses. The issue is that I'll have to do some more experiments to determine how large I actually need the cube to be. Once I've gotten it pretty close, then I'll have to evaluate the circuitry that I would need for the radio station, based on the power plant I attach to it.

Since a large amount of the work actually involves working with stone that is already up on the mountain, it means that a potential construction crew and myself can simply have a guided hike to the summit to avoid eagles, and can start working after the spring thaw, rather than having to haul most of the components up there before the central path is complete. After I finish doing thermal capacity research for this hypothetical plant, I'll do some math based on our diagrams to determine where the central tunnel is going to breach the summit in order to locate where construction should occur.

I used basalt samples from around the island and smaller heat crystals to develop an empirical equation for the relevant thermal capacity involved over the course of 55 days. The size of the cube that we need to cut is quite large, measuring about 10 feet on each side. That is, if I want the power plant to produce enough power for the radio signal to reach the other islands. Overall, it's smaller than the liquefaction columns, so it shouldn't be too hard to cover it in the same hexagonal vacuum coverings to reduce thermal losses.

At this point, we're quite skilled at building mechanical facilities, so this isn't really that different when you consider everything. The only main differences are that we need to build the buildings a little differently because of the amount of snow that builds up on the summit each winter. We're going to build steeper roofs on everything as part of the process. Excess heat that will inevitably leak from the thermal capacitor and engine should keep the building hot enough that I expect snow will melt.

When we actually build out the power building, radio station, and the entrance to the summit from the central path, we'll need to evaluate how to keep snow off everything. I'm thinking that we might just dig some ditches, then embed small heat crystals under the pathways to keep the snow melted as it falls, directing it away from the area. That'll have to be evaluated after the power plant is built though, and we determine how much ambient mana is still available for such a task.

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