Since I knew my math was quite imprecise on heat capacity for the purposes of using basalt as a thermal battery, I decided that we should err on the side of over-sizing the thermal battery. The increased size will result in two negatives. First, it will take longer for the battery to reach steady state, meaning longer startup and shutdown times. Second, there will be higher heat loss to the environment over time as a result of the increased surface area, meaning we might want to consider increasing the vacuum insulation amount around the thermal battery.

Ultimately, I've decided on 20x20x10 feet as the dimensions of the thermal battery, giving it four times the thermal capacity of the initial cubic design. I debated keeping it as a cube, but spreading it out horizontally lets us utilize columnar supports more effectively, due to other design considerations. I had previously thought we'd just cut out columnar supports as part of cutting the thermal battery out, but further testing over the past 12 days has led me to making multiple revisions.

First, I've found that the thermal conductivity of our native basalt is quite a bit higher than that of acid washed lightstone, and it has far worse compressive strength, meaning the columns would have to be wider. Considering the columns will be a significant amount of heat loss, which reduces the overall efficiency of the system, it seemed like it would be foolish to do it the other way. When we initially cut the block away from the surrounding rock, we'll leave large columns of basalt in place, then when we've completed the internal path up the mountain, we'll come back to replace them with lightstone.

The plan is to work on the thermal battery for a few days at a time, hiking to the summit while carrying a small amount of material up with us each time, then return back down for a few days. The thinner atmosphere means we can't actually carry that many supplies each time we go up, and our work will be slower because we'll get exhausted sooner. Since we're now in the new year, construction teams have been freed up and the new city is now operating under normal government provisions.

As a result, they've also resumed mining again at a faster pace. There were some negotiations between the dwarves, Zeb, and some of the other ministers as to how pay will be handled. When the dwarves had moved here to help with the war effort, we'd essentially taken full command of the economy for war, so money wasn't very useful. We were rationing necessities, and everyone was merely expected to work to contribute. That isn't how we want to run things long term, obviously, but the dwarves weren't well informed on how our economy worked previously.

So, while the economy in Kembora City had reverted back to a monetary system quite easily, some things had to change for the island as a whole. Mining and labor was, and still is, something that the government regulates and provides pay for. We managed to collect a lot of the savings from richer individuals over the course of the war via the paid slots on our clam excursions, so there won't be a need to mint new coin for some time.

Ultimately, rates for labor and new goals were set. We've got a stockpile or ores that will take months to process, and our stockpile of processed metal is growing not shrinking, plus we've started receiving metal shipments as repayment already. As such, the actual mining goals have changed. While new scouting tunnels will still be dug, the new aim is focused on mana crystals. Some amount of the mining force is also being redirected towards larger scale development projects like terrace farms. Zeb has also laid out plans to try to terraform two of the craggy valleys on either side of the new city, with the long term goal of building two additional large artificial tide pool traps on that side of the island.

We had already noticed an increase in the yields of fish now that most of the leviathans are gone. He's done some research of his own, and believes that at our current mana levels on the island, we could support four more artificial tide pools without resulting in overfishing. It'll still be quite a few months until our next large mana crystal is complete, and the intent is for it to be directed towards our trade city on the dwarven mainland, with the hope that it will also direct more eagles away from the island. Over the course of the winter, about 25% of the eagles that were still nested on our island left for the mainland.

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With the mainland becoming safer again, Zeb started directing more of our construction teams, along with a number of dwarves, to resume construction there. It's mostly in his hands, but he's assured me that it will have a bathhouse ready when it comes time to transport a new crystal there. We've also made sure to get permission from Kao to actually install another crystal on the mainland, since it could be interpreted poorly, given the civil war that happened and the recent destruction of ParTor. He gave us permission, though there are some concerns that he said we may need to address related to ambient mana issues.

These exceptionally large mana crystals cause areas of low mana, which we already knew about. At the dwarven capital, a large amount of that low mana area occurs over very rugged terrain, meaning the negative consequences are minimal, similar to how on our island, it occurs over the open sea. While over half of the low mana area for this new site will occur over open ocean, and about a quarter will occur over mountainous areas, some will occur over coastal plains, which will likely lead to some changes in population distribution.

Basically, we're having to inform anyone who may be trying to resettle in what will become low mana areas that the area will become less desirable. We're also told that we need to compensate individuals who go through a process in the dwarven courts to show that they used to live in the affected region. With all this development going on, it'll probably be a few years before we start actual development on the academy, which gives me plenty of time to get the radio system up and running.

The thaw came a little late this spring, so myself and the construction team I brought with me ended up having to wait 9 days before we were able to trek up the mountain. For the first trip, we brought enough food and water for 3 days, an a little bit of lightstone. I spent the first day using tectonic sense to find the most homogeneous stone location for us to begin cutting a thermal battery out of the stone on the ground.

The second and third day we started using stone shaping to cut down around what will eventually become the thermal battery. Since we'll have to do a lot of work on the block itself, we'll be excavating a 12 foot wide trench around the entire exterior of the block, with a final depth of 18 feet. The stone that we're excavating we're using to begin building the walls of the building that is intended to house the power plant. Of course, since we're relying on passive mana regen, work is somewhat slow. We couldn't work much faster anyway though because the atmosphere is thin enough that we ended up feeling exhausted quite quickly.

The way we worked was a half-day trek up, three days of work, then a half-day trek down, followed by five days of rest before we repeated the cycle. From the second trip onward, we started bringing along about a dozen or so hobgoblins with us, hauling additional lightstone and copper cable with them. Overall, we took ten trips before we'd completed the the excavation of the thermal battery and built the building above it. There was still a lot of work to do, however. The columns need to be replaced with lightstone, copper wire needs to be distributed vertically throughout the battery to allow the thermal mass to act more readily as a single unit, and vacuum insulation hexagons need to constructed in layers over most of the battery.

During the intermittent five day breaks, I worked on some of the more detailed design plans related to the academy. While I've laid out a significant amount of the academy, one thing I decided I wanted to do was layout workshops specifically for research related to the various efficiency improvements to things I've already designed. I already stated how there were a lot of different marginal improvements that could be made to a lot of things, and I figured it would be a good idea to designate appropriate spaces for said research. I designed the spaces to be flexible enough to be useful for other related research as well.

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