My current focus, having completed what I wanted to with radio for the time being, is on getting the academy up and running. Unfortunately, that is a situation where I myself am only worth about two regular workers, since that island has low mana. In other words, I just have to wait for them to reach a point where I'm actually useful there. So, the next best thing is improving our trade city on the dwarven mainland. Kao has agreed to assist us in a number of ways with getting the academy set up and functional, but only after the dwarven continent is stabilized and functional again. So, speeding that process up via trade is probably one of the best methods at our disposal to achieve this.

Since the mainland trade city is supposed to be a counterpart to the city on our island where dwarves and demons intermingle, there is some amount of joint jurisdiction involved with both. As such, I think that if we manufacture certain goods that we plan to sell to the dwarves here in the trade city, we can use that as an advertising tactic. After all the goods will be made, at least partially, by dwarves using dwarven mined metals. At the very least, I'd expect that it would soften any anti-demon sentiment that might be floating around our products in the market.

After discussing some with the other ministers on the matter, I'll be traveling to the trade city on the next ship, and spending an extended period of time there. In addition to the factories, I plan on working on getting the train system up and running. We'll be needing more materials over time to feed the factories, and getting trains up and running in full will be a good way to do that. I wish that we had actually gotten trains up and running before they manually transported a lot of the construction stone via carts from the nearby foothills, but as Zeb told me, his estimation on the amount of effort it would have required to install all the rails and operate the trains was more than the savings they would have gotten from at least getting the city functional first.

Now, however, as we start considering much longer term time scales, the savings from having trains operating for bulk material transport will outweigh their construction costs after a few years time, meaning it's worth me spending some time to train some demons on operation and installation.

As I traveled to the mainland, I looked over my notes on trains and rails that I'd developed previously and I quickly realized that I should do a complete overhaul of the locomotive, and make minor adjustments to the rest of the designs. A few years of operations and manufacturing of tanks and ships has given me some amount of insight into improvements for all of the designs. I felt it'd be a waste not to integrate those design improvements in to the first generation of trains.

Trains are on the backburner anyway, since the first goal is actually to develop manufacturing plants for mineral processing equipment first. I've discussed previously that replaceable parts not being readily available in remote regions was part of the reason I believe we're not making as many sales as I'd like. By installing a facility on the mainland, and designing it with the idea of making spares of the most likely to fail components, we can reduce the time for replacement parts to come in, and mitigate some of the downside.

Since our machines are already the cheaper option, we can increase the price somewhat and provide spare components as part of the sale. Then, we can also sell spare components on an as needed basis. As long as the components are stored in a relatively stable environment, then customers shouldn't have as much of a problem with having to wait for downtime. It's a matter of changing their mindset from making replacement parts on the spot to keeping spare components on hand to make repairs, then replacing the spares when you use them. This is a hard mindset switch to make, but if we provide spares as part of the initial sale, it might help them to ease into the transition.

Designs for this new factory took me only ten days to devise, meaning it was mostly complete by the time I actually arrived in the city. I had designed it in a modular fashion so that when I arrived, all I had to do was pick a location and then determine where all the modules would go in order to design the final building.

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Of all the cities I've seen in the world, this is the only one that really fits my idea of a modern city. Everything was laid out by design from the start with no organic growth having occurred in an unstructured manner. Kembora City is the next closest thing, but even there we've had multiple city redesigns that have resulted in old architecture being mashed in with new. The roads here are wide, meant to handle large cargo shipments from the port, and true to my urging, the port has been designed to handle the rail designs I'd previously given, with there being a predefined area where a pair of rails could leave the city. Everything has a consistent grid pattern to it as well.

While inorganic and perhaps unsettling to those used to less structured cities, it's efficient. This layout makes logistics easy and modular, improving production efficiency. For demons, the repetitive layout probably isn't much of a downside, since their natural inclination seems to be in line with that. For other races though, I could see how this would be less appealing than organically grown cities.

I'll be assisting in the construction of this first factory, along with the attached warehouse, whenever my mana is refilled. In the downtime between though, I'll be working on the new design for the mana powered locomotive, along with the minor improvements to the rail cars.

Getting the new factory up and running took 66 days. A lot of the machines and other components were imported from Kembora City in order to get it up and running sooner. Housing here has slowly been expanded, and we've brought in more and more laborer demons to work and live here, though the food supply isn't really that stable yet, requiring us to also import that or trade with nearby dwarves for shipments. We've also started to have a small amount of dwarves move in and settle with Kao's permission.

Some of the dwarves don't live in the city, instead living a little ways out where they're managing animals or crops. It's still technically within the city's jurisdiction, so they're counted as citizens. Being close to a large mana crystal means the crops grow quite readily and the bargas herds are robust. Next year I expect that they'll do a lot to reduce our reliance on external food sources.

We haven't yet sourced steel to use for this factory, but we've made the request to our diplomat to negotiate at the trade summits for steel sourcing. Without rails though, moving steel is quite hard due to its weight. Anyone trying to ship it to us is going to need to move a large amount of heavy metal to the nearest port, which adds considerable cost.

So I'm hoping that in the near future we can lower that cost with the help of railways. The main improvements I've made to the locomotive design are related to handling heat more effectively with lower risk, especially while operating at below capacity. As part of the design, I've integrated some amount of quartz shielding where heat fluorite can be moved via levers to reduce total heat output. Steam explosions aren't anything to scoff at, and after a bunch of the tanks catastrophically failed when the demon lord Malagord destroyed ParTor in the dwarven capital, I'm inclined to add additional safety to prevent accidents like that from occurring in the future.

I've also made some small modifications to the suspension system on the cars based on information we gained from the tanks. Before we start building any rail cars or engines though, I plan on getting our next factory up which will be dedicated to making rail components. Building out rails will take considerable effort, and we'll likely need to utilize a tank with the custom carts I made to be pulled behind them in order to transport the rails themselves to their final destination.

The rails will definitely be a net loss in value for a decent period of time though, since they won't even provide us with stone shipments to and from the nearby foothills until a whole rail line and the locomotives and rail cars are complete. Since I'll have some downtime while I work on these factories, I think it will be worth trying to design a heavy duty supply truck capable of transporting goods. Without the need for heavy armor or weapons, I'd expect I could design something to fill the role. One of the main issues that we have is that I've yet to see any kind of plant that produces any thick latex that could be turned into a rubber material. I've also not seen tar or oil, meaning plastics aren't readily available. If it's going to be hauling heavy loads, we can't just use wood either, meaning I might need to utilize treads for the design.

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