I wish I could say that my workload got lighter, but with each new class of students entering the academy, there are always new troubles. So, despite having more people hired on to handle some of the communication between research teams, I still found myself falling further behind on my own parts of ship design. Since I still had a bit of coordination to handle with the arc furnace construction and design, along with it's full supporting facility, the deadline for the capital ship's design has been extended by an additional half-year.

As a result, I've taken a little extra time to organize additional goals and meetings to help optimize the final design further, hopefully making the first ship more robust than it would have been otherwise. I'm just hoping that the ship won't be too late of a launch to matter. After the design is complete, it'll probably take two years to assemble.

We also have a severe disadvantage as compared to the other alliance that I'm not sure how we'll alleviate in the near term. The elves have a long history of espionage and data collection, where as the humans and dwarves have little. It's very likely that this is a result of the elves guidance of the other races, purposefully making them reliant upon them. While our islands are isolated enough that it is hard for them to spy on us here, they're likely spying on everything on the mainland. This asymmetric information flow is a bit of a problem for us long term. The dwarves have captured a few spies that were sneaking around their territory already, so it's clear that there is a problem.

It's the sort of thing that I would like to alleviate by developing aircraft. Even if we couldn't get information on the ground, we'd be able to see what their general developmental progress is. Unfortunately, that sort of work is so far in the future that it might already be too late by then. I say too late in the sense that a war may have already broken out and concluded by that time. There have been some attempts at spying done by our alliance, but without long distance communication methods, we're basically getting the same sort of info we're hearing through rumors spread by random citizens.

About half-way through this semester, I came to a conclusion that I am not going to be able to develop sonar. The steered torpedo was able to be developed fairly easily. It's not perfect, but it relies on a winch in the ship to power a propeller on the torpedo with a payload on it, with two additional wires being used to steer and detonate it, in a similar manner to the depth charges we used for dealing with clams.

The problem with sonar is that there are too many things I'm missing. I tried to develop some form of electronic way to convert sound waves in water into electrical signals, but I just couldn't come up with anything that worked well enough that I could fine tune it to what we need. That does leave me somewhat concerned about the ability of our ship to preemptively deal with a leviathan attack. Hypothetically, it shouldn't actually be a problem, since it has been quite some time since a leviathan was spotted between our islands and the mainland. In theory, as long as our ship operates mostly in the narrow corridor from us to the mainland and the inland sea, it won't be a problem, though it does restrict the operational area of it somewhat.

Since I won't be developing sonar anymore though, I can turn my attention to other things. We could have shortened the development time for the ship again since I was no longer behind, but at this point, the disruption in schedule itself would cause delays, so it's best to leave it as is. I've been heavily debating whether I should work on digital computing next, or if I should instead shift my focus towards aircraft, given my previous concerns with spying.

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I talked it over with the ministers, weighing the opinions of the army and navy heavily. With the more restricted operational theater of the capital ship, there was some concern about overcommitting resources into it. A digital trajectory calculator would be useful for our defenses on the island as well, but after some discussion, it was pointed out that if we have two-way radio communication on the aircraft, that'd be just as useful for defense, since it could be used to spot and sink ships from further than artillery could fire.

So what I'll be doing is working to develop aircraft and two-way radio communication on that scale. The main problem I see with developing aircraft is the range of conditions it'll operate in, and how exactly I'll power them. There will be a lot of tinkering with weight distribution and balance, but at the very least, I have a pretty good idea of wing design and general layout.

An unfortunate consequence of how secretive we're being with a lot of our military research is that I don't have a good opportunity to use interns to do certain research for me, but I try my best to have something for them to research that is peripherally useful. This summer break, I set up two projects for interns to work on, one was additional data collection on fluorite optimization, determining the exact properties small variances in impurities would cause in the overall crystal. The second was data collection of atmospheric and temperature data in very short altitude steps, collected multiple times a day.

In the mean time, I've been developing things along three fronts for aircraft. I'm completely skipping over super-lightweight aircraft, and attempting to immediately jump to larger metallic propeller planes. The reason for this is pretty straightforward, but larger engines are heavy, and a lightweight engine is less efficient. What I'd consider the "normal" development path for aircraft is being completely sidestepped.

What I'm starting with, in essence, is a bomber. I believe it'll actually be easier to design with my current technology and constraints over a smaller jet. The idea I'm working with currently is to utilize the hybrid engine design from the tanks, optimize it somewhat with newer technology, then utilize it to drive propellers. Unlike a tank which has to have special heat exchangers, the fuselage and wing of the aircraft can have head exchangers built onto it to condense the steam back into water for recycling. Similar to the tanks, a spare water tank will be carried on the aircraft to replace the small amount of leakage that occurs as the plane operates.

All of this is easier said than done, however, and I'm still in the planning phase, I'm hoping that over this next semester, I'll be able to start assembling component prototypes. In the meantime, some of the testing of capital ship components have begun, and they've had impact on how we're planning other things moving forward.

The main guns for the capital ship are being sized in at 16-inch wide shells. Which are absolutely massive. Shells this large can actually carry a decently large explosive payload, and could also house a fairly large lead fluorite crystal. The army is very interested in installing these larger guns at higher points on both Kembora and Drazvok to maximal range and power defenses. Initial range tests showed ranges above 20 miles, and with additional altitude of installation on our islands, they'd be exceptionally hard to return fire upon by enemy ships.

There were some delays that have occurred in the area of metal joining for armor of the size we're using. The previous rivet system just isn't going to cut it for a ship this large. Thankfully, the already delayed schedule gave plenty of extra time to this area of research, so it hasn't led to an overall delay. I've introduced the concept of arc welding for that team to tinker with. It'll eat up some of our argon supply to utilize appropriately, but it should allow for much better overall construction of future ships if they can get it working well. I don't have the time to actually work with them fully on the idea, but I'm at least able to give them guidance and safety measures that they need to consider while working on it.

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