Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

Ten days of work, and I've gotten the final guardhouse complete, and the public bathrooms are done and functional.  I've started work on the first of the high density housing buildings.  It's basically a two story building with a central hallway connecting four units on each floor.  It takes the space of about four houses, but since it houses eight goblins, it's not just more effective time-wise, but also space wise.  I plan on building three of these buildings for the time being.

The prisoner's moods have also been deteriorating even more over this time.  What started as general unease amongst them has changed to an even more foul mood.  The goblins on duty have reported that they occasionally yell at each other now, although we don't understand what they're saying.  I've decided we should keep more goblins stationed to watch them, in case they fight each other.  If that happens, we'll probably have to move some to the smaller cell to keep them from hurting each other.

After another six days, the group of prisoners had an incident.  It seemed like tempers had been flaring, and eventually, a fight broke out between the human and dwarf who had been wearing armor before.  Although the goblins on duty tried to stop the fight quickly, both the human and dwarf ended up quite beaten up.  They also ended up harming not just the two goblins who tried to stop the fight, but also the elf who attempted to break the fight up early.  I'm personally just thankful it wasn't a ploy to escape.  When I heard that they had started fighting and the goblins watching had attempted to stop it, I immediately thought of the possibility that the goblins might be killed and the prisoners might attempt to escape.

Although they hadn't been very communicative up until this point, the dwarf we had talked with in the past helped us to at least identify that the human had been the aggressor in the situation.  As such, they've been moved to the solitary cell for the time being.  Unfortunately, they now occasionally shout at the other prisoners from their lone cell.  The whole ordeal is becoming even more of a headache.

On the bright side, I'm nearly done with the first of the apartment complexes.  The basement in the complex is a bit weird though.  I wasn't sure what to do with it, since it's technically shared by all the domiciles, so for now it's just empty.  It will at least give the inhabitants a place to hide, even if it is quite dark.

After two more days, I've finally finished the first apartment complex, and the human seems to have finally quieted down.  There is a chance he's just lost his voice though, and the yelling will resume soon.  It's hard to say.  Considering how long it's been, I'm actually quite surprised no one else has shown up to try and rescue the prisoners.  We've now got two steam cannon charges of Zaka's blood stored up again.  Honestly, it might be worth building a stationary siege engine like a trebuchet or catapult to give us extra defensive capabilities against targets on the ground.

The steam cannon was necessary for dealing with the eagles, due to them flying, but having a trebuchet would probably be useful if we had an army trying to attack us.  Of course, that could turn out to be entirely useless thanks to magic, but based on everything we've seen so far, I think it should at least be somewhat useful.  Although magic exists, and some of it is fairly powerful, it seems like the overall power level of most individuals is fairly low.  Following that logic, siege engines should at least be useful for cutting down the numbers of low power individuals.

Before I finish building the next two apartment complexes, I think I'll try my hand at designing a trebuchet, and if it works out, we can build a few around the walls of the village.  It should be possible to try to build a ballista as well, given we have rope and wood.  The concern I have with a ballista is that the wood here is a bit softer than earth wood.  If we can make it work though, adding ballistae to the walls would also vastly increase our defensive abilities.

We have a few goblins who already can throw a spear almost like a ballista, and I've seen it be useful, so allowing other goblins without that skill to perform that feat should also be useful.  At this rate, I'll end up turning the village into quite the fort.  When the only threats were wildlife, it seemed like building heavy defensive weapons might be a waste.  The only time it would have been useful, when the lizards were sieging the village, we were trapped without enough resources to attempt to make any siege weapons.  Now that the threat is coming from intelligent creatures, I'm kicking myself for not considering building them sooner.

I've spent twelve days working on designing a working trebuchet, and things haven't been going great.  I've learned some valuable lessons working on the trebuchet related to the strength of the wood here.  The first four days were spent building a small model trebuchet, and the fifth day was spent calibrating it so that it would properly throw the projectile, which turned out to be quite the hassle.  The bigger issues came after that.  Since I made a smaller model, I figured all I would need to do is scale up.

That turned out to be harder than I thought.  I mentioned before that the wood here is quite soft compared to earth wood.  The larger scale trebuchet's arm snapped.  Multiple times.  This trebuchet is about the size I would actually want for defensive purposes.  From top of the arm to base, it reaches about seven feet over the height of the city walls, for a total height of 18 feet.  I've been working on a few different solutions for the arm snapping, but I'm getting quite frustrated.  I don't particularly want to thicken the throwing arm any more than I already have tried to, as it's starting to significantly reduce the capacity of the device.

While I've been working on this, Zeb has been working on building the next apartment complex, and he's about a quarter of the way done.  I often forget just how much time and mana I save with improved stone shaping, but when I see it in action, it's quite astonishing.

After five days, I had an idea and a breakthrough.  I was at my wits end trying to reinforce the wooden lever arm of the trebuchet.  Stone is both too rigid and heavy, and any combination and attempts resulted in failure.  However, I finally realized that I do have the option of using metal for this.  While copper might work, the new metal also should be useful, albeit labor intensive to make.  Ultimately, I made rings of metal that I embedded in the wooden lever arm, and then ran a longer reinforcing beam between each of the rings.

Thankfully for my sanity, this resulted in a success.  The larger trebuchet was completed.  The bad news is that I want three more made, and it does take quite some time to process all the wood to make these.  Thankfully, I had help building the first trebuchet in the form of the carpenter goblin alongside two recently summoned goblins who are now living in the first apartment complex.  I'm hoping that I can leave most of the construction of the other three trebuchets to that group, and only step in to help when it comes time to add the metal parts.

As long as they end up being able to handle that construction, I want to move on to designing a ballista.

Compared to the trebuchet, the ballista has actually been a bit easier to design.  Although it has its own issues.  I've been working on it for five days, and although it isn't perfect, it's functional.  The biggest issue with the design I've come up with is that after firing it between ten and twenty times, the wooden bow sections on either side tend to give out.  The wood here just isn't quite to the construction standards I'd have liked really.

That's fine though.  Unlike the trebuchets, it's easy enough to replace these sections on the ballistae when they break, which honestly, if you get ten shots out of them during a fight, then you probably will have time to replace these parts.  I've designed this one with a stone base capable of being rotated and aimed, although it's maximum vertical angle is only about thirty degrees or so.

The downside of this is that I'll actually need to expand the wall of the village in sections where I want these built.  The trebuchets are just being built behind the wall, since the lever arm and sling can shoot over the top safely, but the ballistae need to be built on the wall, which would leave no room to walk around the device or store ammo for it.  As such, anywhere that I want to build a ballista will need a larger rounded section behind it in order to actually be useful.

I'd like to say that is easy enough to do, but we've actually managed to run most of our stone reserves dry again from all the other construction.  Which means to actually build the ballista like I want, we'll need a new source of stone.  I'd like to just expand the reservoir area to get the stone, but given that we still are unsure about being attacked at any moment, I think I have a slightly better idea for a way to get excess stone.