Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

Although we said we were going to hurry back to look at artificial minerals, we still did our due diligence and finished collecting samples from all the areas along the way back down the mountain from the cave.  By the time we got back, it was late enough that we agreed to wait until the next day for me to unveil the artificial minerals.

So, that night, I made a sample of the three artificial minerals I'd made in the past.  Lightstone, darkstone, and the reddish-brown stone that I found near the entrance to the cave.  Now, there might actually be examples of these minerals that he knows about, but I manually refined them with stone shaping, and in fact, I still use lightstone occasionally for things that I need exceptional durability and weight properties, but still want to use stone for.

The next day, when I brought those samples over, Konkur determined that he'd need to do a lot of experiments to determine the exact properties of these stones.  For good measure, I showed him the process by which I refine the minerals, and he was quite impressed stating, "This is the sort of tradeoff I mentioned when I made the comment yesterday when I compared how you mine with how dwarves mine.  We're quite good at bulk excavation, but detail work like this using magic is impossible.  The idea of trying to do something like this manually would be impossible as far as I'm concerned."

It seems that there is already some form of established Mohs hardness scale here, although its not called that and the scale goes to a value of 16 instead of 10.  Diamond is still at the top at 16 though, so it seems like the whole scale is just shifted around.  On this scale, pure Quartz crystals are an 11, making lightstone, at just over 10, actually quite hard.  Darkstone, by comparison, falls at a bit over 5, making it fairly soft.  The reddish-brown stone was at a 6, also fairly soft.  I already had a bit of an intuitive understanding of this, but getting the actual tested numbers on this was quite useful.

He did a few other basic checks on the minerals, such as density checks and basic stress tests.  Similar to what I'd found, lightstone had a lower density than the other two, and seemed to have better resistance to stresses and impacts.  According to Konkur, "It has quite a few desirable properties, and is on par with some very high quality building materials.  It's too bad it's on an island, so exporting it would be very impractical."

With a handful of new samples to research, I left Konkur to study those for a few days while I would go work on other projects.

One project that I had thought we might neglect doing before, which I've now decided we should actually get a facility made for is glass production.  It doesn't need to be a large facility, but getting it all organized in one place, and getting a stone shaping goblin to work on it might be useful.  A lot of the various facilities, let alone the houses, would benefit from having transparent glass, so I think it'll be useful.  For the past six days, I've been finishing up the glass making area, minus the machines it'll need.

I hadn't gone into much detail before as to the exact process I went into to make the glass, since I sort of improvised certain tools to achieve the desired results.  Now though, I'll need to actually make the right tools for the job.  The area I've been making will be quite similar to Karsh's smelting workshop, except a lot of the areas that would normally be used for handling metal will be replaced with corresponding tools for handling glass.

I'd like for there to be glass blowing tools and other quality shaping tools available, as proper glassware is essential to preventing contamination when working with pure materials.  In a perfect world, I'd even be able to make a glass vacuum chamber so I can better observe the decay of crystals, and the process of growing them.  Of course, that level of precision and material science is still a long ways away from what we can produce right now.

To aid in production, the glassmaking workshop will also get their own stone crushers, which will ultimately be sized such that it should make very fine sand grains.  Ultimately, what I'd found was that lightstone is a good base for making glass.  Just crushing it technically wasn't enough though.  I also fluidized it to separate the different density grains.  Manually, this involved an improvised pan, and I operated it like you would for gold panning.  Unfortunately, quartz isn't that much more dense than the other particles in the lightstone, so it took quite a lot of effort to remove it.

Manually doing this with water and a pan takes quite some time, and I'd much rather make the two machines necessary to process this in bulk instead.  The first is a particle sieve, with various mesh sizes stacked from largest to smallest.  By pouring the ground up lightstone through the sieve and maintaining vibration in it, all the particles will be sorted according to the size of the mesh they can pour through.  For these meshes I'll need more wire to make them big enough to handle larger bulk processing.

Also, due to the very small density differences in the particles, I'll need to make these meshes precise from one mesh to the next.  Probably less than 5% difference in particle volume, meaning a little less than 2% difference in particle radius.  Doing this by hand would be impossible unassisted, but there is a pretty space intensive way to manage it.  By using a simple lever arm and a slide, and extending it much further than the edge of the mesh, what might have been a hundredth of an inch difference at the edge of the mesh can instead be an inch or more at the end of the arm. 

Of course to achieve this, I'll need an exceptionally long lever arm, at least 100 times the radius of the mesh, or more depending on exactly how fine I want the mesh to be.  Initially, I thought I might just build it in the open, then tear it down when I made the meshes, but considering how they'll be used, they'll probably need replacement every so often.  Building it underground is an option, but we'd also need pretty good light to work with.  I'm currently thinking about building the facility deep in the cave, and lighting it using crystals. 

The crystals don't produce that much light on their own, but if I pack enough of them into the walls, I could probably light the area pretty well.  Plus, only two areas actually need to be lit.  The area where the meshes are made, and then the far end of a wide cone where the end of the lever arm sits.  The in between area doesn't actually need much lighting, and you won't be reading any measurements or building there.

Once the mesh process is done, the second step is to then put all the similarly sized particles into a large vibrating tube, so that the particles separate themselves out by density.  This, comparatively, is much simpler, just needing some gears to drive vibration in the tube. Then, quartz sand can be collected from the separated bed to be used for making glass.  The other mineral sands might actually be useful too, depending on their compositions.  Feldspar is useful as a flux for some glass making as an example, but without further testing, it would be hard to determine what materials we have.

Thankfully, we now have a mineralogist here on the island, and I'm guessing getting access to this equipment would probably be a pretty useful boon to him as well, since it helps you separate out compositional materials from rocks.  Hopefully, he'll be able to also determine some useful properties of those components.  As I go to begin the work of digging out the room in the cave on the mountain, I'll need to be cognizant of time, as in about three weeks, I have my first classes at the academy to teach.