Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

Work proceeded steadily on making the barge and its components.  A basic steam engine is actually fairly easy to make, though we had to use more of our dwindling iron to make a large portion of it.  While I worked with Karsh on that during the days, I spent the evenings making copper wires to make into cable.  After thirteen days of work, the steam engine was pretty much complete, including our testing and adjustments to make sure it worked.  I also had made enough copper cabling to attempt my first tests to see if I could use the copper cable to pull materials from the ocean using a winch.  So, at the far end of the jetty, I set up a winch made of stone as a trial, and wound the copper cabling around it.  For this first test, I'm going to see if I can recover anything from the nearby shipwreck. 

The first day I just explored the shipwreck a little at a time.  I'm glad that I can hold my breath for a significant amount of time, but even then, searching a shipwreck is dangerous.  It'd be easy to get stuck and simply run out of air and die.  There was some good news for my test, in that a portion of the ship had broken, exposing a few cannons facing the jetty.  It looks like when the ship hit the seafloor, it had damaged some of the hull's integrity, which caused the failure in addition to whatever damage was done by our artillery.

So, on the second day, I dragged cable behind me, and tied it off to a cannon.  The cannon is embedded in a wooden cart, and that looks like it had been lashed to the ship wall which was now broken away.  In a perfect world, I'd remove the cannon from the wood cart securing it first, but the wood had swollen due to being submerged in water for so long, making it hard to work with.

So, I tied the cable down as best I could, and returned to the winch.  I didn't expect success from this trial, but I wanted to get a feel for a few things.  First, if the cable would easily snap or not.  The answer to that ended up being no, but it would snap.  The cable snapped after turning the winch for a bit less than a minute.

While disheartening, when I went to go see what had happened, I was pleasantly surprised.  The cannon had, in fact, moved.  It had been pulled out of the ship, and as it fell, it lodged itself firmly between the collapsed wall of the ship, and the remaining hull.  As I had continued to turn the winch, it had sheered the cable at where I had tied the cable to itself.  I gathered what copper I could from the canon, and returned to the jetty.

The good news is that it seems like the cable was at least capable of dragging the cannon.  The bad news is I can't really tell if it can lift one.  If the cannon hadn't gotten wedged in wreckage, I would have liked to recover this cannon, then set up a test rigging to see if the cable could lift it vertically on land.  So, I'll need to either recover a different cannon, or free this one to try again.

Thankfully, it seems like a decent time to see if any of the hobgoblins with water resistance can break the ship hull.  If they can, we might be able to free the first cannon, and possibly some others for recovery.

There were exactly two fishergoblin hobgoblins who had served in the war with Rathland who had capabilities that I was looking for.  They both have water resistance, heightened strength, improved endurance, and the improved throwing spell, meteor shot.  What they found was that they could hurl cannonballs from the ship, while underwater, with enough force to shatter the soaked wood of the hull.  Which honestly terrified me. They also could hold their breath even longer than I could, which was a good sign.

If more of the ships were very close to shore, I'd even say that the ship was a waste, and these two could just go out and gather cannonballs, but in actuality, even with how long they can hold their breath, many of the ships are much further from shore.  So, we worked together for a bit to free the one cannon from before.  Every so often it would get stuck on a rock or other object as I pulled it in, and they'd have to either move the rock, or work together to move the cannon, but we got it onto the jetty.

Between testing them, and the cannon, we spent two days getting it up on the jetty, and then I ended up having to have both the hobgoblins help me push the cannon off the jetty, and out of the way, where I could start testing cable for lifting the cannon.   I intend to use the crane we've been designing here first, because the crane will also need to be capable of handling the weight of a cannon.

After eight days, Karsh and I got the crane set up to attempt to lift the cannon, and the cable snapped.  While it was disappointing, it wasn't that surprising.  I have a plan to fix this, though it's going to take some time to complete.  First, I need more copper for cables.  My plan is to make the cable a little thicker, and then use two winch drums instead of one. That make it a little easier for the hobgoblins to secure their cargo. 

Normally, multiple lines on a single crane could be a problem, since you might accidentally tip what you're hauling, or the lines could get twisted.  We're trying to bring up cannons though, which are long cylinders, so it might actually prove beneficial, as long as the operators keep a careful eye on what they're doing.  This way they can winch one side up if it starts to tilt too much, and straighten the load, so it doesn't slip.

The biggest downside to attempting this is that I need to go up the mountain and mine more of our native copper deposit to manufacture the wire necessary.  It'll be nice to check on the gypsum deposit though, and see how Konkur is handling that vein.  I haven't really been keeping track of what they've been doing, so It'll be good to see exactly what quantity of material they've been extracting.

Konkur's team has been hauling a few tons of gypsum down a week, which has slowly been filling a warehouse up in town.  Considering I plan on trading most of it away, I've started to think about making containers for it, like how we made containers for paper, and building a warehouse on the far side of the island, but I'm obviously nervous about theft happening.  We'd need to have our trade post occupied, at least during the winter when ships come by, to prevent that.  It'd save the traders a lot of trouble if they didn't have to travel all the way to the other side of the island.

Plus it would give us a good location to store some of these goods that we only plan on trading away, so they aren't slowly filling up our city's storage, which the goblins also rent out to store their own goods.  I also have a feeling that our one merchant who comes by will be unable to actually haul away all the gypsum we'd like to trade in a year, so having a location to store the excess for future trade will be good.  Depending on the profit margins, it might also allow the merchant to justify making multiple trips in a single season, since he can actively see the goods that we'd like to trade.

I've also been thinking about making a proper harbor for loading and unloading goods again.  There are three places that we could do that in my current estimations.  The far bay would be the easiest, as the terrain is naturally set up for it.  If we build it there, in the long run we'll probably end up settling a second town on that side of the island for convenience sake.  Plus, if we settled a second city there, it can be more easily fortified, which would help protect us from any future invasion, as the natural bay there would be fortified.  An added boon over my previous estimations on the matter.

The second location is the other valley, where we're currently planning on making another artificial tide pool.  This would prevent us from building the tide pool there, but it would be much closer to our existing city, though still far enough we'd want to keep people stationed there over winter to prevent any theft.  I really don't want to build a harbor there, as it would be more convenient for the city to have access to that for food.

The third location would involve significant more work, and would involve terraforming the craggy terrain outside next to our valley into an artificial harbor.  That would involve moving a lot of rock from the crags into the ocean, and engineering the whole area to be maneuverable.  In an ideal world, that would actually be our best location, as it's a little closer than the other valley is, which means it would be fairly easy to manage from our city.  Unfortunately, it'd take years of work with our current task force working around the clock to make that into a viable harbor.

Perhaps in the distant future, that could be a project we attempt, as a way to increase our own naval capabilities, but for now, I think building it in the far bay is our best bet.  I'll talk to Zeb about the idea, and see what kind of projects he's currently working on, and see what he thinks of the idea.  Though if I had to guess, it'll be on the backburner for a few years as we grow our city's population.