Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

I got things set up again to test for electricity, and initially checked for a spark every minute or so.  After ten minutes, I started checking every five minutes, then every fifteen, and after a few hours, it seems like it had probably reduced in output by some amount, but the exact amount I couldn't tell.  After half a day, it became apparent that a decent amount of the electrical capacity was gone.  The decay seemed to be logarithmic in nature, so I imagine it would continue to generate electricity for a decent amount of time, albeit more and more weakly over time.

When Tiberius returned to the lab the next day, he wanted to resume his experiments, and I was taking the whole underground lab space for my tests, but I'd basically finished what I wanted to do for today.  I want to make an inductor before I try this again.  I can't make a small inductor for this though, as I'm basically attempting to smooth out static shocks.  What I need is a fairly large iron core, which will be made of thin layers of iron separated by lightstone.  I'll then wind thick copper wire around that core repeatedly, making sure there aren't any shorts in the copper wire, and coating them again in lightstone.  Ultimately, I'm going to have a large round rod of lightstone with two thick copper wires coming out of it.

I expect I'll have to spend at least a few days working on that inductor to get it where I want it, so, to pre-empt any potential interruption, I left Tiberius with some more coins to use if he needs it for any research in the next week or two, though I doubt it will take me that long.

I ended up having to build an intermediate machine to help, namely, a roller.  Thankfully, rollers are fairly simple so we only spent four days getting it working.  Once we had the roller, making thin sheets of iron, while somewhat labor intensive, was fairly easy.  Then we were able to sheer the sheets into the shapes I needed for making my iron core, which took another four days.  Ultimately, this core is about ten inches in diameter and made of twenty-seven layers of iron separated by a small amount of lightstone, then sealed in a layer of lightstone, reaching a yard in length.

I then had Karsh's help with making the fairly thick copper wire that I wanted while I wound it around the iron core, using stone shaping as I went to insulate the copper.  The previous wire I used was probably less than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, so I've gone with one quarter inch wire for this project.

I wound 120 turns down the length of the yard-long core, then repeated the process back and forth down the length until I made the inductor 8 layers deep for 960 total turns.  That took a total of two more days of work. This thing is heavy.  So heavy, in fact, that I can't even lift it.  I can roll it though, and thankfully, hobgoblins with heightened strength seem to be able to lift it with a bit of effort.  

I'm going to have to be careful with running this thing though, as it might generate a decently powerful magnetic field in its charged state.  I'll need to keep any magnetic materials relatively far from it, to prevent damage.  The last thing I want is to have to rewind the whole thing to replace the lightstone insulation.

When I had the inductor hauled to the lab the next day, Tiberius seems to have been waiting for me to begin his next experiment. He had some new things he wanted made of stone, so I obliged him.  I thought it was probably a step in the right direction that he wasn't just carving from wood and wasting materials from the fish to run a test so I wanted to reinforce that behavior, though I can't say for certain if that was his intention, or if he just thought he needed my more precise manufacturing with stone shaping to get the outcomes he wanted from his tests.

Though it still seemed for naught, as his tests still resulted in wild electric arcs coming off the organ until it was fried, and back tracked to the blood, then boiled it to the point of stopping the electricity again.  I'm fairly confident that figuring out how exactly the fish's controlled arc can be weaponized is far beyond Tiberius, or anyone in the current state of the world.  Biological engineering is just that hard to do.  The only real way we can harness any of this is by harnessing secondary properties of organic matter.

We used the self boiling property of Zaka's blood, or in Tiberius's case, the rathgore, to make the cannons.  I highly doubt that either the rathgore or Zaka actually boil their own blood when they direct a fireball somewhere.  This is probably a result of the chaotic usage of random excess mana flooding their blood.  Hypothetically, something like that could occur if they touched a powerful enough magic crystal directly though.  I have a feeling that biological beings have some form of natural defense against that, but I could be wrong.

Likewise, I'm trying to harness just a bit of the excess electricity here to make some semi-permanent magnets, which would be the next step to making an actual semi-stable source of power.  The blood itself isn't actually a stable source of power, and would require an extreme amount of the fishes to be killed to provide enough power to do anything useful.  What I can use it for, however, is to make an electromagnet, which I can use to polarize some steel. 

That steel won't remain magnetic forever, but I can use it to jumpstart a dynamo.  By using a self-feeding stator coil, as long as I can give it a decent initial burst of power, I could then use a dynamo to generate some amount of stable electricity from our dam, for instance.  The issue before now was that I had no real way to jumpstart that initial dynamo.  We don't have enough types of metal on the island to make a battery, and permanent magnets have the same problem.  Konkur has a lodestone, but it's field was a bit weak, and I'd hate to accidentally demagnetize it and not have the dynamo working at the same time.

Now, if the dynamo has to stop for some reason, then I'll just have to make a new temporary magnet to restart it.  That means we'd have to kill another electric fish, but that's far easier for us to do than waiting for the trader to hopefully be able to find another lodestone.

As for why I've chosen to try to make a dynamo over an AC generator, there are quite a few contributing factors.  First, we're on an island.  One of the biggest advantages of alternating current is its ability to use transformers to allow long distance electrical distribution.  We don't have especially long distances here on the island that we need to handle, meaning that advantage basically serves us no purpose.

The second reason is that direct current is generally safer than alternating current.  The third reason is that direct current circuits are generally simpler and more useful than alternating current, which should lighten my work load considerably.  The fourth reason is the ease of connecting multiple generators together.  In direct current generators, you only have to deal with voltage and amperage, while in alternating current, you also need to synchronize the frequency of all the generators.

If some day someone decides to reinvent alternating current, and utilize it, I'm not going to resist, it has it's own benefits, but for us right now, it's significantly worse than direct current systems.  One downside long-term to direct current generators is their maintenance is more frequent than alternating current generators, so as long as someone else is doing the work making the circuit converters for everything, I wouldn't mind.

The first trial run of the inductor was a success.  Although the inductor ran fairly hot, it never failed, and never hot enough that I would be concerned.  After the inductor, I was able to use smaller gauge wire in the same configuration as previously, and this time the wires seemed stable, as did the magnetic fields.

There was a small downside though.  It did seem to be slightly more damaging to the blood itself, and I noticed that the power level seemed to decay about twice as quickly as before.  My guess is that the load on the circuit is causing a higher buildup of charge in the blood, potentially accelerating its decay.

Twice as fast of decay isn't enough for me to be worried though, as I don't plan on needing to run it for that long to make some temporary magnets.  Though before I do that, I want to make a small dynamo that I can insert the temporary magnet into to test with.  Though I'm starting to feel like a criminal with all the different electrical discoveries I've been using at once.  All these different devices were discovered by multiple people over a decently long chunk of time, and I'm basically bringing them into existence over the course of a single season here.  Though I suppose a few of the things I brought into existence for the war could be classified similarly...