Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

I continued working in the other valley with the various goblins I hired for sixteen days, until a storm hit.  Once again, it rained heavily for three days with strong winds berating the island.  Everyone hunkered down in the city, although some people occasionally would venture out despite the danger.  That was how I heard that the water level had risen about half the distance between the city and the ocean during one of the three days of the storm.

By the end of it there was a lot of cleanup to do once again.  Areas that had been partially submerged needed to be cleaned out and the windmills needed to be repaired.  It seems like springtime here always runs the risk of one of these storms occurring.  In all likelihood the storms are hurricanes or tropical storms with a storm surge associated with them.  Which has me wondering if we should build some preventative measures into the beachfront.

We wouldn't have that much issue building up a sea wall to protect our infrastructure from all but the worst storms.  Something like a twenty-five foot barrier that rises up between the tide pools and all the rest of the infrastructure should be doable.  Some valves will be necessary for the salt evaporation ponds and the stream will need to have it's own barrier until it reaches that twenty-five foot height differential, but it'd help protect us against most of the powerful storms.

Three days after I started designing the new sea wall system, I got news that while the ship on the other side of the island didn't get blown away, it was heavily damaged, and would require repairs to the hull, crane, and steam engine.  Unfortunately, there are other more pressing repairs to make before the necessary personnel are available for that work, so it'll probably be a few weeks before anyone can really tend to the ship properly.  Thankfully, it sounds like they were able to pull the ship far enough ashore that it isn't of threat of being damaged further.

Cleaning up the damage from the storm near the city took ten days, and then the neighboring valley took another three.  After that, the carpenters and a handful of other goblins began work repairing the ship while I focused on working on the crane and steam engine with Karsh.  Getting the ship into working condition again took a total of fourteen additional days due to travel times and hauling broken parts from the far side of the island.

Considering the damage to the ship, it has increased my desire to build a proper port on the far side of the island so we could prevent damage like this from happening in the future.  Before that though, getting the city's side of the island protected would save considerably more time and labor.  While the initial cleanup was happening, I talked with Zeb through the general designs for a sea wall to help protect our island from future moderate storms.  So when I went to go work on repairing the salvage ship, he had one of his construction teams begin work on the first of the sea walls.

It'll take a considerable amount of time and stone to build, since it reaches across the length of the valley, stands twenty-five feet tall, and needs to be sturdy enough to hold back the ocean.  Ultimately, I settled on a design that consists of 45 degree slopes with intermittent stairs to allow crossing it more easily, with a six foot thick center region between the slopes.  Since the sea wall needs to stretch across the nearly mile and a half width of the valley at the coast, a rough estimates tells me we'll need about six million cubic feet of stone to actually complete this project.  Which, while daunting, isn't actually even as much stone as we'll carve out for the new artificial tide pool, and isn't even as much stone as we've cut from the reservoir.

Also, we aren't expecting to finish this wall any time soon.  Even a partially completed wall will provide some protection against weaker storms.  Though with more and more projects of this scale being considered and attempted, I'm starting to think about the need for another large crystal on the island.

Our current large crystal sits in the bathhouse of the city, allowing workers in the city to regenerate mana quickly.  However, when work is being done an hour or more walk away from the city, it's usually not worth the effort to walk back to regenerate your mana, since you'll regenerate a decent portion of it during the walk.  If, however, we had a second large crystal, one which we could use to set up a temporary bathhouse near worksites, we could increase our effectiveness drastically.

For example, our current construction stone demand is being met by carving out the new artificial tide pool, which is about two hours from the city.  If we set up a temporary bathhouse over there, then stone cutting could be done continuously by fewer workers while still having a higher output productivity.  Then later, that crystal could be relocated again to the far side of the island for building a port, or to a new quarry location.

Before I go do that though, I want to oversee and finish the salt evaporation ponds in the other valley, so they can be productive for the next few months as we enter summer.

With the help of a large taskforce of goblins, I was able to get the remainder of the work for the salt evaporation ponds done in twenty-seven days, though we didn't build the road.  Unfortunately, some of the downed tree wood got washed away in the storm before it could be fully transported back to the city.  The storm surge did uproot and wash away many of the smaller trunks though, so in some ways the storm sped up the construction progress.

While we were working, the eagle, which had been living on our island for a considerable number of years now, left in the direction of the mainland.  A few of the dwarves said that it likely left to find a mate, and depending on the eagle's gender, it'll either return with it's mate or remain on the mainland.  This behavior could be seen occasionally with eagles that had moved between the population near the capitol and the coast before.

While it would probably be best if the eagle doesn't return to our island, given the fact that we've basically had to appease it for a number of years, I think our population started to look on it similar to how the dwarves do.  It had helped us through a number of invasions, though the sheer number of humans made the eagle's impact negligible.  From what I gathered, the eagle did eat a few of them, but twenty to thirty barely made a difference, and the humans seemed to know better than to actually fight back once the eagle had snatched someone.

After the salt ponds were done, I did a last check around the city for any duties I needed to take care of before I go to work on making another surface viable crystal.  Tiberius was still making progress and developments with his new weapon, so I left him with enough money to get him to winter to continue his research.  I hired a few goblins to be assistants in my crystal growing process, though they'll travel and join up with the mining team for their actual employment schedule.

I'll have them heat the vacuum chambers of crystal material to bring to me while I operate the vacuum chambers.  That sped up our progress considerably last time, and I don't have any reason to expect it won't do so again.  Plus I have some good jumping off points thanks to the fact I operated multiple chambers last time, a trick I intend to repeat again this time.

At night, when they're asleep, and potentially on some of the days when the mining team is gone, I'll continue excavating new crystal bubbles to make sure that I have plenty of raw material.

I spent a good four months growing crystals on the mountain until I finished a six foot crystal.  It's only twelve days until the eleventh month of the year now, which is when I consider winter to start.  The eleventh month is when ships start arriving from the mainland and when we get snow usually.

In the time it took me to grow the six foot crystal, I grew a spare four-foot crystal, three two-foot crystals, and eight one-foot crystals, though I'm not going to tell Tiberius about them.  I'd come back to the city with the miners every other trip they made, so I wasn't out of the loop on events, but every time I came back, it seemed like a new tall building had been completed, and more and more work was being done.  There were a considerable number of new fields for crops throughout the valley, and the sea wall had about a foot of height completed.