Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

I ended up spending five days expanding the underground lab space so that I wouldn't interfere with anything Tiberius was working on.  I made a new room behind where the medium sized crystal is, so that I could access its mana without interfering with things happening in the first room.  I then built a lab table, with the bunsen burner design I figured out from before.  I also added a chamber for holding water, with a faucet and a removable liquid container under a sink space, so I can dispose of potentially dangerous or hazardous materials.

This room is much smaller than the other room, but it doesn't need nearly as much space.  I tested a small amount of the heat crystal over the bunsen burner flame, and found that it was non-flammable, but it did color the flame a yellow-green color.  After being exposed to the heat for a period of time, the crystal started to deform.  I retested the deformed crystal, and it had lost its mana related properties, sadly.  After having heated the crystal, I reflected on the fact that I'm not using any sort of fume hood, so I could have potentially inhaled something toxic.  Creating such a fume hood that deep underground would be a monumental task though, so I should probably consider the usefulness of making a larger surface crystal in the lab for this purpose in the future.

After that destructive test, I decided to move on to the next one.  Since we've made lead, I've been wanting to get my hands on sulfuric acid.  Glass is also functional for forming sulfuric acid in the same process I'm going to do, but lead is much easier to form into the shape I want.  I want a container with a very high surface area, which means I should also fill the chamber with small balls of lead, to maximize the surfaces available.  Making such a chamber with glass would have taken us some time to make all the glass beads, but with lead, it's a fairly simple casting process, followed by some manual rolling.

After three days, I'd gotten my reaction chamber made.  Next, I needed a glass beaker to store the acid in, so I worked with the glass making goblins for two days until I had a decent sized container for sulfuric acid to be stored in.  The last few steps of the process were fairly straightforward, requiring I heat some potassium nitrate and steam to add to the chamber alongside sulfur dioxide.  By cycling the process a few times, I could get some low concentration sulfuric acid.

So, after about six days of tinkering, I had some low concentration sulfuric acid in a quart sized flask.  There is a better method for making sulfuric acid involving ammonia, but ammonia manufacturing is a bit more complicated so for now I'm going to be limited to only making smaller amounts of sulfuric acid.  If I do end up making ammonia though, then I could easily make the additions to the ore roasting area to manufacture much larger amounts of acid moving forward.

For now though, I'm quite interested in dropping a bit of the crystals in the sulfuric acid, and seeing what happens.  It's actually quite interesting running through these sorts of tests.  Without the internet, or easily accessible knowledge from other people, I'm basically working from a cheat sheet on material discovery.  If I had perfect knowledge from Earth, I could probably tell from sight what these crystals are, or if they're a new crystal.  Since I don't have that knowledge though, I'm basically running through some destructive testing, and trying to use what knowledge I do have to pinpoint what materials are involved.  

Given my concern with fumes, I did the test with the crystals in acid on the surface, rather than underground, and it narrowed it down enough that I'm confident in what the crystal is.  After fuming for a while, the mixture initially seemed to calm down, with the small bit of crystal having largely been destroyed by the acid.  Though shortly after, the glass broke, and spilled on the ground.  I used stone shape to bury the spilled material for safety reasons.

Given what happened, I went through the whole process again, this time with a thicker glass flask.  That took another six days in total to prepare, and after I repeated the test, I observed it more closely.  What I saw was that the resulting material in the flask was eating away at the glass.  I could be wrong, but the only material I know of that is formed like this, which also breaks down glass is hydrofluoric acid, which would imply that these crystals are fluorite.

That comes with some good news, since I do know a few things about fluorite.  Some lenses for telescopes and cameras were made of fluorite, so it is possible to artificially form and shape them, though the process to actually do so is unknown to me.  Fluorite was also fairly common on earth, so I'd hope that they're also common here.

Though, the process of growing them might end up being quite dangerous to fully rediscover.  I don't know what behavior pure crystals might have, and figuring out the various inclusions and their behaviors could prove to be fatal if handled incorrectly.  It reminds me a bit of the original research into radioactive materials.  Honestly, it seems like there are definitely going to be deaths involved in the process.  I'll probably want to do some form of informed consent for anyone who decides to work on the matter, though I get the feeling Tiberius would more than willing to put his life on the line for something like this.  Before that though, we'd actually need to get our hands on a large enough deposit of the stuff.

There are a few ideas I have for making some of the tests safer, like using stone shaping to release the crystal into a mana bath with some ground birds in cages to test the effects of any manufactured crystals.  Then use stone shape to drain the water to reduce the mana flow to the test crystal again.  Even then though, there is going to be potentially fatal consequences.

Having done what testing I can, with what crystals I have, I moved on to other projects.  Given the time I spent, I decided to go check on the progress of the new tunnel.  The progress is somewhat slow going, since they're having to be so precise with where they are digging.  They haven't found any new layers of rock or anything else of interest, but that isn't that surprising to me.  The slope of our island doesn't increase right away, so until they actually start tunneling under the higher slopes I don't actually expect them to find anything of value.

Since everything with the tunnel seemed to be going fine, I turned my attention to a different project that I'd discussed previously.  I want to try my hand at making a greenhouse for salt production.  In spring, like it is now, there is far too much rain for us to produce any salt from our evaporation ponds, which require there to be more evaporation than deposition of water.  During summer, and part of fall, this issue goes away, but it still means we're only using the salt ponds about a third of the year.

So, what I want to do now that we've got a sea wall protecting the valley, is build a large greenhouse over one of the ponds, and make an underground condensation chamber with a fan to encourage evaporation.  If things work well, that one pond might end up becoming significantly more productive than the other ponds that we have.  The condensation should be fresh water as well, which means that it can be pumped to the surface and used for drinking water, which would be a nice source for the workers along the shore.

I'll make a request to the glass making goblins for a significant number of large glass panels, while I begin modifying one of the ponds and dig the condensation chamber.  Ultimately, this single project will probably use up quite a bit of our remaining quartz, but if push comes to shove, we can always trade for some moving forward.