NOVEL SIMPLE [Vol.5] Ch.9 Gypsum
After another six days on the mountain, we found something, that in some ways was a disappointment, but in other ways was a good find. We struck a vein of material, though I wouldn't call it ore. It seems to be gypsum, at least from what I can tell from Konkur's description. We have little use for gypsum here on the island thanks to stone shaping, but it can be useful for some agricultural practices, or perhaps allowing non-stone shaping goblins the ability to make castings of things via plaster.
Unfortunately, gypsum is pretty common throughout the world according to Konkur. It's used by many countries for construction, but unlike earth where construction materials were relatively expensive, gypsum seems to be much less valuable than decent wood. I think the reason for this is probably magic enhanced mining techniques. On earth, prior to machine powered mining, materials like gypsum were fairly expensive because they were labor intensive. With many of the races having access to some form of cutting stone via magic though, mining is much easier, which is probably why it isn't as expensive, if I had to guess.
Either way, the gypsum basically goes for twice the value of a nicely made wooden barrel that it would fill. Which isn't nothing, but it's not that valuable. That said, fish only goes for about double that rate, so I won't be too picky, and will gladly ship excess gypsum off in exchange for things that we actually need.
I initially thought we might just ignore this vein of material, and keep searching for some other deposit, but Konkur told me that mining out this vein would be a good idea, as there is a decent chance we'll find other, more valuable, ores within the vein of gypsum. Which is why I considered what to do with the excess we'd mine. He said that while gypsum itself may not be that valuable, it's frequently found around metal ores of copper and lead, so it wasn't a complete loss. It also indicates that this layer of rock does have at least one hydrothermal deposit, so it could hold more.
Unfortunately, the gypsum isn't really valuable enough for me to try to recruit an entire second goblin mining team to increase our rate of extraction, so for the time being Konkur and his team can continue mining the gypsum in an attempt to find more valuable ores. We still have some of the native copper deposit I found before, so I'm really hoping that if they find an ore deposit, it's not a copper ore, as we already have easier accessed reserves of that which we aren't utilizing.
If we find lead, that opens up a few new avenues of materials and processes that we could utilize. Lead would be invaluable for making sulfuric acid, which would open up chemically processed paper, rather than mechanically processed. The gypsum would also be useful as an additive to said paper, converting it to a much more valuable product. Chemically processed paper is quite involved, and would be somewhat hazardous to make, but the quality of paper produced is significantly higher than its mechanically processed alternative. I'd imagine it would fetch a much better price as a luxury good.
After talking with Konkur, I realized that I need to start working on a way to recover all the iron sunk off our coast. All the cannonballs and cannons on the ships we sank are a decent source, and there are literal tons of iron sunk out there, in addition to any other valuables that might have sunk on those ships. The reason being that the kind of ores that are found in those hydrothermal veins generally don't include viable iron ores.
It sounds like they frequently include pyrite though, so if push came to shove, we could potentially process the pyrite into iron, but it generally isn't very high yield, and requires a lot of work to make viable iron. That said, recovering items from those sunken ships is also going to be resource intensive, so it would probably be worth it to process pyrite if we find it.
What I've been doing for the past seven days is working on a design for a barge with stabilizers. If we can make a barge with winches on a crane, we might be able to use that to pull up metal materials from our bays. I'm thankful that we still have a lot of leftover waterproofing materials since we stopped making windmills when the threat of war came about which we could now use for making this ship. If things go well with this ship, then we might consider attempting to make a fishing trawler or similar fishing vessel for catching fish further out from the island.
Right now I'm just using scale models in a tank to approximate the stability of the potential vessel when hauling up large cannons or bundles of cannonballs. If I can get everything working well here, the next step will be hiring some of the fishergoblins who have gained water resistance to actually do the diving to attach the cables. We'll also need an individual who has the ability to use a heavy tool and magic to smash open the waterlogged hulls of the ships to expose their innards, allowing us to actually recover the iron from them.
I'm hoping that the magic for throwing things with high force works underwater, and we can just have a hobgoblin hurl a large piece of darkstone at the ship will break some of the hull. Ultimately, if that doesn't work, a handsaw might need to be used, and careful cutting would need done to avoid reinforced sections. If there are metal reinforcements that they can't handle, then the hope would be that by attaching cable around the reinforced bit, we can break the part off of the ship.
The actual process of ship-making isn't well known to me, though I hope that the harbormaster we acquired has some idea of the process, and we can fill in the gaps for the rest of the process. Since wood is a surplus for us, I plan on having the stabilizers not be waterproofed, and just made of bound wood. They'll need replacing every so often, but that's currently much cheaper for us than the waterproofing materials are.
I'm calling it a barge, but it's technically a self-propelled barge, and I intend to have a dual paddle wheel design powered by a steam engine. We've had the technology to build steam engines for some time now, but we haven't had a great use for them. The island has a bit too much slope for viable surface powered steam engines. We could, in theory, use it for industrial purposes, but our only source of fuel for them is wood and charcoal, which seems like a waste compared to wind power. This, on the other hand, is actually a viable use for a steam engine. We need the barge to be maneuverable around our coastline.
I spent nineteen days working with the harbormaster, I was able to get the gist of ship waterproofing, and started the process of assembling the barge. I needed a lot of help from Karsh with metal working for things like nails as we built the ship in two layers of overlapping wood, with some waterproofing spread between them. Then the outside will again have waterproofing spread over it. I hired a goblin carpenter and two other goblins to help in the assembly process. We basically used as large of pieces of wood as we could, sliced from the centers of trees to reduce the chances of leaks.
The entire barge is planned to be about 30 feet wide and 120 feet long, making it a monster of a ship, though the design is fairly simple. We'll have six potential locations for the stabilizing arms to be attached. Two off either side, and one on the front and back. Before I build the crane though, I want to get the paddle wheels and steam engine designed and built. The reason being that I want to design the crane to weigh approximately the same amount as the steam engine, to keep the barge's front and back weight similar.
There is a lot of work that needs done for the ship though, so I'll be busy for some time working with Karsh to get the rest of the necessary components ready. I've also identified a sunken ship not far from our incomplete jetty which I plan to use for testing with some hobgoblins to see how easy recovery is actually going to be. I have my fingers crossed that we won't have too many issues.