Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

I ended up needing to replace some of the laborers that I hired in the gambling hall after five days.  They basically stopped showing up to work, so I went and found new workers, only for the original ones to show back up after a few days, begging me to let them work again.  They're definitely gambling addicts.

I let Zaka know the situation, and left it to him to decide how he wants to handle them.  I'm inclined to let them live their life as long as they don't start committing crime to fuel their addiction.  It's not my problem to handle them anymore, though, and some of the original workers from the gambling hall have continued to work well, so I don't think that they're actually addicts.

In any case, excavation of the fluorite growth lab has been going well after that initial hiccup.  About halfway down, I excavated a landing and storage room, where fluorite can be stored intermittently.  On either side of the landing I've installed another sliding door with quartz blocks added in.  The idea being that, hopefully, whatever mana is still in the air by this depth gets consumed by the fluorite in the storage area, leaving almost none for the growth lab even deeper underground.

In twenty days, we've managed to get down to the level where I want to build the new fluorite growth lab.  There is still quite a bit of excavating to do to actually make the facility.  There are a lot of factors that actually have to be considered for the place itself.  The path down here is so long that I'm quite concerned about running out of oxygen.  We don't have any source of light outside of fire, because I want to keep the mana levels at near zero, meaning we're really burning through the O2.  It's somewhat cool underground, so I do have an idea for how I could at least attempt to make this more functional, though I'm going to have to wreck a bunch of natural fluorite to do so.

In essence, I want to make an air inlet and outlet pipe going down to the lowest level.  Throughout the inlet pipe, I want to put fluorite crystals cut into mesh shapes and fit onto heat sinks installed periodically down to depth.  Hopefully, as the air passes through those meshes, mana that is being carried in the air will get consumed and turned into heat.  The heat can then be dissipated into the tunnel and rock.

I'll also need to create a stable power source to power fans on the air inlet and outlet.  Since this is actually a fairly low power application, I'm thinking about using the singular fluorite plate that I've already made from the 8-inch artificial crystal to power a small stirling engine to drive both fans.  If I also have the stirling engine close to the air inlet, it'll hopefully drain even more mana out of the air prior to it entering the system.

While I started designing the stirling engine to power the fans for the lab, the second batch of fluorite mined with the help of cryogenic cooling in the mine was delivered, and taken down to the storage area.  I gave a few goblins the task of sorting the largest natural fluorite crystals out, while the smaller ones were set to be melted down.

The general design of stirling engines comes naturally to me by now, there were still design choices that I made that meant I couldn't just re-use old designs.  For starters, I have that fluorite plate that is functioning as the heat source.  It's only 5.5 inches to each side, and an inch thick, so it's not that large, but it's still quite hot.  If I rest a thermometer on it's surface while it sits in the atmosphere, it's a good 40 degrees above ambient temperature.  If I submerge it in a pot of water that isn't much bigger than itself though, it'll bring the water to a boil.

What I decided to do was embed a metal grid through half the plate's thickness, to act as a heat conduit into the hot-side piston head.  That piston is only 8.5 inches in diameter.  The metal grid slash heat sink was then isolated using lightstone, and then everything was hooked together into an appropriately sized stirling engine.  Thanks to the previous improvements I made with cryogenics, like quality heat exchangers, and fine lead wool as the regenerator, the engine was able to easily spin the 12 inch fans that I'm using for the air intake and outlet for the lab, though the actual tubes aren't completed yet.

The fans are 12 inches, but I'm planning on making the air tubes themselves only four inches in diameter.  The reason being that I want to make sure that I have plenty of natural fluorite that I can use to remove the mana from the air in the tubes.  The tubes are going to just be made of stone and embedded in the ceiling of the stairwell down to the fluorite growth lab when it's completed.  I plan on having the air outlet be on the far end of the lab, and the inlet be close to the stairwell, to encourage cross flow.

All in all, I spent ten days getting this new stirling engine and air intake system built.

I decided to build the first fluorite radiators just beyond the first underground lab layer, after the first sliding door.  To make it, I started with the largest of the natural fluorite, and cut two thin plates from the center of the crystals, then I used progressively smaller parts of the crystals until I had enough plates that I could cut notches in them to make a grid with half inch spacing.  Each plate is about a fifth of an inch in size, and independently, they don't produce much heat.  On either side of the grid, copper grips the grid, and connects to the pipe.  From there, small heat fins extend down into the hallway on the roof, providing some amount of ambient heat.

The whole heat sink apparatus is only about 8 inches long, and uses two 4-inch fluorite crystals to make.  Since they aren't very efficient, given how little volume each crystal plate has, I needed a lot of them before I'd feel comfortable that I was actually removing enough of the mana in the air, so I took a day to teach a goblin how to make them, while I started excavating the main room.

With the help of goblins hauling the stone I cut out, I was able to get the main fluorite lab area and the air system up and running in thirty days.  Of course, the lab is empty right now, but at least I've gotten it made.  The space is forty feet long, twenty feet wide, and has eight feet tall ceilings.  For starters, this should be plenty.  

Though the air system is up and running, I'm having the goblin continue making the heat sinks for the air line.  He produces one a day, and I've got thirty in the line already, but there is still a decent amount of mana flowing into the room.  I can tell because my own mana is recharging at about a fifth the rate that it does on the surface.  While that's quite a bit slower, by comparison, my mana recharges at about a twentieth the rate if I'm in the fluorite storage room part of the way up the stairs.

It'll take me some time to build the new fluorite crystal growth apparatuses down here anyway, so I'm hoping we can have that problem fixed by the time I've got the machines ready.  Considering the improved efficiency of scale for fluorite crystals, I wanted to increase the size that I could grow considerably if possible, though I suspect it'll take much longer to grow larger crystals, so I decided to think through use cases first to determine what size apparatuses I should build.

This lab has two main goals.  First, to produce heat producing fluorite crystals, which can then be cut into appropriate shapes for various practical applications.  Second, to be used for researching different inclusion materials for varied output effects, which will probably a Tiberius research subject.  For the second goal, I think it'd be wise to actually build another offshoot room from this one, and isolate that room with quartz blocks all around it, just in case.  It's probably also worth considering building a mana test chamber beyond that room as well, where mana crystals can remotely be exposed to the fluorite.

In the case of practical applications, I think it's worth considering just what applications I want.  Obviously, a very large stirling engine is the goal.  If large enough, these stirling engines could power numerous processes that we're currently relying on wind or hydro to drive.  There are also numerous smaller processes which would benefit from having smaller crystals similar to the eight inch ones I've grown already.  Smaller stirling engines, or hot plates for cooking would be a great improvement.

The larger crystals would still have slices which are smaller that are left over in the end, but I suspect that growing larger crystals is going to be significantly harder than growing the small ones.  That being the case, I think I'll first make a slightly larger apparatus than the one I made before, and aim for 12-inch crystals next.  Once that is working, and I've trained some goblins how to operate it, I'll try to make something like a 30 or 40 inch growth chamber.