Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

Excavating the rooms for the high risk fluorite research didn't take that long because they were so small.  All in all, I spent thirteen days building them.  They aren't very large, but I needed to be very precise with the quartz blocks and sliding doors to prevent as much mana as possible from entering the space.  I've used up pretty much all of the cut quartz as well, and while the mine isn't producing any more raw quartz, there is still a decent stockpile that needs cut, so we aren't actually out yet.

I also decided to mount some of the heat fluorite in each of the short hallways and small rooms, to hopefully consume any mana that might leak in.  It's not foolproof, but the growth room barely has 1/1000th the surface mana regen, and the testing room was about 50% lower than that.  In fact, I wasted an entire day just waiting for enough mana to regenerate just to verify that the rate was that slow.

As I've thought about it, I realized that a 4-inch crystal could still be incredibly dangerous, and I should probably hold off on building that machine until procedures are figured out.  Instead, I'm going to build a tiny crystal grower, meant to only grow small, half-inch crystals.  The way I've gone about that was redesigning the semi-functional grower that I initially made.  By only using a 2-inch growth chamber, and having the heat source be removed faster than would be necessary to make a single crystal, I can induce small crystals to grow.  By changing the chamber shape, it should have multiple nucleation points as well.  That way, Tiberius, or whoever does the research, can also have multiple samples for testing, while still keeping them small enough that minor exposure hopefully won't be lethal.

I built the small crystal growth chamber where I had planned to build the 4-inch chamber in three days, and gave it a test run.  After a day of tuning, it was ready to grow crystals.  That didn't mean it was actually ready though.  Our fluorite source has an unknown impurity in it.  From experience, repeated melting slowly seems to remove the impurities.  There probably are better ways to remove it, but rather than experiment with that for a long period of time, instead, I'm just going to use one of our furnaces to melt a large amount of the fluorite repeatedly over the course of a few days to remove enough impurities.

I plan on melting enough that dozens, if not hundreds, of experimental growths can be done from the raw fluorite.  Though, to make enough fluorite glass for that, I'm going to need to do some fluorite extraction of my own.  I'm hoping that by the time I'm done, we'll have enough of those mana filters completed that I can be comfortable with the extra large fluorite growth chamber being used.

After twelve days of mining and refining, I've made all the purified fluorite glass material, which is transparent, that I wanted.  As I noticed before, the glass of fluorite, even with impurities, doesn't seem to exhibit any mana related properties, so I'm somewhat confident that I could mix the impurities into glass samples and use that for growing crystals.

However, I've been saying for a while that I'd rather offer this research up to Tiberius if he wants it.  It is magical effects, after all.  We've also been in summer for over a month now, which means the reservoir is probably getting low.  That means it's about time to take my first large amount of argon up to grow a mana crystal.  Since I should have a pretty good idea of the total amount of argon I use, I can attempt to calculate the ratio of argon gas to added crystal volume, to determine exactly how much argon we need to grow a crystal of any particular size.

The last six days have been filled with highs and lows, to say the least.  Tiberius agreed to work on the crystals, since he's basically all but concluded his research on extracts.  In the near future, I'd like to review his total findings, but in short, it seems like with the right storage equipment, we could have some very interesting military equipment.  Given we're on the verge of reliable mechanical power, we could potentially start paying any demon that fishes off any of our jetties for certain fish catches, since their extracts could be valuable.

If that was the extent of it, then it would be fine, but Tiberius demanded that he "have no less than three assistants, and make sure they're disposable."  That was concerning to say the least.  However, I did inform him of the potential risks, so I suppose he's just mitigating that risk in his own way.  I talked it over with Zaka, and I was surprised that Zaka basically agreed that it would be fine, as long as the goblins agree to it willingly, and are paid well.

I keep having to remind myself that there are weird disconnects in demon society's norms that I don't expect.  I'm always the one who wants to memorialize the dead, and most of the demons don't even care that much for entertainment.  Either way, it wasn't actually very hard to find goblins who gladly took on what would be considered a very hazardous job in exchange for high pay.  The work itself is actually pretty light too, which probably contributed to the ease of finding them.

After that was done, I took a day with Tiberius and the goblins, working on getting impurities into the fluorite glass.  Fluorite comes in a lot of colors, and most of that is due to impurities, though not all of it.  It follows, then, that most elements or basic compounds can actually fit one way or another within the fluorite crystals.  So, after giving a brief lecture on the kinds of materials that are likely to work, we began using crushers to make the fluorite into fine powder, and attempted to add in a few of the ores we'd mined.

Given our lack of information on what exactly can fit within fluorite, we made multiple different glasses that they can later use for testing.  We used pure metals of our available types, as well as both the sulfide ores and oxide ores.  Interestingly, two colors were eerily similar to samples I've recovered, and a third was close and worth investigating. 

The iron oxide from our hematite, and copper metal impurities were the close samples.  The hematite sample was nearly the same color as our heat producing fluorite, and the copper sample was similar to the hydrogen fluorite.  The third interesting sample was the pure iron.  It had a richer color compared to the hematite, and given the similarities in atoms, I thought it would probably be worth investigating.

Ultimately, each glass sample took on a different appearance, and we made enough in two days that they should be able to grow multiple samples from them.  I gave them instructions, and told them they could always ask the other goblin operators who are growing the heat fluorite if they have any questions.

After that, I went to check how things were going with the cryogenic production, and was quite disappointed.  A half of a gallon was all we had made of argon.  I don't know if it's actually a lot or a little, because I don't know the exact atmospheric concentration, but I'm a little sad we didn't get more.  The reservoir is too low to run the cryogenics facility here again, so I'm going to go grow what I can with this argon, and then we'll decide what to do.  It also, unfortunately, means that I'll be on fluorite mining duty in order to supply what is needed for making the fluorite heat plates.

My initial estimate of 700 years wasn't far off.  In two days, I'd used up the half-gallon of argon, and grown the crystal by 0.9 cubic feet.  Meaning that instead of 700 years, it'd take closer to 500 years.  Unacceptably long, in other words.  However, if things go to plan and we start growing the very large heat fluorite, and it turns out that copper fluorite makes hydrogen, then I could easily make more facilities for creating and refining cryogenic air.

Though I do need to be somewhat careful.  While our fluorite deposit is big, we only have the one deposit right now, and those large crystals aren't going to be cheap.  Plus, we've already seen what happens when we become too reliant on a singular point of failure.  I can already see a future where the large fluorite plates melt during a mana surge.  At least in that situation, I'd expect that we could reprocess most of the fluorite to repair the damage, as compared to the mana crystals, where we lost all the argon, and most of the flaky solids leftover from the crystal breaking were washed away.