Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

The tunnel digging has been proceeding at a good pace, and as you proceed deeper and deeper under the mountain, the slope of the grain of the rocks has slowly been getting steeper.  While I haven't detected anything new directly with tectonic sense, I have a feeling that, at the very least, it shouldn't be long until we get a layer transition.

Extraction and refining of ores has generally been going well, and we're building up quite the stockpile of materials.  Unfortunately, most of said materials are lead and zinc.  Though the lead has been processed to produce silver.  We've gathered a couple of approximately 10 lb ingots of the stuff.

The two villages are also doing well, and the added niter from both of their excrement fields has allowed us to build up a much larger arsenal of artillery shells for defense.  Soon, we might actually have enough to consider attempting to make personal firearms.  I'm sure that Tiberius won't be fond of that idea, however.

Speaking of Tiberius, I've settled on what my next project will be.  A simple refrigerator/freezer for preserving the extracts that he's making.  Discovering refrigeration was quite complicated, but once you know about it, it's actually not that hard to make simple refrigerators.  In fact, for the design I plan to go with, I'm going to be using a stirling engine.  By forcibly driving the engine, I can turn the work into a temperature differential, rather than using that differential to produce work.  Though when using a stirling engine in this way, it needs a larger regenerator than a normal stirling engine to be useful.

Stirling engines are fairly simple devices compared to things we've been making, so getting the first one made was relatively easy and took only two days time.  I utilized the lab's well windmill to power the engine for testing purposes.  However, I ran into issues as I attempted to use it for refrigeration.  As the cold end reduced in temperature, the water inside the air of the engine froze and caused the engine to jam.

So, I built a second engine in a day's time, this time the air it was charged with was taken from one of our dry rooms filled with desiccant.  While this second engine worked better, I could still hear the ice crystals crunching internally.  However, it worked well enough that I came up with a way to make a third engine without this issue.

I made a large box to function as a freezer out of stone in one of the desiccant areas, and used the second engine to drop the temperature to below freezing.  The box had a high internal surface area, with grooves to encourage deposition of water ice.  After a few hours, the second engine was starting to struggle, with the ice crystals internally jamming things.

At that point, without opening the freezer, I stone shaped a container inside the freezer to trap the air.  Hypothetically, this air should be almost water free.  Then, since the first two engines had likely been scratched and damaged by the ice crystals, I made a third engine, and infused it with the dry air.

This engine worked much better than the other two.  I had also made a few minor improvements in design in places where I noticed leverage issues, improving it further.  I left this engine to run while attached to the windmill for three days, and it seemed to be running just as well as it did when I first made it.

I had attached it to a rudimentary freezer made of stone, and unfortunately, that had cracked and lost it's seal, so the inside area wasn't much cooler than the outside temperature.  I thought that the remedy for that would be straightforward, and that I could just add a layer of metal inside to keep it airtight.

While the metal layer did remain airtight, the stone casing I made around it broke again after a day's time.  I tried replacing it with lightstone, but that broke too.  Finally, I tried powdering the lightstone, then roasting it at high temperature before reforming it around the freezer, thus driving out the water content from the stone.  This seemed to work, and after four days, the freezer remained intact.

This freezer is relatively small, being only about 3 cubic feet of internal space.  This one, however, is just to assist Tiberius in his testing.  Ultimately, it's there to see how much it improves the shelf life of the extracts he's making.  If some of the more useful ones are drastically improved, then I'll consider building a facility dedicated to making some of the extracts, and building a larger freezer for storing them.

As for how his extract experiments have been going so far, some of the extracts have a much better shelf life than others.  He's been diligently collecting and testing samples for the last few years, and has found some interesting results.  There are some external factors at play in how long extracts will last.

Some samples seemed fairly shelf stable, losing about fifty percent efficacy over the course of an entire year when kept on a regular shelf on the surface.  Others went completely bad in ten days in the same environment.  That lead to Tiberius storing samples in multiple locations to test different environments for storage.

During the mana storm, most of the extracts went bad, except for a handful that he'd had a goblin store in the old mountain mine away from mana sources.  The more mana they're exposed to, the faster all the samples decayed.  Depending on the sample, they decayed in different ways during the mana storm.  The electric extracts crackled with static, while an extract from the bone shard throwing fish scattered itself around.

However, heat also seemed to cause some to decay faster than others, as did humidity.  Though across the board, it was consistent that a low mana, low heat, and low humidity environment aided in how long the extracts would last.  Some apparently produce varied effects while partially decayed, usually related to their original function, but occasionally not.  A common partially decayed effect was be heat production when exposed to mana.

Ultimately, that information led to me making a final change to the freezer.  While light stone seems to be mostly silicon dioxide, which comprises quartz, smaller quartz crystals have less of a mana insulative effect as compared to larger ones.  So, I decided to make an additional container around the freezer, which we filled with quartz crystals.  We started with large crystals, then added in medium, and finally smaller crystals and sand to pack the area completely, as to reduce the amount of mana leaking into the area.  Unfortunately, this did require the addition of a secondary door comprised of similarly designed quartz packing material.

In order to figure out if this actually helps, I made a second container, without the freezer portion, which we'll keep next to the freezer and store a few samples of each of the extracts inside.  I made a second freezer without the quartz packing as well, just to keep the study even.  This way we can record which environment is best for storing different samples.  For some samples, the regular freezer might be enough, and knowing that could save us extra work down the line for storing particular types of extracts.

With about a month left before winter, I lead a few of the forestry goblins up the mountain to once again harvest the mana poison plant, and replant the seeds.  This time, however, we're bringing the samples back to Tiberius, so he can try collecting an extract from them.  We spent another ten days systematically collecting and planting to try to make the most of this year.  I'm honestly hoping Tiberius's research on this topic, and in particular this plant, yields more positive results, as it could be quite revolutionary.

Tiberius's focus is, and always has been, magical weaponry.  As such, most of the extracts he's focused on have been focused in that area, things that shock, burn, explode, or are just generally a hazard to be around.  However, I could easily see the usefulness of extending his research to other areas.  Defensively, making an extract from tree bark might be very useful for a transformative material.  We already used water infused with tree bark to make leather armor that hardens when infused with mana, the applications by using a concentrate could be even more extreme.

Most of our tree bark currently just gets turned into charcoal, so if that extract turned out to be particularly useful, that would be a boon to our economy and prosperity.