Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

I knew that attempting to grow fluorite would be hard, but after a month of trying I don't feel like I'm any closer than I was when I started.  Each time I recycle the fluorite by melting and solidifying it, it's color changes ever so slightly as well, which means that something is happening with whatever material is the inclusion in the crystal.  I only noticed that after observing one of the larger natural crystals directly next to the most recent batch of failure synthetics.

That is making me a little worried, as color is about the only way we can currently tell if the crystals are safe or not.  All the synthetics attempts I've made have been failures, and either glass, or just clusters of very small crystals, so they don't have much of a magical effect anyway, but I'm a little concerned what might happen if I succeed in growing a larger crystal from this recycled material.  On the other hand, using non-recycled material would be a huge waste of our natural resources.

I said that I feel like I'm not making any progress, but that's not technically true.  I've found a bunch of ways to not grow large fluorite crystals.  It's nearly insoluble in water, so despite the fact it was probably grown naturally via hydrothermal methods, that process would take far too long to grow crystals artificially.  I also do know that I can at least get small crystals from the molten fluorite, so I should be able to use that method to grow larger ones, as long as I can actually figure out the details of how to do so.

Since a month has passed, I need to go spend a few days fishing to get some levels, then I'll go do some more tectonic sense scouting in our tunnel.  It's been a while since I did so, so I expect that I'll have quite a lot of scouting to do.  The hydro facility has also gotten through their backlog of hematite and it's mid summer, so it might be worth draining the reservoir down to extract more stone and get more stone shaping goblins.

After a few days of leveling, I took a few days to use tectonic sense in the tunnel.  With the dwarves assisting them, the scouting tunnel has made it quite far under the mountain.  In another three years, maybe a little longer, I think they'll reach the middle section of the island, and we'll have to start digging from the other side.  The team widening the tunnel is still quite a ways behind the much smaller scouting tunnel though.

As I went down the tunnel, I noticed a few changes in the rocks as I went, and ultimately, the stone they dug into most recently near the end of the tunnel looks very similar to the stone that made up the bulk of the cavern.  Tectonic sense didn't show anything of interest in almost the entire mile that they had dug.  However, at the very end of the tunnel, I detected a few empty pockets.  They were small, but present, which hopefully means there are mana crystals here.

The extra crystals will help with speeding up mining, because crystal trays can be transported into the mine after recharging, allowing one miner to work for an extended time, rather than having to walk almost the whole tunnel to recharge their mana at the crystal.  Obviously, I only intend to keep a certain number of crystals in a charging room, rather than the bulk of the large crystals.  We'll only keep what's needed in the charging room, in case another mana surge happens, shattering all our intermediate crystals.

Unfortunately, I did break my smallest apparatus for growing mana crystals while trying to grow fluorite in it, but I do still have a few intermediate crystals in our storage, so if I intend to grow any large crystals, we could start that process at any time.  Though that's a whole different ordeal now, since I don't want to stop at six or eight foot crystals.  I want to get it up to sixteen feet tall, as to prevent it from breaking to mana surges like ParTor.  I don't know if we'll even get enough crystals to do that with.  A sixteen-foot crystal has the same volume as eight eight-foot crystals. 

We couldn't make that many from our initial deposit, meaning we might still be unable to make one that large.  Plus the amount of waste that I generate in the apparatuses grows with their size, due to the amount of the captured gas I have to charge them with.  Realistically, it might take ten to twenty times the raw material of an eight-foot crystal.  A way around that would be figuring out what the gas is, and using it for growing the crystals.  We have literal tons of the waste solid stored away that could be reused if we could figure out what the gas is.

I do have a few hints to start looking into what gas it is, should I decide to start that process. I'm sure I've inhaled a lot of it over the course of the time I've been working on crystals, meaning that it's likely not toxic.  The containers I've stored crystals in, as well as the pockets that we mine them in don't seem to be altered chemically, meaning that the gas doesn't seem to be reactive with stone.  Add in that the gas doesn't seem to have a scent, and it's likely that it's very chemically stable.

Crystalline lattices are generally repeatable patterns of a material.  Since the gas seems to be both forward and backwards compatible, since I can reform crystals from broken crystals, it likely means that the gas isn't forming any new molecules from being in the solid crystal vs the gas.  Since I need the gas to actually grow the crystal, it means it's probably not just trapped in the crystal, but instead is integral to it's structure.

I'm not certain what the atmospheric composition is here, but it's likely not too far from what Earth had, given the similarities in what life looks like.  Carbon dioxide can be ruled out as the mystery gas, since it's two different atoms.  Nitrogen and Oxygen should be plentiful within the atmosphere, making them unlikely as the culprit.  I'm almost certain it's not nitrogen given it's reactivity, but oxygen has an easy way to rule it out since I should be able to attempt to burn something using the gas.  The gas seemed colorless, so that rules out a handful of gasses like chlorine, though again, chlorine is highly reactive, so I wouldn't expect it.

Factoring in all those things, I'm left with a single column of the periodic table, and it's somewhat surprising, the noble gases.  Almost every other gas forms a diatomic molecule with itself otherwise.  Once a diatomic molecule is formed, it's unlikely it would want to break back down into the crystal form.  It's not impossible, and the heat being added when we melt the crystal material might be enough to encourage the molecules to break back down, but if that was the case, then it'd need to be a gas not present in large amounts in the atmosphere, since I wasn't able to grow the crystals in atmosphere.  They were grown in a partial vacuum filled with the mystery gas.

If the gas is a noble gas, that means there is some odd chemistry going on that is beyond my earth knowledge.  Some of the extremely heavy noble gases like Xenon can be encouraged to form molecules, though a crystal structure is basically out of the question except at very high pressures.  If Radon was the culprit, I wouldn't expect ParTor to have existed for hundreds of years, since the radioactive half-life of radon is days.  So, in all likelihood, this is some magical effect.  That would also explain why the crystals seemed odd to me, and I didn't recognize them.  They aren't a crystal you could find on earth, because the underlying physics would be impossible there.

I'm actually a little upset that I didn't reason this out sooner.  Though even if I had, we've only just gotten to a technological point where that could potentially even matter.  If it is a noble gas, as long as it's not helium, then we could potentially try to harvest it from the atmosphere by liquefying the air, then use fractional distillation to collect the noble gases.  That would also get us closer to being able to synthesize ammonia by using concentrated nitrogen in the Haber process.

I was planning on just going back to work on fluorite, but now, even if those pockets don't contain any mana crystals, I think I want to attempt to liquefy air and separate it to attempt to grow mana crystals.  The process will be somewhat difficult, but it's at least something I'm a little more familiar with, as compared to growing fluorite.