Five days ago, a few moments after the ogre stepped into the clearing in front of James’s dungeon with the kobold tribe.

I think it was Napoleon who was attributed to have said to his troops “ask me for anything but time,” well, that was certainly true for me now. It definitely appeared as though this group of lizard people along with their big ugly friend were moving in for the long term. I had thought just three of these lizard people were bad enough house guests, let alone a couple hundred of them. Even if I did experience about 204 hours per 24 hour day, I don’t think it would be enough to help me prevent this bunch of lizard people from setting up right in front of my entrance. One of the few things I was relatively certain of, was that I didn’t want to be a monopolized resource, and definitely not a resource monopolized by a bunch of less than fully civilized lizard people.

I wasn’t quite ready to drop the blast doors and start trying to actively get rid of them, although if it wasn’t for the fact I saw one of them write a message, I probably would be actively trying to get rid of them. That little observation of mine indicates that this group is at least somewhat more advanced technologically than the Stone Age weapons and tools they carry would indicate. Frankly, based upon the scouting group’s behavior I don’t have high hopes for these lizard people, nor their tall and ugly friend. I could move away from all my hard work, but I definitely wasn’t ready to go that far, not yet.

The head scout got together with some stooped and somewhat frail looking lizard people, and started discussing something, what I wasn’t really sure, but there was certainly a fair amount of hand waving on both sides. The frail looking lizard people were likely the tribes elders, but beyond that I couldn’t really say at this point. One of the elders stepped away after a bit and walked over to two lizard people who appeared to be minding the giant humanoid, a fairly short sibilant conversation replete with obligatory hand waving later and the minders started directing the giant ugly humanoid to get to work. It became obvious in short order that the humanoid was ordered to uproot or fell the trees around the clearing, either for housing or for a palisade, that part wasn’t obvious just yet.

I tried, somewhat unsuccessfully to bury myself in processor component testing, but was unable to fully focus due to the distraction of my new less than fully welcome guests. It was 4:05 PM when I took a short break and took stock of what they had been doing for the past few hours. The giant humanoid and his minders had definitely been working on a palisade for this bunch of lizard people. Frankly they had been making more progress than I expected, having completed about a third of the circumference of the clearing as a three meter high log palisade. The rest of the tribe had not been idle whilst this construction was going on, there were now fifty circular pits partly scattered around the clearing, one of which was almost three times the diameter of the others. The dirt from the pits was being pressed into a rough wall around each of the pits, with what appeared to be the deliberate use of urine to wet the dirt and assist with the creation of what appeared to be low walls around each of the pits.

I am not really sure what purpose the urine served in the construction of these low walls, but perhaps the uric acid would have some chemical reaction with the soil that would assist in strengthening the walls, what do I know, maybe it just could have been for scent marking. The smaller and presumably the younger lizard people provided the majority of the urine used for the construction, but they also assisted in gathering berries, and kindling from beyond my clearing. I was wondering what they were going to do about a source of water for the village, I certainly wasn’t planning on providing it for them, I might not even do that for my other visitors beyond the bunk room, although I was still debating that.

Observing all this industrious behavior in starting the setup for their village was interesting from a sociological perspective, but it was most certainly not what I wanted to happen to me, I really didn’t want these primitive lizard people to monopolize access to my entrance. Except for a small area around the tuft of grass I had claimed as my own, I had previously added all the soil up to five feet below the surface of the clearing to my area of influence, I now started to expand that influence more towards the surface. I figured if I could claim the area, I could transmute at least a layer of material to something that would limit their progress. Unfortunately I discovered that I should have probably done something like that before they had arrived and started setting up a village.

I discovered that I was unable to expand my influence closer than a meter to anything these lizard people had touched or worked on. This included the pits they had dug around my clearing, and even the underground portions of the palisade they had been constructing. It wasn’t an abrupt effect, but as I approached that meter distance, the amount of energy required to expand my influence started to increase exponentially. This made my initial passive aggressive plan of destroying the palisade by cutting it off at ground level completely moot.

Despite this unforeseen limitation, there were several other ways I could simply destroy the palisade, an explosive blast of some kind would be satisfying, but despite my EE and Physics background and knowing that TNT is also known as trinitrotoluene, I had no real idea of the chemical formula for it, nor any idea of how to go about making any. I could try using a laser to burn the underside of the logs of the palisade, and that would work, except I would be playing whack-a-mole with the lizard people just moving the palisade wall any time I succeeded in burning it down. The other problem with just burning the palisade down was that it wasn’t really flashy enough, I mean, sure it got the point across, but it didn’t seem forceful enough to say absolutely no wall.

The lizard people could just go and build a wall out of stone instead, explosives would have been so convenient in getting that point across, but not only did I not know the formula for TNT, I didn’t know the formula for black powder gunpowder, let alone smokeless gunpowder. I knew one component in one of the formulas for gunpowder was saltpeter also known as potassium nitrate (KNO3), thanks to 1000 hours playing Civilization 5 back in highschool. Other explosive compounds such as nitroglycerin were also beyond me as I had been busy memorizing circuit diagrams and CPU components, instead of learning any chemistry beyond the minimum I needed to understand what made up the various electronic components I was interested in.

As the sun set I continued to ponder my options for convincing these lizard people that I wasn’t enthused by them just setting up their village in front of my entrance without so much as a by your leave. The first thing I would do after most of the village went to sleep would be close the blast doors I had put in place after my more civilized visitors had left, somehow I doubted that would be enough for them to get the idea on its own though. My lack of knowledge regarding the formula for various useful materials wasn’t just limited to explosives, frankly the fact that I knew the formula for carbon fiber was a fluke and probably the most complex chemical formula for a useful material that I knew. Heck, the reason I used titanium, aluminum and various carbon allotropes for construction was that they were simple chemically speaking, and I didn’t know of a good formula for steel.

I spent the better part of two accelerated hours in my core equivalent of navel gazing, looking at my inner ball of flame, and trying to determine the best way to get rid of the unwelcome tribe that had landed on my figurative doorstep. I didn’t really come up with any brilliant ideas, although I did figure that I could try to use an array of speakers to try to drive the tribe away with either infra or ultrasound. That was going to take some experimenting though. I spent the remaining 14 hours of my 16 hour accelerated session putting some speakers in place above and to the sides of my entrance, along with the insulated wires connecting them to the tone generator I had built previously and used to get the attention of the elf and wolf-man.

After my automated step-down back to real-time kicked in, I took a short break and looked out over the half complete village. They had four lizard people on watch, the giant humanoid was dozing on a large pile of leaves near the palisade it had been constructing, the bonfire they had had going as a cook fire for the village was still burning, but at a more reasonable height. I didn’t really feel comfortable being the bad guy and kicking them out, but I wasn’t going to be a figurative door mat either. I sucked in my figurative gut and kicked off operation sonic disbursement. I started things off with a 2 Hz tone at a volume of 150 decibels, closing the blast doors as I did so, it was became plain that the lizard people could feel the vibration, but couldn’t really hear it, as all it seemed to do was make the lizard people on guard duty nervous as they seemed to be looking around for something they couldn’t find.

I gave this tone a few more minutes and continued watching the village. Just as I was about to adjust the frequency, one of the elders woke from his post dinner slumber and called to one of the guards, demanding to know what was going on or so it seemed. Despite getting a few of the lizard peoples attention and making them nervous, this wasn’t really the effect I was looking for, and bumped up the tone to 5 Hz. I vaguely recalled that the human hearing range started at a really low number of Hz but that we could still feel frequencies below that range, and regardless of what range these lizard people could hear, a few of them, it seemed were sensitive enough to feel these tones being emitted from my speakers.

It wasn’t until 30 minutes later when I bumped up the tone generator to 50 Hz that I really got a reaction. Half of the lizard people shot up off the ground where they had been sleeping and pressed their hands to the sides of their heads whilst screaming in pain, the other half didn’t get off the ground, their giant humanoid friend joined them roaring as it did so. I tried to watch their pain dispassionately, but the younglings screams of pain almost broke me, I couldn’t watch. I turned back to my testing of CPU components, not really paying as much attention as I should have been. As such, I screwed up and shorted out my component tester. I cursed up a storm before finally calming down and started to replace the burnt out testing unit. It wasn’t until 9:10 PM that I finally finished replacing both the testing unit and the component I had been testing, I decided that I probably shouldn’t continue testing until I could actually keep my mind on the testing, instead of what was going on in the clearing with my unwelcome guests.

A glance out front didn’t reveal an empty clearing like I had hoped, instead the bonfire was burning bright and most of the tribe was awake, and no longer screaming in pain. I went and examined the speakers I had set up, turns out I should have stayed and watched them earlier, they had gummed up the works, so to speak. They had gathered a fair amount of tree sap and somehow managed to cover the entire surface of the speakers in it and then, just for fun, covered that in a layer of dirt. I was going to have to come up with a different plan to get these lizard people to leave.

I didn’t have any new bright ideas at the moment, I did have my thought about burning down the palisade, but like I thought earlier, that would just lead down a road of whack-a-mole. I needed something that would definitively state that they weren’t welcome, preferably without slaughtering the entire tribe in the process. Not being able to sleep on ideas is a bit of a pain, don’t get me wrong being able to work 24 hours a day is definitely useful, but sometimes I wish I could just let an idea percolate and come back more resolved after a nap. Sigh, the travails of being a self-aware crystal, no naps for you. I stepped back up to my fully accelerated perception and returned to my navel gazing, staring at my inner ball of flame. I started trying to remember all the various means of area denial weapons and methodologies from back on Earth, it certainly wasn’t what I had studied in school, so it was going to take a while.

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I ended up spending almost another entire day going over every option I could think of. I tried a sound based system, obviously that wasn’t as effective as I would have liked. If I just wanted the tribe of lizard people dead, I could go with a gas, carbon-monoxide is easy to make, but I really would prefer not to go down that path. I could try an infrared or microwave based system, I am not really sure the infrared method would work well with a tribe of lizard people, and a microwave system would just be cruel. A laser system directed at the tribe would be equally, if not more cruel than a microwave system, torture isn’t something I want to bring myself to, if I am going to kill somebody, I am not going to leave them in pain. As much as the tribe of lizard people may be borderline Stone Age savages, I wont allow myself to become a child killer if I can avoid it at all.

I needed something that I could target, something that I could selectively choose to be lethal or not. A machine-gun or a pistol with selectable ammo would work, but, there is that minor problem of not having a clue how to create gunpowder in any form or fashion. Railguns were barely out of prototype in the Navy back on Earth, maybe, just maybe, I could build my own. One of the things that is absolutely necessary for a successful railgun is a rapid discharge of electrical power down the electro-magnetized rail of the barrel. A large rapid discharge capacitor bank would be needed to hook into the rail system, the magnetic field that drives the projectile down the rails needs to start from behind the entrance of the projectile into the barrel.

I figured that I would start my railgun design with the easy part, the projectile. A neodymium magnet for the core of the slug with the primary weight coming from a sheath of depleted uranium, and finally a light laminate of tungsten to keep the projectile from igniting as quickly in the atmosphere. I figured the shape of a fifty caliber rifle bullet from earth would make for a decent projectile design, as far as aerodynamics is concerned at least.

As I had a few different uses in mind for this railgun, that meant I needed to target at least two, maybe three target projectile velocities, I think I will plan on three. For a non-lethal round, I planned on using a 5 gram projectile at 55 meters per second, a fair bit slower than my brothers indoor paintball marker setting, but with a heavier projectile. For lethal rounds, I would use a 50 gram projectile at 500 meters per second, and for a shock and awe projectile I would try for a 100 gram projectile at 2500 meters per second, I am not sure I would succeed in that, but that is what I was aiming for.

The hard part of designing this railgun system is of course the method used to accelerate the projectile down the barrel. If I just used wrapped coils around the barrel, technically it would be a coilgun and not a railgun. A linear induction motor is another option, but it might have interference problems. A homopolar motor has the benefit of using direct current, but might not provide enough projectile velocity without causing arcing in the barrel, which would reduce the barrels useful lifetime.

I spent almost 32 accelerated hours tinkering with small, low velocity mockups of each prospective barrel design in my materials lab before I tentatively decided on going with the coilgun type barrel design. I think potentially the linear induction motor design might be more efficient, but I was having some trouble integrating the phases of the motor properly, and yes I would have had to be very careful with anything ferromagnetic along the track of the motor that wasn’t the intended projectile. The coilgun barrel despite its complexity would allow me to adjust the projectile velocity in two ways, by adjusting the strength of the current, and also by changing the speed at which I turn on the next coil segment.

Midnight had just rolled around, and I needed another break from planning mayhem for my unwelcome visitors. If I didn’t know better, I almost would have thought my visitors pleasant, so long as they were asleep, certainly my bunk room didn’t need a second visit from the other members of the tribe. Despite my sonic disruption to their evening, they seemed to be settling in quite a bit more than I would have liked. It looked like a cloud front was moving in from over the mountains to the east, I might actually get to see what a storm looked like in person. I had seen and heard a thunderstorm to the southwest of my dungeon entrance almost two weeks previously, but I hadn’t had rain into my clearing as of yet, I will have to see what the morning brings in that regard.

As I stepped back up into my accelerated time perception, I started planning all the operational requirements of the finished coilgun system. I had values for what I wanted each size and speed of projectile, I needed to determine rate of fire for each projectile type so I could best determine the needs of the capacitor system for the coils. For my largest projectile, my shock and awe projectile, I think probably no more than one shot every fifteen seconds would be more than sufficient. For my lethal projectile, eight times a second would give me a nice chain-gun style bullet stream, I don’t really think I would need to go with a higher firing rate for the non-lethal projectiles. So, a 50 gram round at 500 meters per second fired 480 times per minute, needs at minimum 6250 Joules of energy per projectile, so for 480 rounds, would need at minimum 3 mega joules of energy per minute, or 50 kilowatts of power.

As I looked over the numbers, I once again lamented my lack of gunpowder, it looked like I was going to need just under half a percent of my total power generation just to fire a minutes worth of my mid-size projectiles, for one gun, and that was just an off the cuff minimum energy required calculation. I needed to break out some more physics calculations to determine the actual energy required for each coil segment. On top of all the issues involved with actually getting the projectiles to launch at their target muzzle velocities, I still wanted this entire system to be at least somewhat aim-able, a fixed gun turret just wouldn’t cut it in this case.

It was 3:34 AM by the time I had partly settled on some of the other characteristics of the barrel. I decided that the projectile feed system would be mechanically fed via a rotating chamber that would scoop the next round from a magazine below the barrel. As I do not know how to make spring steel, I would instead use air pressure to ensure the next round would be ready to be chambered. I also decided that the first magnetic coil in the barrel would be located directly behind the rotating bullet chamber system to provide the initial impetus for the projectile down the barrel. Despite not having fully completed the coil layout for the barrel, I did decide that I wanted it to be 3 meters long, any longer and it would be difficult to aim into the clearing, any less and I am not certain I would have enough room for the electromagnetic coils.

It was 5:01 AM when I finished running the numbers, not just for the needed magnetic field density of each of the 20 sets of magnetic field coils, but also for the heat dissipation of the coils, and the heat absorption of the barrel due to the friction of the projectile traveling down the barrel. In an effort to reduce that friction, at least in part, I planned on rifling the tungsten titanium barrel in a double helix pattern, as a side benefit, I hoped that it would also provide additional aerodynamic stability to the projectiles. It was time to start prototyping the entire design, half scale should be enough, especially as I am going to build it in a chamber within the mountain, near the materials lab.

Of course, I need to actually carve out that chamber first, it was fairly simple although tedious work. I made the chamber, 5 meters wide,110 meters long and 3 meters high, along one of the long sides, I made alternating 1 meter wide textures which changed the absorption characteristics of the light that hit the wall, giving a nice even black and white band which would, when I actually am able to store video, allow me to analyze other projectile or explosive experiments more easily. The walls I made of 5 centimeter thick titanium, in order to help contain any inadvertent shrapnel, the ceiling I lit with a solid plane of LEDs like I had done with the chambers of my dungeon above. The chamber took longer to complete, than I would have liked, but by noon I was finally ready to get to what I had been cogitating on most of the night.

The lizard people had apparently had the giant humanoid of theirs pound on the blast doors for a while this morning, as there were some small streaks of blood on the doors. After that unsuccessful attempt, it seems they had the humanoid continue building out the palisade around the now, significantly more complete village. Almost all of the pits that they had put walls around now had a thatched roof to go with them, a few even had animal hide doors, a good thing for them, as there had indeed been a short thunderstorm this morning. I needed to convince these lizard people to leave soon, or I don’t think it would ever happen.

I had another 102 total hours available to me before midnight rolled around, it was time I started making the most of them. I had my first problem with the projectile feed mechanism, it would sometimes try and grab more than one round of the smaller caliber ammunition, if I was changing out the size in mid stream. My next problem was that despite the vacuum channel transistors I was using worked everywhere else, the amount of current flowing through the circuits was causing them to short excessively, as such, I had to replace them all with more traditional MOSFET transistors. With those two relatively simple issues out of the way, my first test fire with just three of my planned twenty one total electromagnetic coils, fizzled. I don’t really think there was a better way to describe it, the first field moved the projectile out of the rotary feed mechanism successfully, the second triggered too early slowing the projectile, and the third did the same, leaving the projectile stopped with 5 centimeters left in the barrel to go.

After several accelerated hours of frustration, I decided to try adding some complexity to my already complex design. I placed a small infrared laser and photo-detector just after each set of electromagnetic coils to trigger the next phase of acceleration for the projectile, after I got that in place for all twenty of the coils along the barrel after the feed mechanism, I finally got a reasonably fast launch out of the design, it barely ricocheted off the far wall, but it was a start. Just after my first successful launch, I adjusted the far walls texture to have a similar effect to the right hand long wall, but this time, I laid out a 2 centimeter increasing diameter set of concentric circles, making for a nice bullseye.

At the front of the barrel, along the underside, I added a laser sight that I would more properly calibrate once I got more of the kinks in the design squared away. It took almost 175 accelerated hours of work to get the settings needed for single shots of my three ammunition calibers to reach their target velocities, even in this scaled down model. I then spent another twenty five hours working on a method to select between each of the ammunition types and also rates of fire, getting the capacitors sized the way I need for my desired rates of fire was more annoying than I would have liked, but I did finally manage that by midnight. My test gun may not have been as big and powerful as the one I planned to use to deter the village, but I might have use for it in the future, as such I moved it off to one side of the testing chamber and got to work on the real one.

It was 3:21 AM when I finally completed the full size model I had initially planned, it may not have been as fast and powerful as the Navy railguns back on Earth, but it would compare reasonably favorably to a .50 caliber rifle and a chain-gun. I got to work preparing the pillbox style chamber above my dungeon entrance for my little friend. It was 5:04 AM when I finally finished putting the gun in place, complete with laser sight and motorized aiming system. I still needed to create enough ammo for the gun to have a nice sustained run, I would do that after I dropped the outer door for the pillbox that I had created, and verified that I had the full range of travel that I had wanted for the gun. A boring two hours real-time later and I had a good stockpile of ammo, and I had verified that the gun was set the way I wanted, complete with an armored cowling to prevent successful potshots by my unwelcome guests, not that I suspected the lizard people could do anything to the gun, but that humanoid on the other hand might. It was 7:15 AM by the time I decided it was time to introduce this world to modern firepower, good morning lizard people, say hello to my little friend.