After having spent six days mining copper on the mountain, I spent an additional six days transporting it back to the city. When I returned I talked with Zeb about the idea of building a harbor on the far side of the island. As I suspected, they're busy right now with what we both agree is a more pressing matter of expanding the population, which will eventually lead to a larger work force, allowing projects like this to be more easily completed.
It has been nice that I've no longer been having to manage many aspects of the growing city, but it also has left me feeling somewhat disconnected from it. I see new housing go up, and many new goblins I've never seen before every time I go to work on a project for an extended period of time. Before, I was making a lot of the executive decisions for the daily operation for our city, but now I'm basically only handling foreign relations.
I shouldn't complain to much though, as handling all the little tasks is a pain I'd rather not have to think about, but maybe I should dedicate a week every year to check up on things, and make sure that the people I left in charge of different aspects of running things are doing a good job.
For now though, I have a salvage barge crane to work on. I've brought back significantly more copper than I should actually need, with the hope that if I get the barge working, I can produce a few spare cable spools for the hobgoblins who will run the salvage ship. If I can't get it working, then we'll just have more spare copper.
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After eight days of smelting copper into thick wire to make into cable, I finally had enough to run the test to lift the cannon. While I worked on making the cable, I also worked with Karsh on designing a gearbox for operating the dual winches for the crane. Ultimately, those gears are one of the next most likely failure points for the process, so they're closer to toothed drums than gears per se.
The first and second tests with the new cable system were a success. I was able to hoist the cannon up and suspend it between the two cables. It also handled me pushing, jostling, and eventually jumping on it. This was to try to simulate the extra force that it might experience while being maneuvered onto the boat.
The third test, sadly, resulted in a failure of a component. The third test was rotating the crane head. The way the crane is supposed to operate, it'd pull objects up from the front of the barge, to try to keep the boat as stable as possible. Then, it would rotate and deposit the item in the center of the hull, keeping the ship generally balanced.
Unfortunately, the crane head sheered the overlapping metal to fall free when I attempted to stop the crane. This was my fault though, as I purposefully rotated the crane faster than it should have been rotated. We'll have to fix and replace any of the damaged metal, do some reinforcing in the failure points, and then make sure that all the goblins who work on the barge to operate it know that the crane needs to be moved very slowly, so that this doesn't happen.
If the crane head had fallen and dropped the cannon and itself on the boat, in all likelihood, the boat would fail and sink. Which is exactly the opposite of what we want it for.
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After seventeen days of work fixing my mistake, double checking everything with the crane, assembling everything on the ship, then training parties on their roles on the ship, it was time for its first test drive. I had hired the two hobgoblins I ran the initial test with to function as the recovery team. Given the unique situation they'll be under, I've devised a bit of an impromptu diving aid for them.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Each one has a leather vest that has some things attached. Secured to the top of the vest are two containers made of lightstone and reinforced with copper, which are under a slight vacuum. I tested them myself at about 100 feet of depth without issue of them breaking or failing. Ultimately, they're flotation aids. On the bottom of the vest are darkstone weights which can be easily released, and provide extra weight beyond the buoyancy of the floats. The darkstone weights were very simple to stoneshape, and made a great use for the excess darkstone I get from making lightstone, so I really don't mind if they release the weights and leave them in the sea.
The sides of the ship have some ropes attached that the divers can also tie to themselves. Each vest has a slot for a knife as well, though they're lightstone knives, they'll cut most rope. The ship also has two thick nets for recovering cannonballs. Many of the downed ships likely have lots of unused cannonballs, so I paid the ropemaker and weaver to make two nets capable of hauling quite a few cannonballs. That should make recovery of cannonballs using the crane quite functional.
In fact, before we attempt to recover any cannons that aren't exposed, I've suggested that the two hobgoblins simply haul cannonballs out from sunken ships and put them in a net for recovery. Recovering cannons is much riskier for both the ship and the hobgoblins, though I advised that they keep a decent amount of the cannonballs to use for meteor shot later when they might return to recover the cannons at a later point.
Overall, the ship is manned by 18 demons. The two diving hobgoblins, two goblins and a hobgoblin who operate the steam engine, one goblin for each paddle wheel, three goblins and two hobgoblins who operate the crane and maneuver goods, four goblins who help maneuver collected goods as needed, a first mate hobgoblin, and a captain hobgoblin. On this particular voyage, we also have myself on board to observe and help teach all the roles to all the parties involved, though I've trained each group for at least a day now on their respective roles.
Due to the nature of this job, I had to pay all the parties pretty well to make up for both the difficulty and risk the job poses. About half of the ship's crew have water resistance, and those who don't have other things like improved endurance which I think will help them swim to shore if something were to happen.
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We launched the ship five days ago, when the tide was at it's highest, and we could roll the ship on logs into the filled artificial tide pool area to float it out to the open water. The first day was pretty unproductive, as we ran various trials to make sure that everyone knew what they were doing. At the end of the day, we anchored a little ways from the jetty, and the crew used two rowboats which we had attached to either side of the ship to make it to the jetty to sleep for the night.
The next day we brought plenty of food with us to the ship, as the plan was to drive the barge to the far side of the island, where it could more safely be kept long term. On that side of the island, the sandy bay sees the water retreat a significant distance each day, so the barge can simply make it's way close to shore at high tide, drop it's anchor, and in a few hours, it'll be resting on dry land, and the contents of the ship can be unloaded using the crane.
Though I actually do need to do some construction to allow unloading cannons that way, if they stick to cannonballs for a while, I should be able to build what I have in mind. For now, the fort can work as a storage area and sleeping quarters for the demons operating the ship. We easily reached the far side of the island, though we ended up needing to do some work clearing a proper area to park the barge. There were still many remnants of the battle that was fought here, with spikes driven into the sand of the beach.
After a day of clearing an area for the barge to properly be anchored at, and a clear pathway to the fort, we were finally ready to do a proper salvage attempt.